IN the rarefied world of horror movies, Wes Craven is a name to conjure with. But after more than two decades of cult success the director of such horror classics as A Nightmare On Elm Street and The People Under The Stairs has finally and surprisingly entered the mainstream with his latest film, the aptly-titled Scream. A sharply satirical and highly entertaining spoof on suburban slasher movies such as Halloween and Friday The 13th. crammed to bursting point with smart-alec movie and media references, Scream has taken almost $100 million at the US box office, several times more than most horror movies.
As well as being very funny, it also still manages to be pretty scary (the opening sequence with Drew Barrymore answering the phone in an isolated house is a virtuoso piece of look-behind-you film-making in its own right).
The soft-spoken director is clearly delighted with the film's success. "This was unusual in that it attracted an excellent cast. We just heard that every hot young actor wanted to be in it. We knew it was powerful stuff." Among those who appear are Neve Campbell (of the TV series Party Of Five), Courtney Cox (better known as Monica in Friends), and rising star Skeet Ulrich.
"Films don't make psychos, they just make psychos more creative." declares one of the characters in Scream. and, having splattered more blood in front of the camera than most directors, Craven has strong views on the debate about "imitation" of violence in movies. "In 25 years of doing this I haven't yet been shown one press clipping reporting how somebody has copied something from one of my films. I've made 19 films, so where's the evidence? What may be more dangerous is the action film that portrays violence as a quick and easy solution that doesn't even hurt that much. If you portray violence as something that's quick and clinical, then that's a dangerous lie. In something like Scream, people find out that there's a real cost to violence. It seems to me that that's not attractive to anybody.
"Audiences tend to come out of my films feeling really good not that they want to go out killing people, but something has been dragged out of their subconscious and put into a narrative in an exuberant way. I look at that audience, and they don't look traumatised, and yet you have this group of people, who never go to see this kind of film, telling me I'm going to traumatise somebody."
Screams script, written by debut screen-writer Kevin Williamson, pokes fun at tabloid TV, moral panics, and the shallowness of US suburban culture. In particular, it suggests that family life is not all that it might be in Smalltown USA, agrees Craven. "It's certainly suggested at the end of the film that parenting is at the root of all this, and I know that Kevin felt very strongly about that. He's now writing the sequel, which is going to point even more strongly at the family as the source of this craziness.
In a way. the characters in Scream are the children of the adolescents portrayed in 1970s movies like Halloween. "Yeah, I suppose so. It's very much a case of the next generation, who grew up with my films, writing a script that is the next step. It has a kind of a razor wit, but I think there's a real affection for all the characters in the film, even the crazoids. That's one of the things which is wonderfully rich and entertaining about Kevin's script. It has these fantastic characters, great revelations, twists and turns and nuances, and this wonderful deconstruction of modern entertainment."
Craven himself has indulged in his own deconstruction of the horror genre in the past, with Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a not very successful attempt in 1995 to revive the flagging cycle by peppering it with in-jokes and post-modernist self-referentialism. (Even this is commented on in Scream: "Nightmare On Elm Street, the original was OK but the sequels sucked," declares Barrymore.) The impression was of a director who was trying to push out the envelope of his genre, but was unsure how to go about it. Being a bona fide cult director can be both a blessing and a curse, he agrees. "It allows you to keep working in a field that's very rich in its possibilities. You can do all kinds of strange explorations and talk about levels of reality that normal naturalistic films can't handle. Strange transformations that really stand for subconscious things. On the other hand, the bad thing is that it's a restricted audience. A lot of intelligent people just won't go to see your films. And there's a lot of subjects that perhaps are too complex or subtle for the core audience. You have to keep things fairly simple most of the time.
THE success of Scream means that, after filming the sequel in time for a Christmas release (they don't stand on ceremony with these kinds of things in horror), Craven will have the chance to make his first non-genre movie, based on a true story about "a woman who taught violin to third graders in East Harlem, who everyone told her were incapable of learning anything as hard as classical music. Now, 14 years later, they're playing in Carnegie Hall."
For years, he says, he's been waiting for someone to recognise that he's not just a director of horror films. "I'm somebody who understands how to make a film, how to direct actors and mount a story. I'm glad I've done all this, but I would have rather had a career like Polanski's, who did wonderful, bizarre films like Repulsion and Rosemary's Bahy, but also has done things like Tess, I'd rather have had that range, and hopefully now I will."
As in many contemporary horror movies, there's an interesting tension in Craven's films between a narrative which often involves vengeful and violent men preying on apparently defenceless women, and strong female characters in the central roles. "Nightmare On Elm Street was the first script I did that had really strong women, and I felt that this seemed really true. It's often the women who can see the truth of the matter, and are trying to convince the men. Certainly Scream is Neve Campbell's movie, with Courtney Cox's help.
"I like scaring people - it's fun and a challenge, and people appreciate it. I've always felt that these films are like parables. They take a composite character, which is the hero/heroine and all of their friends, and one by one pare away the parts that don't work. It seems to me that when the audience cheers at somebody getting their head cut off or whatever, they're really saying `That's not a persona I want to identify with'. They keep identifying with the central character who does stay awake, who does keep going. and has the courage to do battle. You're playing a sort of mind game with an audience, which can be difficult, because there've been a lot of scary movies and a lot of cliche's. This movie says `Here are the rules', then breaks every one."