Wes Craven
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“Requel”-ing Wes Craven: Radio Silence on Scream (2022)
There may be no horror franchise that opens with as simple and satisfying a tradition as Scream. As the production company’s logo appears on screen, we begin hearing the ringing of a landline phone—if you’ve seen only one of Scream’s now five installments, you immediately know whose voice will be on the other line. Reeling in a character with a false sense of comfort before swiftly posing a question everyone in the audience would affirmatively respond to (“do you like scary movies?”), the soon-to-be-victim begins to realize what we already know: if they can’t answer three specific slasher-film trivia questions, they’ll […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 14, 2022 -
Watch (and Listen): Hearing A Nightmare on Elm Street
In our second Jacob T. Swinney video post of the day, here’s the critic and filmmaker’s tribute to the late Wes Craven, in the form of an analysis of the director’s use of sound in his horror classic. From the video’s notes: The first horror movie I ever watched was Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. Being a child, the film frightened me so badly that I didn’t view another horror film until my teen years. Despite the obvious tormentors of a man with a burned face, gravity defying whirlpools of blood, and a dying teen being dragged around […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2015 -
“I Don’t Feel Like I Gave Birth to Jesus”: Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wes Craven, one of the greatest horror directors of all time, a man who directed classics in almost every decade of his professional life,passed away yesterday, August 30, of brain cancer in Los Angeles. Last October, Craven spoke to Filmmaker‘s Jim Hemphill about perhaps his most celebrated creation, A Nightmare on Elm Street. As a way of remembering Craven, we are reposting it today. On November 9, 1984, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street opened in American theaters and changed the movie industry forever. Serving as a bridge between the primal ferocity of Craven’s earlier work (Last House on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 31, 2015 -
Disembowelment and Doggie Cams: DP Sandi Sissel on Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs
If there are two characteristics defining director of photography Sandi Sissel’s work, they are versatility and realism. Sissel began her career in the documentary field, shooting countless hours of footage for NBC and ABC News as well as 60 Minutes, and she has continued working in the non-fiction form on dozens of highly acclaimed films for PBS (Before Stonewall, Witness to War), HBO (Jane Goodall: Chimps So Like Us), and Disney (Endurance, for which Sissel received a BAFTA nomination). Concurrently with her non-fiction work, Sissel has forged a career as a superb narrative cinematographer; her acclaimed feature debut, Mira Nair’s […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 26, 2015 -
NOT QUITE A TOP TEN
There’s a fun piece in The Guardian today by John Patterson in which he lays out his ten films that made today’s cinema. It’s not a “ten best” list but instead a “ten most influential,” and not in a fussy, highbrow sort of way either. For example, here’s Patterson on his numbers four and five: “4. The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and 5. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Released within six months of each other, these were the first smart-ass stepchildren of the self-referential post-Pulp Fiction effect. The only refreshing way to rehash the blandly inoffensive 70s Bradys was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2005
