Last House on the Left (2009) – Horror Film Review

Last House on the Left (2009)
I never really expected the remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 debut feature LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT  (itself a retelling of Bergman’s 1960 THE VIRGIN SPRING) to be successful as a remake. I did, however, expect it to be at least mildly successful as a horror film, and to some extent, it is. The cast is rather good, the photography often surprises with its beauty and subtlety, and I imagine it will be quite suspenseful for audiences who haven’t seen the original. I’m guessing that will be about 90% of the people who will be seeing it in theatres.
Craven’s feature was so reviled by critics and audiences alike that he essentially disowned it (he gave away his entire collection of reels including all outtakes and footage to fan and scribe David Szulkin, who later wrote a book , nay, an obsessive monograph, about it), and the film went more or less underground for years. Having an opportunity to see an “uncut” version at the Harvard Film Archive some years ago (where Szulkin was on hand to answer questions), after having last seen it grainy and edited beyond comprehension on VHS, I was reminded of this film’s power and daring content. It certainly must be said that Horror Cinema As We Know It Today would never have existed without LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and the vision Craven manifested in this oft-misunderstood and much-hated film.
Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham, who was a producer in 1972, are credited as producers this time around, so one can assume they signed off on the new version. Greek director Dennis Iliadis helms, and the screenplay is co-adapted by Adam Alleca (a former student of mine at Emerson College) and Carl Ellsworth (DISTURBIA). The original plot is relatively intact, although the body count is somewhat smaller this time around. In the remake, Krug (DEADWOOD’s Garret Dillhunt; David Hess played Krug and composed the original songs for the 1972 version) is an escaped convict who meets up with his pals Francis (BREAKING BAD’s Aaron Paul; Fred Lincoln played “Weasel” in 1972) and Sadie (Riki Lindhome; Jeramie Rain, aka Mrs. Richard Dreyfuss, in 1972), and his son Justin (the excellent Spencer Treat Clark; Marc Sheffler was “Junior” in 1972).
In Craven’s version, Krug, Weasel and Sadie are all escaped convicts; the two men are sharing Sadie and decide they need some additional women (Sadie also hints she would like a girl to play with). Krug convinces his junkie son to procure some young female victims by promising him heroin. So Junior finds Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassell) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), strolling the streets in Manhattan before going to see their favorite band, Bloodlust, in concert, and lures them back to Krug’s hideout. The girls are kidnapped and bundled into a car trunk, and brought out to the countryside. Through an add twist of fate, they end up a few yards from Mari’s house, the last one on the left down a tree-lined dead street. Mari is eventually raped and killed right by the swimming pool in her parents’ backyard.
In the remake, the girls (Mari, played by Sara Paxton, and Paige, played by Martha Macisaac) are hanging out at the convenience store where Paige works when her friend Mari comes for her annual summer visit with her parents. They are shyly approached by Justin when he overhears them talking about pot. They follow him to Krug’s hotel room, and Mari is forced to drive them all in her parents’ SUV, which crashes on a wooded road. The girls manage to escape, briefly, but their captors gain the upper hand quickly. As with the first film, there is a brutal but, surprisingly, not very explicit rape scene. Mari is left for dead but escapes by swimming across the lake to her house. In the original, the pool represents the “virgin spring” of Bergman’s film, based on an ancient Nordic legend about a girl who is raped and murdered and later avenged by her parents, and the pure spring that appears at the place of her death. Obviously the lake is intended as a larger expression of this metaphor of renewal.
As with the original, the band of killers (with a horrified Justin in tow) ends up knocking on the door of Mari’s parents, John and Emma (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), and are invited to spend the night in light of the bad weather and their smashed car. But in the remake, Mari has crawled her way home and is left sleeping deeply on the couch when her attackers arrive. When Justin leaves Mari’s necklace on the kitchen counter, Emma realizes their houseguests raped her daughter. Dr. and Mrs. Collingwood embark on a revenge-fuelled rampage of their own.
Responding once to criticism that the film was misogynistic, Craven replied “It’s misanthropic in every way; that’s the point.” Indeed, in 1972, the depraved and sadistic behavior of not only the kidnappers, but of Mari Collingwood’s parents as they avenge her death, was without precedent in American cinema. The remake has more than enough slow, graphic violence and gratuitous gore for the most inured horror fan. What it doesn’t have is the uncomfortable intimacy and intensity of the original. One can’t go back to 1972 and understand what it must have been like to experience this film in all its raw, verite-style impact. But it seems a shame that the remake can’t be bothered to emulate what were the original’s most memorable and affecting scenes. Sadly, this means the actors can’t have as much fun, either.
In Craven’s original version, Sadie’s vaunted lesbianism allows for a disturbing scene in which Mari and Phyllis are forced at knifepoint to make love to each other. It is tender, awkward and not titillating in the least. Later, Sadie’s offer to help the girls escape is met with a snarled insult of “Stupid dyke!” by Phyllis, thus sealing their fate. This context and its attendant character complexity is almost completely avoided in the remake. Why? Krug’s rape of Mari, circa 1972, is stunning in its animalistic depravity; portrayed simply with a close-up of their faces. Afterwards everyone, even Krug, seems ashamed. It’s a painful and empathic moment. The remake has the camera at a tasteful distance, adding an oddly bucolic, and thereby nearly idyllic, feel to the scene. Cinematographer Sharone Meir and Production Designer Johnny Breedt do an admirable job, but the subdued beauty here is almost unbearable (perhaps that’s the point). Afterwards, we see Mari’s dirt-smeared legs and Justin’s hooded, bowed head, while Krug, Sadie and Francis behave as if they’re thinking about building a campfire to toast marshmallows. Their indifference is almost harder to take than the drooling savagery of Krug was in 1972.
In what may be the most frequently-referenced scene from the original film, Weasel is seduced by Mrs. Collingwood only to have his penis bitten off during her proffered blow job. The corresponding seduction scene between Emma and Francis starts out promisingly (Aaron Paul’s leering charm recalls Jesse Pinkman, his character from BREAKING BAD, and the latter’s penchant for “MILFS”). But Francis is ultimately dispatched with a kitchen appliance, not teeth. In fact, the vengeance-fuelled violence perpetrated by the Collingwoods is very choreographed and drawn out, making it a major component of the story, instead of the unexpected and grittily satisfying epilogue it seems to provide the original.
Craven chose to shoot his 1972 film with a grainy, newsreel look for better shock value. He also intercut the farcical antics of the local police with the main action, as a sort of campy commentary on the pervasiveness and inevitability of violent crime, even for rich suburbanites. This class consciousness is an issue in the new film, but only as one of numerous false gambits of dialogue that seem to be employed to carry the film along to the next vignette of violence. Sadie, upon learning the Collingwood house is a summer residence, intones in mock wonder, “How many houses do you have?” and is met with Emma’s polite silence. But the point, of course, is not that kids from poor families end up as criminals, or that the have-nots feel justified in lashing out at the haves, but that wealthy doctors and their wives can themselves be pushed to horrific acts of murder if provoked. But this conceit has been explored so many times since Craven first invoked it, that there is no irony or even satisfaction left in it.
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is perhaps best seen as a reminder of why remakes of classic horror films almost always fail, and badly: the elements that imbue them with fear or shock or novelty the first time around are simply no longer culturally relevant. They become kitschy artifacts, so we have to reinvent them by skewing them to fit the World As It Is Now. We forget what fear is, and begin once again to go camping or hire babysitters or visit cemeteries with impunity. We see so much blood and effluvia that hyper-real gore becomes as banal as soap scum in the bathroom. Horror films must become either arty and minimal, or extreme and self-referential, just to get a rise out of us. And as we continue to build our technologically-savvy fortresses and remove ourselves further and further from what it means to be at the mercy of the cruel natural world, we have to venture out to the theatres to be reminded that danger is as close as the woods and water behind our well-appointed homes.

