SCFZ poll: Wes Craven

[flip]

Shocktober Special! Polling the films of director Wes Craven

The rules:

- your list can include no more than half of the Craven films you've seen, up to a maximum of 5. So if you've seen seven of his films, for example, you can list only a top 3. It's only if you've seen ten or more of his films than you can list the maximum of five.

- i'll assume ballots are ranked unless you tell me otherwise. unranked ballots are fine.

- deadline for ballots: next Friday, in seven days, whatever day that is

- if anyone is watching films for these polls, then i'll extend the deadline up to three days, if someone requests an extension

- next poll: whoever posts the first ballot in this thread is free to nominate the director we poll next, unless you've nominated in this round already (everyone should get a chance). Already nominated this round: umbugbene, greennui, evelyn, bure, m arkadin, mrcarmady, nrh, brian d, mesnalty, kanafani, st gloede, ofrene, silga, greg x

umbugbene created an index on letterboxd of all of our previous polls here: letterboxd.com/umbugbene/list/index-of-all-scfz-director-polls/

one rule for nominees: at least 3 scfzers need to have seen 10+ of a nominee's films, or at least 4 scfzers need to have seen at least 8 of the nom's films, so if it isn't clear if that will be the case, we'll confirm that's true before moving forward

if 24 hours pass after a poll opens, and no one eligible to nominate has posted a ballot, then i'll nominate someone, and then we'll start over, and everyone will be able to nominate again

[flip]

we'll go with the normal rules for now, but if the ballots mostly seem short, i might switch to extended rules mid-poll

[flip]

Red Eye
Scream

seen four, only really liked one of them, might watch another though because i'd prefer not to vote for scream

[brian d]

seen 5

the hills have eyes
invitation to hell

same as flip, might need to to watch another just to bump scream done

[Holymanm]

Seen 1

[therouxxx]

The Last House on the Left

[john ryan]

seen 8

1. scream
2. a nightmare on elm street
3. the people under the stairs

[oscarwerner]

Seen 15.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
2. Scream (1996)
3. Deadly Blessing (1981)
4. The People Under the Stairs (1991)
5. The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

[Joks Trois]

Seen 21.

1.A Nightmare on Elm Street
2.Wes Craven's New Nightmare
3.Scream
4.People Under The Stairs
5.The Serpent and The Rainbow

[greennui]

3.

The Last House on the Left

[Silga]

Seen 8

Scream
Scream 2

[nrh]

the people under the stairs
shocker
nightmare on elm street

seen enough to list more. craven is the for me the weakest of the major '70s english language horror guys by a pretty wide margin. wish i could enjoy the scream films but i feel like i need to be another decade away from the '90s for those to feel palatable, and new nightmare always just felt both corny and clumsy to me...

[Roscoe]

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT

Seen enough to list more. Never got the fuss over the SCREAM things, which just made easy faux-satirical points that any high school kid could have made.

[Silga]

new nightmare always just felt both corny and clumsy to me...

I think New Nightmare is one of the worst horror films ever made. It doesn't help that I'm no fan of Elm Street franchise which I think never had at least a decently directed film. I am very surprised how Elm Street series even achieved its popularity and success. It doesn't hold a candle to, say, Halloween, Friday the 13th or others.

[grabmymask]

Seen 13

1. A Nightmare on Elm Street
2. The Last House on the Left
3. The People Under the Stairs
4. Shocker
5. The Serpent and the Rainbow

[FLABREZU]

Seen 6

Scream
A Nightmare on Elm Street

[Joks Trois]

new nightmare always just felt both corny and clumsy to me...

I think New Nightmare is one of the worst horror films ever made. It doesn't help that I'm no fan of Elm Street franchise which I think never had at least a decently directed film. I am very surprised how Elm Street series even achieved its popularity and success. It doesn't hold a candle to, say, Halloween, Friday the 13th or others.

Because it had some creative ideas beyond hack and slash. Not hard to see.

No doubt New Nightmare has aged, but it is a smarter film than Scream that is asking much bigger questions. The execution is a little shoddy, but that is a general problem with Craven.

[brian d]

couldn't find most of the better-known ones, but i stumbled upon invitation to hell. apparently this is craven's anti-scientology movie or something like that. worth it for the 80s fashion and interior decorating, pretty dumb and predictable in all the right ways, and more fun than scream.

[ofrene]

seen 5

A Nightmare on Elm Street
New Nightmare

[...]

craven is the for me the weakest of the major '70s english language horror guys by a pretty wide margin.

