Savage Spawn: The Brutal First Films of Wes Craven – Bloody Disgusting

In a way theyre the films of a young man who I think had much more rage than he ever realized. Wes Craven

In 1971, Sean S. Cunninghams film Together, a soft porn, pseudo-documentary about sex in America, was a success. Hallmark, the distributors of that film, requested a scary movie and offered $40,000 to Cunningham to produce it. Cunningham asked one of his employees, a former college professor who did odd jobs, including sweeping the floors and syncing up dailies, for him if he would like to write and direct a scary movie. Theyd make it for a few thousand and then split whatever was left between them. I remember Sean telling me, Write something! Pull out the stops; pull all the skeletons out of the closet, Wes Craven later recalled. Craven, who grew up in a strict Baptist family that forbade going to Hollywood movies, did exactly that.

Beginning with his time in graduate school, Cravens sensibilities as a filmgoer were much more attuned to the arthouse than the grindhouse, but he was aware of the power that genre films could have. He had seen George Romeros Night of the Living Dead (1968) somewhat against his will but was immediately struck by the film and the audience response. There was tremendous energy in the theaterunlike anything I had ever experienced in the academic-type theaters. And obviously, somebody was commenting on race in the United States and many other things. Armed with these ideas about what the genre could be, Craven wrote the first draft of a script then titled Night of Vengeance over a weekend. The eventual result was one of the most notorious films of the 1970s and a seismic shift in the horror genre, The Last House on the Left.

The film was so notorious that Craven and Sean Cunningham became social pariahs. They hoped that Last House would open doors to other films, but this proved not to be the case. Sean Cunningham and I wrote about five films and nobody would talk to us, Craven said. These included comedies, a Vietnam War script called Mustang, and others. This period was not entirely fallow as in recent years it has come to light that Craven made a porno film, The Fireworks Woman in 1975, under the pseudonym Abe Snake. He was given the opportunity to make another film, but producer Peter Locke wanted another savage horror film. Craven, desperately in need of the work, relented and wrote a film inspired by the legendary cannibalistic Sawney Bean family, but also used the lessons he had learned from Last House. I decided that when I did go back to doing a film like that again I would be less intense and use suspense rather than raw emotion. I never want to get back into that level of opening up violence on the screen. Despite this somewhat tempered approach, The Hills Have Eyes became nearly as notorious as its predecessor for a time, but instead of ending Cravens career, it opened the door to new possibilities.

These two films, which respectively celebrate their fiftieth and forty-fifth anniversaries this summer, are inextricably linked, joined by such strong thematic similarities that they are essentially two sides of the same coin and laid much of the groundwork for Cravens output to come over the next four decades. Like nearly every Craven film, they focus on the American family. These films in particular feature mirror families: one civilized and the other, a dark, barbarous reflection. Both include dark fathers, prototypical versions of his most famous creation, Freddy Krueger. Above all, these two films are about violence and the ways that, when the veneer of civility is stripped away, even the peaceful can give in to their primal, violent nature.

A key inspiration for The Last House on the Left (besides Ingmar Bergmans 1960 film The Virgin Spring) was the cognitive dissonance between violence depicted in movies and the images being shown from the very real horrors of the Vietnam War. Craven later called Last House an attempt to show violence the way I and the producer thought it really was, rather than the way it was typically depicted in films. In that sense, it had a real purpose to it and I think it has a legitimate artistic power. Craven removed any kind of glamorization of violence and forced audiences to confront how viewing violence as entertainment has affected them. Much like Michael Powells Peeping Tom from twelve years earlier, Last House implicated its audience as well as the filmmakers in being responsible for the violence on the screen. Craven felt the sanitized forms of violence in films had desensitized Americans to the real violence in Vietnam, in which their country was currently participating. Last House was confronting America with this desensitization by depicting violence as it truly ispainful, messy, disturbing, and dehumanizing.

Perhaps even more difficult for Americans to face in movies of that time were the complexities of humans, particularly the villains. One of the things that offended me in films, Wes Craven said, was that the bad guy would be bad in a safely bad way. In Last House, Craven filled his characters with contradiction and nuance that suggested that the best of us are capable of the horrific, and the worst of us are capable of evoking some level of empathy. For a generation raised on white hat heroes and black hat villains, this was profoundly upsetting. The reprehensible villainsKrug (David Hess), Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and Weasel (Fred J. Lincoln) are given moments of profound humanity, such as when they look upon themselves in disgust and pick pieces of grass from their blood-stained fingers. Of course, this moment occurs after they have raped and murdered Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody) and her friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) in the woods. Conversely, Maris parents, John (Richard Towers) and Estelle (Cynthia Carr) are driven to savagery when they learn that the gang, which they have taken into their home, has murdered their daughter. In the end, the roles have been reversed as John and Estelle sit covered in the blood of Krug and his gang, stained in body and soul.

