Little C: The King of Nightmares

Hello readers,
Sorry for the lateness in my post. I have no real excuse except to say that the hour I put aside for writing this yesterday got used up on one of the most satisfying naps of my life. I'm not ashamed or sorry. That's how good the nap was.

Now on to the post. As some of you may have heard, we lost one of the greats this week. The master of horror Wes Craven passed away August 30th. As Christy and I are both huge lovers of true horror films, this was a blow. In so many ways Wes was a visionary in taking something that is already scary (Nightmares, serial killers, being buried alive) and making it truly terrifying. I loved The Serpent and the Rainbow but I have not watched it since I was a teenager because it made me sincerely paranoid about being turned into a living zombie.

In the late 90s, when it felt like scary movies had hit a major rut, he breathed life back into the genre by making Scream. It seemed so simple once it was out to make a scary movie about kids who've seen all the scary movies but it was a revelation at the time. Part of Mr. Craven's brilliance was his ability to mix humor into those films to keep the audience off balance when the actual scary parts come in. 

Of course his most well known films were the Nightmare on Elm Street series. And listen up potential horror writers out there, because this was the key to this movie's brilliance. It's a very simple idea (Teenagers being killed by nightmares) with a clever villain (Ghost of child murderer). Wes stated in an interview once that he came up with the idea and then essentially spent the whole time writing the script trying to stay out of that idea's way. As someone who has watched dozens of over complicated scary movies in the last ten years that trip over themselves and fail to stick the ending, I think the thing I'm going to miss most was his ability to let go of his ego and do what was best for the movies he made. 

We will miss you, Wes. Thanks for all the scares and bad dreams. 

Little C