The Best of… Wes Craven!

The Horror World lost a gentleman and a visionary on August 30th, when Wes Craven succumbed to brain cancer. We're still not used to thinking of him being gone, as he was one of our childhood heroes, and one who stirred our imaginations like few others ever could. 

We  may never get another new Wes Craven film (we were really hoping for one last Scream movie), but we do at least have his impressive filmography to keep us entertained, and more importantly, to keep his memory alive. Since his passing, we've gone back and started watching through his body of work, starting with the Scream movies. The Elm Street movies will be next. Then, probably Hills and Last House, originals and remakes both.

For us, Wes Craven will always live on through his work.

• Unlike the other lists that we’ve done, we’ll be including almost all of Wes Craven’s movies here, as there were less than 30 of them. In light of his passing, we feel that his entire body of work deserves to be praised.
• Night Visions, Music of the Heart, and his TV Show work will not be included on this list.
• The Breed and the remakes of Last House and Hills Have Eyes were Executive Produced by Uncle Wes, so we include them here because they were awesome.

If you're going to start anywhere with Wes Craven's work, we recommend that you start with the movies that make up this Top Six. A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream are the first places that you should visit on your trip through Craven Land, but be sure to check out The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left (and their quality remakes, which Craven produced.)

*Most of the links go to Amazon so that you can stream or grab yourself a copy of the movies; our review of the movie (when applicable); or in the case of some of the older & more obscure titles, IMDB, because they simply aren't available to stream or purchase.

R.I.P. Wes Craven (1939-2015)

In the 70's, Wes Craven helped give birth to the Horror Genre as we know it with Last House on the Left, and The Hills Have Eyes.

In the 80's, he turned the Slasher Genre on its head, giving us one of the best Horror movies ever made (as well as one of the most popular movie characters in history) with A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In the 90's, Craven single-handedly revitalized a near-dead Horror Genre with Scream.

The man was a true pioneer, in both the Horror Genre and film in general, and in a day and age where the term "Legend" gets thrown around far too often, and far too carelessly, that's exactly what the man was: A LEGEND.

And now, he's gone.

"HORROR FILMS DON'T CREATE FEAR. THEY RELEASE IT."

As kids, there were plenty of movies that terrified us to no end and gave us many sleepless nights, but none of them did so in the same way that A Nightmare on Elm Street did. I can still remember watching the commercial for the movie, late at night, on a local TV Channel, and how that 30 second spot was enough to make me have fits, and stay up until dawn. That's not an exaggeration, that actually happened. *Of course I was 12-years-old, but still, it terrified me.

That didn't stop me from begging my mom to take me to see it... which I did, endlessly, until she finally agreed. ANOES might be the first Rated-R Horror movie that I ever sat through in its entirety, and it was most definitely the first one I ever saw in a theater. And it changed my life.

Over the years, once i grew and realized that there was a man behind Freddy and his nightmares, I sought out Wes Craven's other works. From his raw and brutal beginnings in the 70's (Last House & Hills), to his more fun and quirky offering of the late 80's and 90's (Shocker, People Under the Stairs), I discovered a man with a unique voice who got what Horror was, and used his talent and vision to repeatedly make films that entertained, as well as terrified us.

We didn't even know that Wes Craven had been suffering from brain cancer before we got the news of his passing last night, and so it floored us. Like a right hook to the jaw, it absolutely floored us. The 76 years that he got on this Earth just don't seem like enough.

All of us here at THC love you, Wes Craven, and we sincerely thank you from the bottom of our hearts for stirring our imaginations, intensifying our nightmares, and entertaining us for over four decades. We will miss you.

Rest in Peace.

THE MAN WAS A GENIUS.

The links below will take you to Amazon in case you want to add some of Uncle Wes’s films to your collection, or you can click HERE to visit his IMDB page, if you just want to read about the man, and look through his filmography.

Either way, let's just remember and celebrate him and his works. Forever.

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)

As Horror Documentaries go, this is one of the best we've seen.

Never Sleep Again covers ever film in the Nightmare Universe, from the original Wes Craven masterpiece, all the way through Freddy vs. Jason. Just about anyone who has ever been involved with the films sat down to discuss them all, and at length; the thing runs for four hours!

Doc's like this are great, because Horror fans are generally rabid enough to sit through behind the scenes looks at their favorite fright flicks. NSA is particularly great because it doesn't gloss over the less popular entries in the series; every film gets the in-depth expose' treatment, and it's all a ton of fun.

Uncle Wes.

Before seeing this, I never realized how overtly gay Nightmare 2 was. I never knew that Renny Harlin pretty much improvised most of the kills from Nightmare 4 himself, because the script was such mess. It was crazy to see how so many of the stars we grew up watching in these movies have turned out, and how some of them look like cabbage patch kids now. (You'll understand when you watch it.)

The man behind the mask.

It's worth watching alone to hear the ever amazing Clu Gulager say "I didn't get a blow-job on the set, if that's what you mean" It's just full of great moments like that. Tons of them. Everyone has great stories from their respective movie sets, and not all of them are nice ones. Some are even sad, as we see how some of our beloved Horror icons hit rough times or didn't have much of a career after these movies.

You won't find the likes of Johnny Depp or Patricia Arquette giving interviews here, but fuck them, they should have shown up. NOES gave them their start, and they should give back some love.Near everyone else is present though, and it looks like they loved sitting and talking about their involvement.

True love forever.

This is a must have for any Elm Street fan, no matter how casual. At four hours long -eight if you count the 2nd, four hour long disk full of bonus features- this one will satisfy fans on every level. You should own this. Own it and love it, we say!

A+

Of course we have to close this out with a look at some of the hotties of the Nightmare movies. We've even included the girls from the remake, even though a lot of people hated it. Chicks are chicks, man.