Krug (Garret Dillahunt) and Mari (Sara Paxton)

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009). Directed by Dennis Iliadis. Screenplay by Adam Aleca and Carl Ellsworth, based on the film written and directed by Wes Craven. Cast: Garret Dillahunt, Michael Bowen, Joshua Cox, Riki Lindhome, Aaron Paul, Sara paxton, Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn, Martha MacIsaac, Spencer Treat Clark.

This article has been slightly rewritten since its orignial posting, in order to clarify the author’s intent.

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Sense of Wonder: Wes Craven on Building a new Last House on the Left

I got to speak briefly with Wes Craven last week when he showed up at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for a panel on how art influences film (part of a promotional event for William Malone’s PARASOMNIA, which is heavily influenced by the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski). Basically, I was curious about the rational for remaking LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which to me seems a film very much of its time, the cynical era of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
When I mentioned this to Craven he smiled and said, “Let’s see: a cynical era, an unpopular war, a corrupt administration…” It was easy to see the reference to the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and draw the obvious conclusion: we’ve come full cycle to a cultural context roughly equivalent to the early ’70s, so a remake of LAST HOUSE actually seems weirdly appropriate – not an anachronisms ripped from its own time and plopped down haphazardly into a new era.
Of course, the film business has changed quite a bit since the release of the original. Back when Craven wrote and directed the first LAST HOUSE, low-budget exploitation films did not receive big nationwide releases; the film opened in a limited engagement before being picked up by a small distributor, which gradually moved it around the country territory by territory. The remake, on the other hand, is a glossy effort that will open simultaneously on thousands of screens, guaranteeing it a kind of exposure that the original could only dream of.
Craven sees this as a mixed blessing: “We’re opening the week after WATCHMEN, which is a bit like following the Titanic in a rowboat. But the movie kicks ass, and it does more than that; there is a certain beauty to it. I think we have a good shot with audiences and with critics if they set aside their cynicism and look at the film.”
Later, during the question-and-answer session, someone in the audience asked the participants (which also included Malone, Tobe Hooper, and Mick Garris) what they thought of the trend toward remaking horror films from the ’70s and ’80s. Craven field the answer and repeated some of the remarks he had made to me but added that, when faced with the concept of producing a remake, he told director Dennis Illiadis, “Don’t remake my film. Make your version of this story.”
It’s safe to say that Illiadis headed the advice. The new version of LAST HOUSE does not seek to replicate the grungy, semi-documentary feel of the original. It follows the basic outlines, but there are several notable variations that prevent the remake from being a clone. Some of the overt sexuality violence has been toned down (no enforced lesbianism or castration this time out), but Krug and company’s heinous assault, rape, and murder of innocent victims packs as much impact as ever, creating that rare horror film moment when the gore-hound audience, instead of shouting “Ain’t it Cool!” in approval, is shocked into dumbfounded silence. Whether it’s an improvement over the original, I can’t say, but the new HOUSE on the block stands on its own terms.

Laserblast: Last House, Bird with Crystal Plumage, Four Flies, Akira

It’s a busy week for DVD and Bluray releases, with titles from such classic and cult genre names as Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Barbara Steele and Tod Slaughter arriving in stores.

