Sunday, August 30, 2015

RIP Wes Craven

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With a name like Craven... well what else was Wes gonna do? Well for starters... be a Humanities professor? Weirdly enough yes, Wes Craven started out as a prof of Humanities... oh the, you know. And that professorial spirit carried through, even as he slashed the throats of young starlets in and out of school uniforms and movie sets, to ribbons. A more thoughtful maker of nightmares we're never gonna meet. He reached deep into the depths of humanity, and he plumbed it for popcorn and screams, for the darkest reflections of who we are. Who We Are, all capitals. There are moments in his filmography that will carry entire generations to their graves, cackling on his back, happy as one thousand maniacs. There are scars inside my brain that he put there, him and his typewriter and his camera and his quiet insistent knowledge of where we're all coming from, the shadowy places, and I cherish every scrape, every claw-shaped curve back and forth and back and forth across my bad dreams - from his thoughts right off the screen and into reality, forever, in his beautiful dark form. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the nightmares, Wes. You make me wanna be a better monster.
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2 comments:

Remington said...

"Scream" literally changed my life, and as a result, Wes Craven changed my life. I can't believe that he's gone. What a truly fangtastic legacy he leaves behind. See you in my nightmares, Wes.

mangrove said...

In all his movies there were some moments of, just, extreme weirdness, that sometimes played against the horror/suspense. It was just these little bursts of mind-fuckery that would just floor me. 'Shocker' for instance was just so strange that I felt I was going crazy just sitting in that crappy cinema they were showing it in. Only Almodovar and Argento have managed to make me feel this way.

The French premiere for 'Scream 2' where they distributed masks and foam knives so people were unknowingly pretending to kill each other in the aisles for fun, right before the film started showing people attending a premiere and actually killing each other was my favorite movie-going experience ever. You could feel the audience thinking "What is happening here? What did we just do?".

He also gave the best interviews in all horrordom and I cried when I read about his death last night. Losing such an intelligent and charming guy. Never getting the chance to say 'thank you' in person.

Thanks for frying my brain multiple times, Wes Craven.