Weakest I can see, but by a wide margin is, for me, much tougher to go with. He definitely had the weakest directorial sense of any at the start of his career. Last House coming across like a work of a complete outsider to movies, which isn't an entirely bad thing in that instance, but he did develop some better sense of craft over time, even if his changes in tone did grind the gears throughout the eighties. I guess it both depends on who you are including in the major 70s list, I mean if you extend it to guys like Sean Cunningham and Dan Curtis, then that's pushing way too far, but mostly I guess I tend to think most of the bigger names, Carpenter, Hooper, Romero, Cohen, and maybe De Palma all have their own problems and get more acclaim then they might deserve due to the genre fandom and some identifiable quirks of method or style. I think they're all pretty interesting and some have some solid successes, but they've all got some pretty weak material/ideas in their careers as well.

Craven's films are generally pretty interesting I find, even with their clumsy elements, which isn't that far from the rest of the group to varying degrees. Carpenter and De Palma being better stylists but sometimes kinda thin in ideas or in De Palma's case even downright ugly at times, Romero often being often a bit clumsy with the craft but sincere, Hooper kinda all over the place, with the best film of all of them but some pretty dreadful ones, and Cohen always being interesting, but with the the fast and cheap keeping everything from totally gelling much of the time. You could add some other directors like Cronenberg, Dante, Peter Medak, Frank Henenlotter and so on, and each of them has their own good qualities, but some questionable ones as well. (Medak does probably deserve to be at least upped to the near ranks of the others though for being the most ignored of the group.)

(That's admittedly a weak tea response, vague on details, but I'm a little out of it today so it'll have to do.)

[wba]

not a fan, but from the ones I've seen, he made one wonderful film, which is great!

01. The Fireworks Woman (1975)

02. My Soul to Take (2010)
03. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
04. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
05. Scream (1996)

Craven seen: 10

[nrh]

referring to the major '70s english language horror directors i was lazily referring to the four heavenly kings (carp, craven, hooper, romero), though guess by saying english language instead of american i was allowing myself room for error with cronenberg.

but honestly i don't think cronenberg, dante, de palma, kubrick, belong in the same conversation; for various reasons they were simply never defined by the marketing genre of horror in the same way. lustig, gordon, henenlotter, charles band or whatever, are part of horror fandom only, no matter what the merits of some of their films are. i have apparently seen nearly everything peter medak directed, including tv episodes.

carpenter strikes me as a major director, but that probably says more about my aesthetics than it does about carpenter; if i ever got a chance to edit a taschen coffee table book called expressive esoterica i'd make sure a hooper image was on the cover. romero is a weird case, i'd say he is closer to a regional filmmaker like jon jost or early robert kramer than he is to his peers, not just the truly odd films like martin and crazies and season of the witch but the dead films as well, especially the late shot on video ones.

craven i just don't know what to do with. i don't have a problem with the ugliness of last house and hills, i am an andy milligan admirer, but i do find them kind of impossibly thin. there is a sense in a lot of his films where i feel like the director is simply nodding off asleep behind the camera; a deadly friend for example is an appealing oddity but at least (to pick another tv movie oddity) when ted post directs the baby i feel like there is someone paying attention to the image.

i do think that shocker and people under the stairs are great though. this is far more weak tea than greg's post.

[grabmymask]

referring to the major '70s english language horror directors i was lazily referring to the four heavenly kings (carp, craven, hooper, romero)

What do you mean by 70s horror directors? Carpenter only directed four features in the 70s (and that’s including a TV movie) and only two of them could be unquestionably classified as “horror” in the traditional sense (though I will of course concede that Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 are clearly indebted to horror’s syntax and iconography). Romero and Hooper also only directed two horror features each during the 70s. De Palma directed four horror features in the 70s, yet you exclude him.

[nrh]

i don't know if this distinction is even worthwhile but horror explosion as a marketing category really had craven, carpenter, hooper, and romero as its faces. halloween, the living dead, nightmare on elm street, and tcm all became either franchises or brand names. which is how you get john carpenter's body bags and george romero's tales from the darkside and wes craven presents wishmaster and so on.

de palma's career just isn't defined that way. there is definitely a kind of public outcry about his violence but aside from carrie (and king is not a marketing force at the time carrie comes out) the films get categorized as thrillers or in the vein of hitchcock, even when the film is as obviously indebted to horror as sisters or raising cain. cronenberg really is the one that should be counted here but he rebranded himself so successfully in the 90s that i can't help but retroactively move him out of this category, fair or not. and i should say i'd much rather cronenberg stoop to directing a few dtv horror films in the vein of hooper's late work than just sitting around waiting for some doomed prestige netflix deal to come through.

again this is not a particularly nuanced or interesting way of reading the history but it's definitely a kind of dominant narrative thread (that tv documentary the american nightmare that used to play on ifc incessantly through the 2000s for example almost exclusively featured them if i remember correctly).

