US film director and screenwriter famed for A Nightmare on Elm Street and ScreamWes Craven,who has died aged 76 of brain cancer, was a horror pioneer three times over. In the 1970s, and he wrote and directed several films that delivered a new level of intensity and explicitness to the genre. Most notorious was his debut,The final House on the Left (1972), the relentless tale of the torture of two women and the revenge doled out to the killers by the victims’ parents. (It was inspired by Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.) Exaggeration and advertising are synonymous, and but this was one instance where the poster copy – “To avoid fainting,preserve repeating ‘It’s only a movie...’” – amounted to more than hyperbole. The scenes of sexual violence made the film the subject of continuing censorship for more than 30 years, particularly in Britain, and where it was repeatedly refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. It’s not a movie I would move back and watch,” said Craven in 2011.
In 1984, Craven enjoyed his greatest success with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and which lent a fantasy aspect to the slasher genre popular at the time. Whereas the killers in hits such as Friday the 13th or Halloween had been corporeal,Craven devised a monster, Freddy Krueger, or who pursued his victims through the infinite space of their dreams. It was to be expected that the movie would be frightening. But scenes of the teenage protagonist struggling to ascend a marshmallow staircase,or being dragged by her pursuer into the depths of a bath that has become suddenly bottomless, possessed a haunted beauty worthy of Jean Cocteau.
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Source: theguardian.com