The Hills Have Eyes is an improvement on The Last House on the Left in practically every sense. Wes Craven is far more assured as a writer and director, capable of assisting his actors in creating strong performances, and much more adept at working with his crew to create a coherent look and tone for the film. He had learned the language of horror simply through watching more films by the time he made it, Tobe Hoopers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) being the biggest influence upon Hills. Because of this, he was able to avoid some of the elements of Last House that he later admitted to disliking. The comedy scenes. I think the clichs of the stupid rural sheriff and his assistant did not work. Last House also has several technical issues, such as elements of the sound and the fact that certain scenes did not cut together well, which have been cited by Craven. For all its faults, however, the power of The Last House on the Left is undeniable even fifty years later. It still feels like a punch to the gut and an assault to more civilized sensibilities, which is exactly why it remains important and relevant.

The Hills Have Eyes expands on the themes of Last House while carrying them in directions that would set the stage for many of Cravens films to come. As Krug and company are a dark reflection of the Collingwoods, the feral clan led by Jupiter (James Whitworth) is the mirror of the all-American Carter family. In both Last House and Hills, these dark families are headed by a cruel father and each film involves a child that feels trapped against their will. This introduces another ongoing theme of Cravens filmsthe sins of the fathers being visited upon the children, which came from a youth steeped in fundamentalist Christianity. In Last House, Krug has hooked his son Junior (Marc Sheffler) on heroin to control him. This eventually leads to Junior committing suicide, suggesting that there is no escape from the sins of the fathers. The character of Ruby (Janus Blythe) in Hills is far more hopeful. She not only survives but assists Doug (Martin Speer) in getting his infant daughter back from her brothers Mars (Lance Gordon) and Pluto (Michael Berryman). The idea that Ruby is not fatalistically enslaved to the barbarism she was born into is an idea that Craven would carry on into A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Shocker (1989), The People Under the Stairs (1991), and several other films in various ways throughout his career.

Also, like Last House, the heroes and villains come full circle with each other, the hunters become the hunted and the victims the killers. What Im saying in the film is that theres a brutal, barbaric nature in all of us, Craven commented about Hills. This is most powerfully depicted in the character Doug Wood, who seeks revenge on Mars and Pluto after they murder his wife Lynne (Dee Wallace in one of her first major roles) and kidnaps their baby Catherine. Doug pursues them into the desert, sicks his dog, Beast, upon Pluto and distracts Mars as Ruby uses a rattlesnake to paralyze her brother. The final shot is a closeup of Dougs face as he savagely stabs Mars to death, a subtle moment of realization of what he has become crossing his face as the screen fades to red. A central metaphor of the film is the Carter familys pair of German Shepherds, Beauty and Beast. Not long after the accident that disables their car in the desert, Beauty is killed by one of Jupiters clan, leaving only Beast alive. This becomes a parallel to the Carter family itself as their civility and the beauty of existence is stripped away. All that remains is the primal beast, but that beast is exactly what they must become in order to survive.

Both The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes remain key examples of savage cinema and movies that defined and redirected the horror genre in the 1970s. They were films made in the cruciblelow budget pictures made in harsh conditions (particularly in the case of Hills) that were profound learning experiences for their director. He tapped into a side of himself that he didnt realize existed and he struggled with the fact that he made them, especially Last House, for years to come. Sometimes I think it was a terrible film to make, other times Im glad I was that angry, he told Alan Jones of Starburst Magazine in 1982. Eventually, Craven made peace with horror and the kinds of films he was able to make. Reflecting on the genre many years later, he said, something about these films, they just brought out an energy, and an insight, and a power that was undeniable.

Wes Cravens films are a prime example of this energy, insight, and power. The profundity of the issues he explored from the very beginning were not only hard-hitting fifty years ago but remain challenging even now. Though some of the edges were somewhat rounded in the ensuing years, creating a more refined filmgoing experience, Craven never lost the sense that horror is capable of telling deeply affecting stories about the world we live in. He even returned to some of the brutality of these early films in later stages of his career, particularly in the Scream series, which graphically depict the true nature of violence and its psychological effects. Few filmmakers have had so profound an effect on the genre they most prominently worked in than Wes Craven. Though he was reluctant to take up the genre fifty years ago, horror fans are certainly grateful he did.

Sources:

Opening quote from The American Nightmare (2000), directed by Adam Simon

Wes Craven Interviews, Edited by Shannon Blake Skelton

Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares by John Wooley

Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror by Jason Zinoman

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Savage Spawn: The Brutal First Films of Wes Craven - Bloody Disgusting