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Seen 11.

A Nightmare on Elm Street
Scream
Scream 3
New Nightmare
Red Eye

I include Red Eye because I can... and I remember having a fun enough time with it in the theater. But it's really a far drop off from the others, which I don't claim to be particularly fond of in the first place.
I will say, I think New Nightmare is a really fun idea, and has several quite clever bits. I don't find the overall execution very effective... but I think it really set up some ideas he later did much better in Scream 3.
I also don't particularly like "The Hills Have Eyes" which seems to vaguely imply some sort of greater subtext by making the family a bunch of racist aryans with german shephards and guns, and the mountain people a bunch of baby eating in-breds. But it does nothing with the subtext beyond sort of half setting it up. It's ok as exploitation... and the main attack scene is decently tense. But it doesn't hold up beyond the immediate moments of viewing it, and the rest of the film feels empty.

[MatiasAlbertotti]

Seen 7, might see one more to round it up, but I don't believe it will change.

1. A Nightmare on Elm Street
2. The Last House on the Left
3. The Hills Have Eyes

I would have liked to include The Serpent and The Rainbow in the top 3, but I don't remember much of it, except fo same vague images and a sense that I liked it when I saw it a long time ago.

[...]

Romero and Hooper also only directed two horror features each during the 70s. De Palma directed four horror features in the 70s, yet you exclude him.

In addition to what NRH said, I think there is some distinction to be made between the kind of films Cronenberg and De Palma made and those of the other directors, as Cronenberg and De Palma are clearly interested more in a psycho-sexual "horror" than they are the more broadly social horror the other directors worked with. For the first two, the horror manifests from individual response to external pressures of some sort and the world of their films tend to be framed more around a distorted world view, even when, as in Blow Out, the subject is more explicitly political, the subjective view of the central character, what he knows and doesn't know and his attachment to the events is the frame, while in the films of the others the frame, even when there is a strong attachment to a central subject, as in Halloween, remains more distant and "neutral" in how events play out, which a big part of the reason why De Palma and Cronenberg don't feel like they are part of the same group as the others, and why their work has different kinds of problems and strengths than the works of the others as well.

I do, though, wonder why Larry Cohen doesn't quite fit in with either group, even as I think he's clearly as vital as the others, despite being, evidently, neither fish nor fowl.

[...]

carpenter strikes me as a major director, but that probably says more about my aesthetics than it does about carpenter; if i ever got a chance to edit a taschen coffee table book called expressive esoterica i'd make sure a hooper image was on the cover. romero is a weird case, i'd say he is closer to a regional filmmaker like jon jost or early robert kramer than he is to his peers, not just the truly odd films like martin and crazies and season of the witch but the dead films as well, especially the late shot on video ones.

I don't think that's really wrong in any way. Carpenter almost certainly needs to be treated as a major director, if one was trying to, say, write a book about seventies and eighties US films. He's the only one with a career that has a strong determined shape to it, where he had enough control over almost all of his films to develop a coherent body of work in ways that are different than the difficulties Hooper, Craven and Romero sometimes faced in getting what they wanted on screen. Carpenter too has more than enough serious admirers in the film community to give that significant weight, as well as having a strong enough sense of technique to have that carry any thematically weaker films. He definitely seems to have aged the best in terms of many of his films not feeling like they're trapped in the era they were made in as much as those of the others, so that aesthetic element does deserve consideration for keeping his work accessible to a broader range of viewers. I personally like a lot of Carpenter's work well enough and don't begrudge him attention as a filmmaker, but just tend to think some of the praise is overblown, with some of the major movies feeling a bit less potent than many do. It's not all that different than I feel about someone like Hawks, on a different level of course, where I likewise can't deny him his importance even if I question the why of some of that acclaim a bit myself.

