The Wes Craven Retrospective

The Wes Craven Retrospective: Invitation to Hell (1984)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

1984 was quite a busy year for Wes Craven who managed to release three films at that time: A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes 2 and Invitation to Hell, the latter of which was a made-for-TV project he did not have a hand in writing. Similarly to how I felt about his 1978 outing Summer of Fear, a movie-of-the-week thriller with Linda Blair, I was immediately asking the very fundamental question of why Wes Craven – busy as he was – would ever decide to re-enter the world of television.

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The Wes Craven Retrospective: Summer of Fear (1978)

/ Jakub Flasz / 1 Comment

Not everyone knows that apart from writing and directing theatrical features that greatly influenced the development of genre filmmaking, Wes Craven ventured outside this bubble in search for other opportunities. In fact, right after making The Last House on the Left he ventured into hardcore pornography (allegedly because indie filmmaking wasn’t exactly lucrative) and those skilled in the art will be able to find some of his work online without much ado. Though, a fair warning to anyone brave enough to do so that to call some of these movies unwatchable would be a compliment. In addition, Craven ended up branching out to make TV movies as well (of the non-adult variety) and over the course of his entire career he would come back periodically to direct something explicitly designed for the small screen.  

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The Wes Craven Retrospective: Swamp Thing (1982)

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Long before what we now understand as the Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, the pickings were slim for fans keen on seeing their favourite spandex-clad superheroes on the silver screen. Richard Donner’s Superman had only opened in 1978 and the public at large was most likely not ready to embrace comic books as a serious source material for cinematic treatment. Granted, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and others featured prominently on TV, but I don’t think I’d be too far off the mark if I assumed these works were never taken as anything more than entertainment for children.  

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The Wes Craven Retrospective: Deadly Blessing (1981)

/ Jakub Flasz / 2 Comments

As the 1970s were coming to an end, the cultural flavour of genre filmmaking was also undergoing some changes. The rogue and unrestrained atmosphere of exploitation films was shifting towards something more aesthetically refined and anchored more decisively in what was happening in mainstream cinema of the time, a post-nouvelle vague, iconoclastic, self-aware recalibration. Having completed The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, both revered as exploitation classics, Wes Craven’s filmmaking was also signalling he was ready to evolve his style into something else entirely.  

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The Wes Craven Retrospective: The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

/ Jakub Flasz / 5 Comments

Following his unexpectedly successful debut The Last House On The Left, Wes Craven ended up convinced to stay within the genre and cook up a worthy follow-up that would cement his stature as one of the up-and-coming voices in horror. Interestingly enough, he was initially quite hesitant because he feared he would paint himself into a corner. Little did he know that the corner he was painting himself into would be looked at with adulation by generations of filmmakers. That’s because similarly to George A. Romero, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper – his contemporaries – he had a knack for distilling social anxieties into his stories and elevating what could otherwise be disposable exploitation films to become cultural icons.  

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The Wes Craven Retrospective: The Last House On The Left (1972)

/ Jakub Flasz / 5 Comments

It is commonly understood that when Wes Craven embarked on a mission to write and direct his debut feature, he was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Some attach a caveat that he was merely adapting the same Swedish ballad, but it is abundantly clear he was intentionally hitting the same dramatic beats as Bergman. But more often than not – apart from remarking upon the film’s exploitation aesthetic, cultural notoriety and the fact some parts of it have been lost forever owing to widespread censorship – this is where the discourse surrounding The Last House On The Left ends. But there’s much more to be mined in there.  

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