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Last House on the Left (MGM/UA DVD)
Wes Craven’s landmark 1972 shocker gets a second DVD go-around with a much more comprehensive set of extras, but the recent UK DVD release easily trumps all previous entries. Few horror pictures have had as checked a history on home video as Last House; two different edits appeared on VHS, courtesy of the beloved Vestron Video, the second of which was billed as ‘complete and uncut’, running roughly 83 minutes. MGM/UA’s first go around with the title on DVD, back in 2002, offered the most complete version yet, along with commentary by Craven and Cunningham, featurettes on the production and Hess’ music, and several minutes of outtakes, some of which feature extra moments of intestine-pulling that was best left on the cutting room floor.
Last year, the UK was finally able to see the film without cuts in a nation-wide release (it had previously held a place of honor at the top of the BBFC’s “video nasties” list) via a massive 3 disc set from Metrodome, featuring an additional commentary track with baddies Hess, Lincoln, and Sheffler, a brand new 40-min production documentary produced by Blue Underground (”Celluloid Crime of the Century”), which provides an extensive look into the making of the film; the interesting “Krug Conquers England,” which covers the first uncut theatrical showings in the UK; an excerpt from the short film “Tales that’ll Tear Your Heart Out ,”which reunited Craven and Hess; all of this in addition to the same set of outtakes and general ballyhoo from the previous release. However, the main selling points that might drive interested parties to double-dip are housed on the second disc, which includes a marginally different cut of the film under the title “Krug & Company” (which contains some footage found in no other version and has at least one astounding plot difference regarding the fate of Mari), and some the infamous soft core sexual footage shot during the forced copulation of Mari and Phyllis. Like much of the film’s more extreme footage, it had fallen victim over the years to the vagaries of local “decency laws”, with theater managers excising out any would-be offending material (and saving it for their own personal collection, of course) and few prints making it back to the distributor’s office intact.
MGM/UA’s newest offering is geared to take advantage of Rouge Pictures’ upcoming remake, and cherry picks several features off the Metrodome set, while leaving off the Krug & Company alternate cut and the “Krug Conquers England” featurette to fit onto a single disc (the 3rd disc on the Metrodome set was devoted to a documentary, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film). Unfortunately, the new MGM release continues the tradition of no-thought, Photoshop paste ups for the cover art; Last House has some of the most memorable promotional artwork ever made for a horror film (much of which is retained on the Metrodome set), but MGM’s disc makes it look like a DTV Wrong Turn sequel. Read a complete review of the film here.
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The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Blue Underground Blu-Ray)
It’s hard to remember a time when a POV shot of a knife-wielding, black-gloved killer stalking through a European cityscape wasn’t considered cliché, but Blue Underground’s gorgeous Blu-Ray edition of Dario Argento’s classic goes a long way towards transporting the viewer back four decades to experience what made this movie such a sensation. It’s a shame that a film which relies so heavily on its visual punch has had to suffer so many years of lackluster presentations. Previous editions have been beset with both image and sound issues, and it wasn’t until Blue Underground’s DVD presentation in 2005 that we finally had an edition that could be called definitive. Their stunning new Blu-Ray transfer, however, trumps all contenders with a 1080p image that squeezes out an amazing amount of detail and clarity without the (apparent) application of excessive digital noise reduction. Also present are a 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and 7.1 Dolby TrueHD English tracks, either of which works fine even without 17 speakers. The Italian language track is available as well, but since the lip movements for most actors are clearly in English (and Musante and Kendall dubbed their own voices on the English track), there’s no need to get sniffy about watching the show in its “original” language. All extras from the previous edition are ported over as well, including a terrific commentary track featuring journalists-authors Alan Jones and Kim Newman, and featurettes on Argento (“Out of the Shadows”), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (“Painting with Darkness” – and thank God that neither Argento nor Blue Underground have let him get his hands on the transfer and pimp-smack it into his beloved universal aspect ratio of 2:1), composer Morricone (“The Music of Murder”), and the late Eva Renzi (“Eva’s Talking”). Read a complete review of the film here.
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Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Mya Communications DVD)
Having just released an international smash with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, Argento followed up with 1971’s Cat ‘o Nine Tails and 1972’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Although Four Flies is a fairly conventional thriller – particularly in light of Argento’s later, edgier work – the beginnings of the visually audacious style that would come to full fruition in Deep Red, Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). The director has a ball with camera placement, and even uses an early variation of the bullet-time slow motion sequence, later made famous (and ubiquitous) in the Matrix pictures. Much of Four Flies on Grey Velvet’s reputation stems from its unavailability on home video. US residents have had to live with dodgy bootlegs of questionable quality while pleas for a proper DVD release fell on deaf ears at rights-holding studio Paramount Pictures. We don’t know what strings were pulled, but Somehow Mya Communications has managed to secure domestic DVD rights, and the results are glorious – an uncut print (sourced from an Italian negative) with excellent color and detail that finally allows for a proper evaluation of the show. There are both English and Italian tracks available (both in mono), though as was the case with most of Argento’s films of the period, the vast majority of the actors (including the leads) were clearly speaking English. The package is rounded out with a collection of fascinating vintage trailers, including one without dialog or narration that is decades ahead of its time. Read the complete review here.
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Akira (Bandai Blu-Ray)
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, based on the director’s own series of comics (or Manga, if you’re nasty), is set in Neo-Tokyo in the year 2019, roughly 3 decades after it was destroyed by a nuclear blast at the beginning of World War III. Newcomers to the film (or to Anime itself) will find that Akira pleasingly breaks from the typical cost-cutting practices, with incredibly detailed animation (even going so far as to sync lip-movements to dialog, a rare practice in Japan at the time). If, like me, you owned Criterion’s towering (and pricey) laserdisc of the film and yearned to see its myriad extras duplicated on Bandai’s new Blu-Ray, you’ll likely be disappointed. Aside from a collection of trailers there’s little else in the way of extras – a real shame given the rich production history of the film and a real lost opportunity to introduce new viewers (for whom Akira may well be the only Anime title in their collection) to the genre with supplemental materials. But the important thing is the presentation, and the Blu-Ray looks fabulous, bringing unprecedented detail to the title (enough even to expose the limits of the source materials, an increasingly common problem). Read a complete review of the disc here.
The rest of the week’s considerable releases include:

  • The Haunting of Molly Hartley. This low budget ghost story generated little positive word of mouth when it received a limited platform release last Halloween.
  • Blu-ray releases of Friday the 13th Part 2 (reviewed here) and Friday the 13th Part 3 (reviewed here).
  • A double-bill DVD of The Whip and the Body/Conspiracy of Torture. The former is a colorful and atmsopheric effort from Mario Bava, who reuses many of his old tricks from Black Sunday in this tale of S&M from beyond the grave; it’s beautiful to watch, but molassas could outrun the pace of the story.
  • Another double bill DVD, this time of two features starring cult horror queen Barbara Steele, The Long Hair of Death/An Angel for Satan. The first is atmospheric and entertaining, providing a good opportunity for Steele to shine, even if the storyline is muddle. The second is a rare title that seldom if ever showed up on U.S. shores before the advent of home video. (Don’t hold me to this, but I think it never received a theatrical release here, and I never saw it showing up on late night television or on Saturday afternoon Creature Features.)
  • And yet a third double bill disc, this one showcasing melodramatic Victorian villain Tod Slaughter in Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barbar of Fleet Street/Incredible Crimes at the Dark House. You can read a review of the former here, including a sketch of Slaughter’s career.
  • Tales of the Unexplained is an old British television anthology, featuring horror icon Boris Karloff (FRANKENSTEIN).
  • Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder arrives on Blu-ray and DVD, and also as part of the Futurama Movies Collection.
  • And lastly, Noah Wylie returns as the Librarian in Curse of the Judas Chalice.

