From the genre-defining classics A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream to such transgressive works as The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes to cult favorites like The People Under the Stairs and The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wes Craven’s reign of terror spanned not only decades but generations.
But there’s much more to the man than just horror movies. In Harker Press’ The Soul of Wes Craven, author Joseph Maddrey (Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film, Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen) allows readers to see the entire person rather than just a collection of his work.
The Soul of Wes Craven is not the first biography on the master of horror, but it is the definitive one. In addition to a profusion of thoroughly-researched sources, Maddrey interviewed over 80 people from Craven’s life — from professional collaborators like Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Alexandre Aja, and Patrick Lussier to family members, friends, and college classmates — for a deep dive into the man behind the nightmares.
Biographies typically reduce a subject’s pre-fame life to a brief chapter, but Maddrey dedicates 100 pages to Craven’s journey prior to filmmaking. Born in 1939, Craven was a latchkey kid with an overactive imagination who grew up as part of a fundamentalist Baptist church that forbade cinema beyond Disney fare. Maddrey explores how Craven’s early life shaped him, including formative childhood experiences that planted the seeds for some of his seminal works.
Craven’s unconventional entry into the film industry came in the form of an entry-level post-production position at the age of 30, despite having a master’s degree in philosophy and two children. He linked up with future Friday the 13th director Sean Cunningham not long after, which led to their collaboration on The Last House on the Left. The vitriolic response to Craven’s directorial debut prompted a brief foray into adult film under the pseudonym Abe Snake.
You’re probably familiar with Craven’s trajectory from there — from Freddy Krueger and Ghostface to troubled productions like Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed and everything in between — but certainly not in the exhaustive level of detail into which Maddrey delves.
A highlight of The Soul of Wes Craven is its heretofore unknown details on Craven’s unmade work — including his take on Frankenstein for Roger Corman, a remake of Village of the Damned written by fellow genre favorite Tom Holland, a Doctor Strange TV series for New World Pictures, getting kicked off Superman IV by Christopher Reeve, and a plethora of original concepts.
The 460-page tome includes appendices detailing where to find all of Craven’s available screenplays (produced and unproduced), his prose and poetry, and lists of his favorite movies, books, and music, along with an earnest afterword by his son, Jonathan Craven.
Upon completing The Soul of Wes Craven, I mourned the loss of Craven all over again. He kept his brain tumor a secret from the public, missing the outpouring of appreciation for both the man and his work that came in the wake of his passing in 2015, but Maddrey’s book doubles as a heartfelt eulogy to the fearless filmmaker and generous person that was Wes Craven.
The Soul of Wes Craven is available now in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.
