
One would think that with a name like
Wes Craven - his real name,
by the way - that a life as a director of horror films would be the man's inescapable fate from the very start. While
the 66-year-old Cleveland-born Renaissance man has created some of the most revered films of the modern genre like
A Nightmare On Elm Street and the breakout
Scream trilogy, there is more to him than that. He studied writing,
psychology, philosophy and literature at Wheaton College and Johns Hopkins University, taught college, and did not even
start working in the film industry until the age of 31 as a sound editor.
It was in 1971, though, when his
path would intersect with that of another future horror legend -
Friday
the 13th creator
Sean S. Cunningham. Their meeting first
resulted in the largely forgotten
Together, footnoted only
because it starred a 19-year-old woman named
Marilyn Briggs (who
consequently met brothers
Artie and
Jim Mitchell, who rechristened her Marilyn Chambers and made her a porn icon
in
Behind The Green Door). However, the collaboration made
fellow tyro Cunningham want to work with Craven again. The next year saw the release of the Cunningham-produced,
Craven-directed
The Last House On The Left, a remake of Swedish
titan
Ingmar Bergman's
The
Virgin Spring, believe it or not, a raw and grimy low-budget effort about a pair of murdering rapists who
unknowingly hole-up in the house of the parents of one of their victims. The film became a cult favorite and launched
Craven's career in movies.
Craven's second film, the savage and effective 1977 survival tale,
The Hills Have Eyes, was about a family who, while traversing the
desert, encounters a group of inbred maniacs who prey on these seemingly helpless castaways. Nearly three decades later
comes the first remake of Craven's own work, with
the new version helmed by French
it-director
Alexandre Aja (
High Tension), released in the U.S. on March 10. Craven, who
produced the film for Fox's boutique arm Fox Searchlight, was cool enough to call me at home for an impromptu chat.
After I insulted his parentage and suggested a scenario in which he couple with a Cheerio (thinking I was being pranked
by my friend Eric), I apologized and basked in fanboy glory for the remaining 22 minutes of our phoner.