Steve Biodrowski contributed to this article.

Last House on the Left (1972) – Film & DVD Review

last_house_on_the_leftWes Craven’s landmark 1972 shocker gets a second DVD go-around with a much more comprehensive set of extras, but the recent UK DVD release easily trumps all previous entries. Last House on the Left is as important a step in the growth of the modern horror film as either Night of the Living Dead or Halloween, even though House rarely gets recommended on that level. The zombie flesh eaters of Night are practically genteel in comparison to what Romero wound unleash in later decades (not to mention the merciless levels of violence that would become part and parcel of the European variant), and the elegant steadicam photography of Carpenter’s Halloween would easily justify its place alongside Kubrick’s The Shinning in any discussion of the evolution of modern cinematography. But after almost 40 years, Last House still possesses the raw power to shock and offend – not just through the plethora of cheap, improvised makeup EFX, but by confronting its audience with the kind of absolute horror that most films dealing in murder as entertainment conveniently overlook.
Craven’s film uses the barest outline of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring in telling the story of teenagers Mari (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham), who stop off in a sketchy neighborhood in NYC’s lower east side to buy pot before going to a concert. Their would-be dealer, Junior (Marc Sheffler) leads them upstairs to conclude the deal, where they are set upon by escaped convicts Sadie (Jeramie Rain), Weasel (soon-to-be legendary adult film director Fred J Lincoln), and worst of all, the malevolently evil Krug (actor and musician David Hess, guaranteeing himself exploitation cinema work in perpetuity). The next morning, the gang throws the girls into the trunk of their car and race up to the country to have some more “fun” with their captives, but coincidently choose an area nearly in the backyard of the Collingwood’s home – Mari’s parents.
It’s easy to dismiss Last House as the worst sort of pandering grindhouse fare; several of the filmmakers were involved in the adult film world both before and after its production (an early draft of the script was rife with outrageous pornographic content), and the majority of the acting on display is desperately amateurish. The local police (including a young Martin Kove) are straight out of a Bethel Buckalew picture, and the scene where they pull over an elderly black woman driving a depression-era truck filled with chickens (actually Cunningham’s parent’s housekeeper, Ada Washington) is perhaps the most epically out-of-place moment in the history of American horror cinema. The intent of the ham-fisted comedy relief is clear, though the tonal shifts are enough to give a first time viewer whiplash.
Fortunately, nothing can blunt the power of the infamous sequence when Mari and Phyllis are ravaged in the woods. Until that point, the cheap production values and semi-pro performances have served to distance most viewers. But something happens from the moment Krug and Company (actually one of the myriad alternate titles used for the film early on) drag the girls to what will likely be the last place on earth that they will ever see.
It begins with the performances of Cassel and Grantham (Cassel spent the early ’70s appearing in several NYC-lensed adult films with titles like Love-In ’72 and Teenage Hitch-hikers, while Grantham’s film CV consists of only Last House), both of whom appear realistically and distressingly frightened for their lives. From the first, relatively benign atrocity of forcing Phyllis to urinate on herself, to the almost unwatchable (and heavily edited) sequence in which the girls are made to be “intimate” with each other, nothing is presented to titillate – it’s a rape of the girls’ body and spirit.
The realistic vibe put out by the actress is picked up in turn by Hess, Lincoln, and Rain, each of whom demonstrates with terrifying verisimilitude the utter absence of humanity or compassion. The sequence concludes with a moment as remarkable as we’ve ever seen in a genre film, in which we actually see the killers reach their collective limit, and their sadomasochist glee is turned off as if by flipping a switch. Is it remorse that we see on their faces, and are we willing to grant them the very thing that we’ve just watched them brutally take away from their victims?
The sequence – as with the rest of the film – is shot in a very grainy, verite style that is both a product of the budget and the stated aesthetic of the filmmakers to achieve the documentary look of TV news reports coming each night from Vietnam. Critics who complained about the level of violence were missing the point; the violence in Last House was itself the central theme, not merely an exploitable byproduct. Craven saw a culture being slowly desensitized by the horrors around it – a world where the Manson ‘family’ perverted the hippie idealism of the ’60s and used it as trappings for their murderous antisocial rage, and where Craven’s own generation were being systematically slaughtered halfway around the world in a war nobody wanted. The audience is forced to coldly observe the atrocities of the film’s crew of killers until the mayhem passes beyond the comfort zone of even the most hardened genre aficionados and asks “Is this what you came to see?”
The show falters somewhat during the second half, once the gang arrives at the Collingwood home after their car breaks down. Here the film becomes more of a traditional revenge picture and ceases to challenge its audience (though one quick dream sequence is undeniably effective).
Few horror pictures have had as checkered a history on home video as Last House; two different edits appeared on VHS, courtesy of the beloved Vestron Video, the second of which was billed as ‘complete and uncut’, running roughly 83min. MGM/UA’s first go around with the title on DVD was back in 2002, and offered the most complete version yet, along with commentary by Craven and Cunningham, featurettes on the production and Hess’ music, and several minutes of outtakes, some of which feature extra moments of intestine-pulling that was best left on the cutting room floor.
Last year, the UK was finally able to see the film without cuts in a nation-wide release (it had previously held a place of honor at the top of the BBFC’s “video nasties” list) via a massive 3 disc set from Metrodome, featuring an additional commentary track with baddies Hess, Lincoln, and Sheffler, a brand new 40-min production documentary produced by Blue Underground (“Celluloid Crime of the Century”), which provides an extensive look into the making of the film; the interesting “Krug Conquers England,” which covers the first uncut theatrical showings in the UK; an excerpt from the short film “Tales that’ll Tear Your Heart Out ,”which reunited Craven and Hess; all of this in addition to the same set of outtakes and general ballyhoo from the previous release.
However, the main selling points that might drive interested parties to double-dip are housed on the second disc, which includes a marginally different cut of the film under the title “Krug & Company” (which contains some footage found in no other version and has at least one astounding plot difference regarding the fate of Mari), and some the infamous soft core sexual footage shot during the forced copulation of Mari and Phyllis. Like much of the film’s more extreme footage, it had fallen victim over the years to the vagaries of local “decency laws”, with theater managers excising out any would-be offending material (and saving it for their own personal collection, of course) and few prints making it back to the distributor’s office intact.
Not even Craven and Cunningham appear sure of what exactly would constitute a final cut; while much of the ‘intestine’ footage was clearly never intended to be used, who knows how much of the forced lesbianism ever actually made it into any complete version? (We’ve heard from various parties that this footage has always been around, but until recently no one had bothered getting the actresses to sign off on the necessary release forms).
MGM/UA’s newest offering is geared to take advantage of Rouge Pictures’ upcoming remake, and cherry picks several features off the Metrodome set, while leaving off the Krug & Company alternate cut and the “Krug Conquers England” featurette to fit onto a single disc (the 3rd disc on the Metrodome set was devoted to a documentary, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film). Unfortunately, the new MGM release continues the tradition of no-thought, Photoshop paste ups for the cover art; Last House has some of the most memorable promotional artwork ever made for a horror film (much of which is retained on the Metrodome set), and MGM’s disc makes it look like a DTV Wrong Turn sequel.
We would like to acknowledge our dog-eared copy of David A. Szulkin’s invaluable book, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, the best available resource for anyone interested in the film. Portions of this review were previously published on my blog, The Blood-Spattered Scribe.