Romero as a regional-like filmmaker is pretty apt. His narrower focus and sense of seriousness about his films stands out from the others, as if he's working in a different but similar seeming vein. Night of the Living Dead would likely kick off and help define the shift from the sixties to the seventies for horror films and more broadly, with maybe someone like Hershell Gordon Lewis serving as a crude preliminary bridge ending the previous era, suggesting the shift from the popular gothic horror of Hammer and Corman to a more violent immediacy that creates its own aesthetic rather than working from the perspective of the film studio era. (Corman took that path with some of his other "exploitation" films, but kept his horror films mostly at a further remove.) Romero's importance in reframing horror movies to address concerns of the time with a less refined aesthetic still makes him a important figure to the era in any film study I'd think.

Hooper's a harder case for me, as with Carpenter, I like his films well enough and think Texas Chainsaw Masscre is probably the most significant film out of all of them, and generally appreciate where he was coming from in terms of how he located the horror in his movies, made me seek out most of his films and appreciate them to some level, but for me there is both the occasional sense that how he locates the horror becomes almost didactic in a way that limits the films, even as I don't object to the values themselves. The Mangler, for example, is rather too on the nose in that way, and the ups and downs of his career makes for some difficulties, with annoyances like the remake Invaders from Mars done for more major release matched against the more limited means like I'm Dangerous Tonight and Spontaneous Combustion suffering a bit from the competing demands of genre and resources and feeling a bit like they were made to make something rather than anything more vital. Then there's movies like LIfeforce and Texas Chainsaw Masscre II, which are hard to pin down in any facet, even as I liked both quite a bit when I saw them. I just don't know how to sum up his career, though I do think he deserves more attention than he gets outside horror fandom and certain auteurist groups.

Craven kind of sits between Hooper and Carpenter in terms of how his career played out, several big and genre shifting successes like Carpenter, but with some work for hire and lower budget stuff and oddities like Hooper. With Last House, Elm Street, and Scream, Craven was a major influence on the genre and to some degree culture, even as he wasn't initiating the change as much as doing something different with things that others had started but in ways that found a different kind of application that spoke to somewhat different ends. Craven is perhaps the most mainstream political perspective, liberal but not too far left, but invested enough to explore some areas that weren't getting much attention, even if somewhat limitedly at times. His consistent interest in the "horror story" as cultural concept and referent to be explored in its own right adds a more unique flavor to his work that varies in effectiveness, but also made his films stand out and seem sometimes prescient in how cultural awareness/engagement of the audience changed over time. That part of the work perhaps loses something as time moves on and others movies and shows worked with the same ideas, but at the time it was notable. I'd give him even more credit for that if he'd written Scream, but as much as it seems like a kind of sideways take on some of the New Nightmare concepts, Kevin Williamson's hand is also pretty clear from his other films. I don't think Craven was really groundbreaking in any of those efforts or anything, but he applied them interestingly for the time and genre he was working in that became more important to the genre and audience response later. His other films vary pretty widely, but are mostly interesting in fairly unique ways, with a few real duds mixed in.

It may well be that Craven's films age the worst out of the group, with Carpenter being more settled as important to whatever extent, Hooper continually being someone who'll be "rediscovered" for having one major work and a number of other interesting ones, and Romero somehow seeming to exist outside the normal dynamics and sit out on his own. One of Craven's strengths was responding to the moment, but that gets lost a bit as that moment fades.

[Joks Trois]

I will say, I think New Nightmare is a really fun idea, and has several quite clever bits. I don't find the overall execution very effective... but I think it really set up some ideas he later did much better in Scream 3.

First time I've ever read that!

Romero's limitations as a director were clear as day when he moved from confined settings. He was just not that good at capturing movement across different locations. His best work was concentrated/localised.

Greg: There has been an 'overcorrection' for most quality genre directors of the past at some point that were dismissed by critics. Carptenter was a bit different in the sense that the critics were behind him for a while, but once he 'failed' to live up to the expectations of Halloween, he was quickly dismissed. American critics were especially savage, unjustifiably, so a degree of correction was necessary.

Carpenter's 'strong determined shape', as you put it, was another reason why The Ward was such a crushing disappointment. It felt 'unsigned' in a way that few of his films from Assault onwards did.

De Palma is more 'psychological' while Romero was more 'sociological'. Craven was somewhere in the middle I guess. Carp is somewhat harder to categorise in those terms.

De Palma's psychology is pretty crude though.

[...]

De Palma's psychology is pretty crude though.

Oh yeah, no doubt about that, crude in both senses of the term.

Carpenter's interest in group dynamics keeps him from being like De Palma or Cronenberg much at all.