Wes Craven's 25/8 in 2009

It seems as if Wes Craven has spent most of the new millennium executive producing direct-to-video fodder (DRACULA 2000, THE BREED) and/or co-writing remakes (THE HILLS HAVE EYES, PULSE), while only occasionally sitting in the directorial chair (RED EYE, CURSED). Now, in what has the potential to be a return to form, he has written and directed 25/8, a new scary movie that warns “evil is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” Although identified as a “suspense-thriller,” the plot sounds as if it borders on horror territory, with a potential supernatural element.
From the press kit:

In the sleepy town of , legend tells of a serial killer who swore he would return to murder the seven children born the night he died. Now, 16 years later, people are disappearing again. Has the psychopath been reincarnated as one of the seven teens, or did he survive the night he was left for dead? Only one of the kids knows the answer.
Adam “Bug” Heller (Max Thieriot) was supposed to die on the bloody night his father went insane. Unaware of his dad’s terrifying crimes, he has been plagued by nightmares since he was a baby. But if Bug hopes to save his friends from the monster that’s returned, he must face an evil that won’t rest…until it finishes the job it began the day he was born.

  • Cast: Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Emily Meade, Nick Lashaway, Denzel Whitaker, Shareeka Epps, Paulina Olszyinski, Raúl Esparza
  • Written and Directed by: Wes Craven
  • Produced by: Wes Craven, Iya Labunka, Anthony Katagas

Universal has scheduled the Rogue Pictures production for 2009, but no specific release date has been set.

Cursed (2005) – Film & DVD Review

The real curse is upon the unfortunate audience.

What can you say about a horror film when its spookiest cast member plays the innocent victim? You can say that it’s only one of many obvious missteps in this misbegotten attempt by writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven to apply their patented SCREAM-style approach to the familiar werewolf clichés.
Of course, the SCREAM films were never quite all they were cracked up to be. Their chief cleverness lay in openly acknowledging the slasher genre they were mining: this gave them a license to trot out all the established tropes, while critics who normally would not be caught dead in a horror film, could sing hymns of praise to their self-referential, post-modern sensibility. It’s a one-trick approach with little scope, so it’s no surprise that its application in CURSED suffers from the law of diminishing returns. What is surprising is that Williamson and Craven could have miscalculated so badly that the film entirely failed to click with audiences when it was released in theatres.
The story begins with a pair of women receiving a dire warning from a gypsy woman (like in THE WOLF MAN, get it?) Soon thereafter, brother and sister Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) and Ellie (Christian Ricci) see one of the women (Shannon Elizabeth) killed by a wolf-like monster after they ram into her car. Both Jimmy and Ellie are bitten and/or scratched in the struggle, and gradually come to realize that they are “cursed” with the Mark of the Beast; that is, they are turning into werewolves.
Unfortunately, this “curse” turns out to be a mild annoyance at most: the central dilemma never registers, because they never really seem in danger of turning into animals or losing their humanity. Instead, the film stumbles through a jumble of ideas: Being a wolf helps you get girls in high school like in TEEN WOLF; it gives you increased sensory awareness in your dog-eat-dog workplace like in WOLF; it gives you a craving for blood and sexual charisma (a detail more appropriate for vampire films like THE LOST BOYS); but never fear, as in the TV show WEREWOLF and the movie AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS, you can save yourself by severing the bloodline — i.e., killing your werewolf progenitor.
Despite Jimmy’s reading from a few mythology books, we never really learn the “rules” by which these lycanthropes abide. Do they transform at will or involuntarily? Only at night and during the full moon, or anytime they get mad? And how long do Jimmy and Ellie have before their condition becomes irreversible? Without these plot points clarified, the story becomes just a pointless exercise, never generating any real suspense or mystery.
Another part of the problem is the attempt to integrate Ellie’s love life into the story. Her sputtering relationship with boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson) seems entirely gratuitous (not to mention dull), but you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that it wouldn’t be in the film if it weren’t going to tie-in with the plot’s big mystery: who is the Top Dog — or, in this case, the Alpha Wolf? In order to hide the all-too-obvious answer to this question, Williamson’s script not only throws in a character who acts suspicious for no good reason (refusing to show evidence that would exonerate him) but also adds a second werewolf (just like SCREAM created a “surprise twist” with its two killers). As is too often the case with Williamson’s scripts, the revelation of the culprit is a disappointment because the killer is not particularly interesting. The story-telling rational seems to be: “Well, it had to be somebody, so why not this character?”
The story is hardly enlivened by its cast, most of whom would seem more comfortable on a television show like DAWSON’S CREEK. The sole exception is Ricci, who clearly deserves to be better utilized here. Her dark and moody attractiveness (she’s ready to graduate from Wednesday to Morticia Addams) makes her look like a Vampire Queen who could round up these mangy werewolves into a slave-herd forced to do her bidding — but the film gives her a hapless victim role while decidedly unscary actors are cast as the monsters.
The action, when it comes, too often disappoints. The werewolf makeup is good, but the computer-generated effects are often terrible: shots of the werewolf leaping and transforming from its human shape, look like something out of a videogame. Even more ridiculous, the werewolves seem to know karate, for some inexplicable reason. They frequently throw their victims (giving them a chance to escape, so that scenes can be prolonged well past the point when suspense runs out) and almost as frequently kick them, using Hong Kong-style wire work to show the bodies spinning through the air. (A few years ago, Wes Craven expressed an interest in doing a fantasy action film in this style; too bad he opted force those visual ideas into a story where they obviously do not fit.)
Not as ridiculous, but more confusing, most of the action (including the entire, interminable, tacked-on final fight) takes place with the villains in human form. Didn’t anyone think that an audience, having paid their money to see a werewolf movie, would want to see werewolves?
To be fair, the film does have some good moments. The obnoxious high school jock-bully is transformed into a sympathetic character when he comes out of the closet and admits his pose is an act to hide his homosexuality — and the transformation seems heartfelt and sincere. And there is one great scare scene midway through, when the werewolf attacks a woman in a parking garage and pursues her into an elevator. Like a staking sequence in an Italian giallo film, it works as its own mini-movie, a nice little self-contained unit of fear.
Overall, however, CURSED is a misfire. Not a complete disaster, but a film whose flaws require no great perception to discern. One suspects the filmmakers had some sense of this, since they resort to lame comedy relief in an attempt to excuse the story’s shortcomings as parody. Perhaps the most memorable image, in fact, is of an angry werewolf flipping off the camera. Sadly, the gesture seems directed not so much at the other characters as at the audience.

DVD DETAILS

CURSED is available on DVD in two versions: the PG-13 theatrical and an unrated director’s cut (with a few more minutes of gore, which probably would have earned an R-rating). The additional footage is, frankly, of the “aint-it-cool” variety that should please gore-hounds. Unfortunately, it’s so far over-the-top that it seldom frightens; it feels forced and desperate, in a “can-you-top-this?” kind of way.
The theatrical cut DVD is without bonus features, while the unrated version contains four featurettes and audio commentary for four selected scenes.
The first featurette is “Behind the Fangs: The Making of Cursed.” Like many so-called “making of” featurettes on DVDs, this tells little about the film’s actual making. It consists mostly of press junket type sit-down interviews, and no one even mentions the film’s troubled production history (which included a halt in shooting, allegedly to allow time for new technology to provide better special effects).
“The Cursed Effects” mostly features an interview with Greg Nicotero explaining the extreme gore for the sequence wherein Shannon Elizabeth is bisected by a werewolf.
“Creature Editing” featured Patrick Lussier discussing how the film was trimmed down to get its PG-13 rating in an attempt to reach a broader audience (it failed: mainstream audiences stayed away from theatres, and gore-hounds waited for the unrated DVD).
“Becoming a Werewolf” is a mock documentary with Eisenberg and Nicotero pretending to do research on “real” werewolves in order to figure out how to do the makeup. There are some chuckles, but the laugh-to-length ratio is low.
Greg Nicotero and Derek Mears (the man inside the wolf suit) provide audio commentary for four selected scenes (which you can access individually, without having to sit through the whole film again, thank god): Shannon Elizabeth’s death; the Parking Garage scene; the Tinsel nightclub sequence; and the Final Fight. Some of their comments duplicate material heard in the “Effects” featurette, but overall the two are informative and amusing.
Perhaps the most memorable moments are their disparaging remarks about the CGI work. Nicotero criticizes the human-to-werewolf transformation shot for the bizarre decision to begin with hair falling out (a human should grow — not lose –hair, when morphing into a furry wolf). He remarks that the killer “turns into an alien first, then a werewolf,” while Mears pretends to be manipulating the cartoony CG-creature with a videogame controller. Nicotero also laments CGI manipulation that places an actor’s face on a dummy severed head with unconvincing results. It’s nice to know that somebody who worked on the film is capable of seeing and acknowledging mistakes that are obvious to the audience. Now if only some of that self-awareness would manifest itself in the people who write and direct this stuff, we might see some needed improvements in the horror genre.

CURSED (2005). Directed by Wes Craven. Written by Kevin Williamson. Cast: Christina Ricci, Jason Eisenberg, Portia de Rossi, Shannon Elizabeth, Joshua Jackson, Scott Baio, Craig Kilborn.

Wes Craven on Dreaming Up Nightmares

The Writer-Director recalls the origins of Freddy Krueger and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

Despite directing non-genre films like 50 VIOLINS, an Oscar-nominated effort starring Meryl Streep, Wes Craven is most renowned among his fans as a writer and director of scary movies, a reputation that extends all the way back to his feature debut, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972). Produced by Sean Cunningham, that film, along with TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, was one of the transgressive independent horror efforts that set new levels of screen violence; Craven’s script was also notable for its structural similarity to Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING. Since then, Craven has often written or co-written the scripts for his films, bringing to the horror genre an intelligent grounding in mythology (as would be expected of a former teacher).
Craven’s most enduring creation is dream demon Freddy Krueger, who first emerged in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The success of this 1984 film from New Line Cinema helped its writer-director make the jump to the major studios, which released subsequent efforts like THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988), SHOCKER (1989), PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991), and VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN (1995), and the SCREAM trilogy starting in 1997. However, none of those films quite matched the cultural impact and longevity of Freddy Krueger. Not only is there an ELM STREET remake in the works; over twenty years after his debut, Krueger has achieved horror icon status on par with classic movie monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. Evidence of this (if any were needed beside the success of the sequels) can be found on the Universal Studios tour in Hollywood every October. The company – which created classic horror in the ’30s – sub-contracted New Line Cinema’s ELM STREET franchise (along with FRIDAY THE 13TH and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE), so that Freddy is now rubbing shoulders with the Count, the Baron, Norman Bates – the horror movie equivalent of being invited to join the gods atop Mount Olympus.
When asked about the origins of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Craven at first replies, “It came to me in a dream.”

Freddy Krueger lurking in a dreamscape
Freddy Krueger lurking in a dreamscape

Then with a laugh, he adds, “No, it was a series of articles in the LA TIMES, three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and who had died in the middle of nightmares—and the paper never correlated them, never said, ‘Hey, we’ve had another story like this.’ The third one was the son of a physician. He was about twenty-one; I’ve subsequently found out this is a phenomenon in Laos, Cambodia. Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: ‘You must sleep.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I’ve had nightmares before—this is different.’ He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount—something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, ‘Thank god.’ They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons. They found in his closet a Mr. Coffee maker, full of hot coffee that he had used to keep awake, and they also found all his sleeping pills that they thought he had taken; he had spit them back out and hidden them. It struck me as such an incredibly dramatic story that I was intrigued by it for a year, at least, before I finally thought I should write something about this kind of situation.”
Having decided on dreams as the landscape of horror in his script, Craven then had to conceptualize the demonic presence haunting them, in the form of Freddy Krueger. What was his creative thinking process?
“It was kind of like a very fortunate series of thoughts I had,” he explains. “I wanted to do something that was tied into the deepest recesses of our subconscious. I had a history in academics, so I knew there were certain things that were universal. One is the fear of predatory animals; obviously, it goes back to when we were little primates running around with nothing to protect us. Nature is full of stabbing instruments: claws, teeth, horns. I thought the claws of the cave bear must be buried somewhere in our subconscious, so that claw which is from nature or animals was combined with what is one of the most specifically human parts of our anatomy, which is our hands. The human hand is so much more dexterous than any other animal’s. Many scientists postulate that that has gone hat-in-hand, if you will, with the development of our brains: the more developed our brains have gotten, the more clever our hands have gotten, and vice versa. So that became the instrument; rather than anything he would leave someplace and then pick up, it was something that he actually had on him.”
Watch the film online for $2.99
Watch the film online for $2.99

The choice of red and green stripes on Freddy’s sweater was the result of reading an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN in 1982 “that said the two most clashing colors to the human retina were this particular green and red.”
Craven adds, “I wanted this costume that [would be recognized] if he changed into any other thing in the room. I was an old PLASTIC MAN comic book fan—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that in your history books! Anyway, he used to change shape, but you could always tell it was him because the couch would be red with a green stripe down it—or yellow? So I wanted Freddie to be a shape-shifter that could be recognized from his colors.”
Freddy’s other trademark, his hat was the result of a childhood incident.
“The hat was the kind worn by men when I was a kid, and there was a particular man who scared me when I was little. He was a drunk that came down the sidewalk and woke me up when I was sleeping. I went to the window wondering what the hell was there. He just did a mind-fuck on me. He just basically somehow knew I was up there, and he looked right into my eyes. I went back and hid for what for what I thought was hours. I finally crept back to the window, and he was still there. Then he started walking almost half-backwards, so that he could keep looking at me, down to the corner and turned, and I suddenly realized, ‘My god, that’s the direction of the entrance to our apartment building.’ I literally ran toward the front door and heard, two stories down, the front door open. I woke up my big brother; he went down with a baseball bat—and nobody was there. Probably the guy heard him coming and ran; he was drunk, having a good time. But the idea of an adult who was frightening and enjoyed terrifying a child was the origin of Freddy.”
The final element in Freddy’s appearance was his burned visage, a sort of variation on the masks worn by typical slasher movie villains of the time. Not just a visual element, this detail impacted on the script’s explanation for Freddy’s origin (having been burned by a vigilante mob after escaping legal justice on a technicality).
Craven calls the concept of the mask “quite ancient” and explains, “Almost all cultures have it in their most important ceremonies. It kind of is a combination of removing humanity and yet leaving it there, behind the eyes. But I didn’t want an immobile mask—I think Jason was around in those days—I wanted something that could express. So I suddenly hit upon scar tissue. So the back story came out of that.”
While working on his script for the original NIGHTMARE, Craven had to keep in mind what was popular in other horror films of the time.
“I was keenly aware of FRIDAY THE 13TH, because at that time I think they had already done a couple of sequels, and the tone in Hollywood was that ‘horror is dead and it’s used up, and it’s a nasty thing and FRIDAY THE 13th is a good example.’ So I was trying to think of elements that were beyond just slice-and-dice, but at the same time there was a sort of thing where you had to have a special weapon — which led to a very careful consideration of what Freddie’s would be — and the use of a mask, I think, goes back to HALLOWEEN. But beyond that, back in ’84, I had been making movies for nearly fifteen years already; LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT was the early part of the ‘70s. So, I was kind of just coming up with my own ideas of what I could do.”
Craven had difficulty getting the film financed because backers thought the script was too gory.
Craven had difficulty getting the film financed because backers thought the script was too gory.

Craven had no idea that his script would lead to a successful series of sequels for New Line Cinema; in fact, he had trouble even finding a producer who would finance the film.
“I knew it was a good yarn,” he says, “but it took three years of taking this script around to everybody in Hollywood. I have a wonderful old file of rejection letters on this, like Bob Raimi, who was the head of Universal at the time, saying, ‘I just don’t find anything scary in this.’ There was only one guy, some guy in a little tiny hole in the wall on 8th Avenue in New York, Bob Shaye, who saw something in it. He stuck with it for three years, trying to raise money on it. Meanwhile, I was taking it to everybody else, and nobody ‘saw’ it. They either thought it was too gory or nobody would take it seriously. Sean Cunningham, who did FRIDAY THE 13TH, a close friend of mine, said, ‘Nobody will take it seriously because they’ll know it’s a dream.’ So, it took a long time.”
During its initial release, NIGHTMARE was perceived to be part of the slasher trend, but its similarities are superficial. For instance, the character of Tina (played by Amanda Wyss) has sex shortly before becoming Freddy’s first victim. Craven, however, does not see this as an example of the puritan morality underlying the HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH films.


“There’s two thoughts I have. One is that I think horror films are about the transition from childhood to adulthood. In fact, Heather [Langenkamp]’s character [Nancy] has an interesting journey, where her character is put to bed by her mother in the first act, and at the end of the picture, just before she goes to face Freddy, she puts her mother to bed. So there’s that transition from childhood to adulthood, and obviously sex is a part of that. And there’s always certain dangers in sex, from early pregnancy to diseases and the fury of your parents. So there is that but nothing much beyond that.”
Craven continues, “The second part of it is that I had been reading during those years a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There’s a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake — which I did throughout this picture. His theory was that consciousness is painful. To know really what’s true, to know the truth in any given situation, is painful, often uncomfortable, and it’s not pleasant. So most of us, most of the time, will go out what he called ‘doors.’ He listed sex, eating, sleeping, being out in a crowd; today you could add television and drugs. Those things ease the pain of consciousness. The hero is the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it’s so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they’re truly conscious. That became the framework for the film. Everybody says, ‘You must sleep,’ but they’re all liars. Really, the only person who survives is Nancy, who refuses to sleep and insists on being conscious. That was more what sex was, among other things: everybody had some door they were going out to avoid confronting this horrible reality, except for Nancy.”
Craven’s script originally had a softer, more evocative ending, but the producer requested a last minute jump-scare (a la CARRIE) that would also provide a hook for sequels.
“Bob Shaye said to me, ‘Wes, I gave you this film when nobody else would. Just give me this one thing.’ Watching it now, I don’t feel it [the compromise] quite so much. The ending as written was she just comes out the front door, and her mother’s alive and there’s a tremendous fog. We did not have much of a budget, and we could not get that damn street to fog over. There was a breeze at that point. We had twenty guys with fog machines out there, and when we’d get ready to shoot, it was ‘Whoosh, all gone!’ Anyway, she was supposed to walk off into the mist, and that would be it — which to me was a lot cleaner.

Nancy (Heather Langencamp) and friends are trapped in the car, but Craven refused to show Freddie driving.
Nancy (Heather Langencamp) and friends are trapped in the car, but Craven refused to show Freddie driving.

Craven adds: “What Bob wanted – and which I would not do – was he wanted to have Freddy driving the car. If you’ve seen NIGHTMARE 2, it starts with Freddie driving the bus — Bob had control of that one. (Bob, if you’re here, I love you!) God knows, film is full of compromises, and there are actually precious few in this film — everything else beside that one moment is exactly as it was written and pretty much what I wanted. Bob, I think, only showed up for one day of shooting; he actually got to call ‘action’ on the scene where Heather runs up the stairs that turn to goo — which is oatmeal and glue.”

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Wes Craven’s horror hit took elements of then-current horror films (numerous teens dying in graphic ways) and refashioned them into an imaginative alternative to the stalk-and-slash formula of FRIDAY THE 13TH, et al. The film combines horror with surreal dream sequences, bending our notion of reality and fantasy and creating a truly terrifying villain in the form of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). The dark, shadowy lighting by Jacques Haitkin captures a wonderfully malevolent mood, and the low-budget trappings actually increase the horror–unlike a major studio effort, this feels like a film that won’t play by the rules, that is willing to violate our comfort zone. Slightly marred by a studio-mandated ending (yet another CARRIE-type grab-and-scare scene), the film nevertheless stands as one of the great horror efforts and a worthy successor to the classic monsters of yesteryear.
Although Craven had conceived of Freddy Krueger as a one-shot villain, Robert Shaye saw the potential for turning him into a returning character. Actor Robert Englund returned as Krueger in a series of sequels that, despite their dwindling scares and tongue-in-cheek attitude, showed more imagination than either the HALLOWEEN or FRIDAY THE 13TH franchises. Craven even returned to work on the script for the third ELM STREET, then wrote and directed WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, a 1994 attempt to re-imagine the franchise as a movie within a movie, implying that the Krueger we’ve known all these year’s is a somewhat degraded, Hollywood incarnation of an eternal, undying evil. Despite the intriguing concept, the film failed to revive the Krueger’s box office fortunes. Eventually, the character made a big box office comeback in FREDDY VS. JASON (2003), but the film continued the trend of moving away from serious horror toward a more audience-friendly, “dumb hoot movie” (those are Shaye’s words, from long before the film was produced).
Fortunately, the grim, hard-edged impact of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remains undiminished after all these years. The original film may be a bit rough around the edges, and multiple viewings do tend to expose its low-budget origins, but the strength of the concept endures, and Craven manags to convey it with enough force and conviction to overcome the budgetary limitations. Watching movies has often been likened to dreaming, and horror films often seem like nightmares transcribed on celluloid.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET takes this connection and makes it literal in a way that is hypnotizing and beguiling, exploiting the cinematic medium to its fullest extent.Yes, there are plenty of shocks, but there’s something much more, almost worthy of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges: an uncomfortably convincing suggestion that the reality around us may not be the firm bedrock we imagine, that it may be plastic and malleable, waking life not all that clearly separated from dreaming.

Watch the film online for $2.99
Watch the film online for $2.99

After walking out of a theatre (or turning off the home video player), you’re likely to find yourself feeling as if you’ve awakened from a dream to a new way of looking at reality, with your sense of wonder re-kindled as you ponder the implications. As with Borges, the concepts may not survive scrutiny in the real world, but that doesn’t lessen their impact upon the imagination — their ability to make us aww things differently and ponder the implications, even if we are not convinced of the premise. A NIGTHMARE ON ELM STREET is the best kind of cinefantastique, the kind that fires your imagination and lingers, long after the curtain has gone down and the lights have gone up.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Written & directed by Wes Craven. Cast: John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corn, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund.

Wes Craven returns to horror

Writer-director Wes Craven transformed the slasher genre in 1984 with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, an imaginative concoction that gave us a dream demon (in the form of Freddy Krueger) instead of another masked madman wielding a knife. More recently, however, Craven has restricted himself to directing films like the SCREAM franchise and the thriller RED EYE. His upcoming flick 25/8 is the first scary movie he has scripted himself since 1994’s NEW NIGHTMARE.
ContactMusic.Com picks up a quote from Variety, in which Wes Craven describes his new film:

“It’s more a thriller than slasher film, and revolves around a young kid with a very dark past involving his family and his father.”

Craven also mentioned the upcoming remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET:

“My baby has fallen into the hands of others, and what can I say but wish them luck.”