Horror movies rely on characters in crisis. The more vulnerable they are, the logic goes, the more empathetic you’ll be to their plight, the harder you’ll root for them to survive. Horror can empower its audience by scaring it. In some cases, the characters do more than survive, they gain power for themselves. That’s a theme the filmmaker Wes Craven has returned to again and again. Six films, five he directed and one he co-wrote, are about characters who are overwhelmed by a powerful force and manage to reclaim some of that ability, freeing themselves in the process. It all started with his most famous film, 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Nightmare is known as a turning point for slasher films, start of a sort-of Silver Age when supernatural material and baroque gimmicks became commonplace. The premise is simple: teenagers are targeted by a monstrous serial killer, but only while they sleep and dream. Dream slasher Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has it out for the next generation because he was killed by their parents in a vigilante slaying. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) is the first to realize what’s going on, much to her parents’ frustration. The film’s ending is the spark of an idea that ran through the rest of Craven’s career: Nancy turns the tables on Freddy when she realizes that she, too, has power in the dream realm. She harnesses her own imagination to fight back, and then cancels out Freddy’s power altogether simply by denying it. The power itself is neutral. Good can use it just as well as evil.
In 1987’s sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, co-written by Craven and Bruce Wagner but directed by Chuck Russell, a group of kids in an asylum become genuine superheroes. “In my dreams, I’m beautiful… and bad,” says drug addict Taryn, revealing a gorgeous punk rock get-up with an enormous mohawk and elaborate claw nails. The characters are empowered to embody their true, idealized selves in dreams, and fight back against Freddy. Although only three of them make it out alive, the movie is sincere in wanting audience members to see themselves in these kids. And every subsequent sequel, however goofy, hinges on the characters reclaiming their dreams to fight back.
In the late eighties, that idea blossoms into a miniature Craven obsession, uniting the first and third Nightmares, as well as his next four films, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, The People Under the Stairs, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. All four advance a Manichaean view of the universe where darkness constantly threatens to swallow the light, but the light puts up a fight nonetheless. As a director and writer, he has a real eye for character, so these feel like real people, not archetypes. The magic is, just a little bit, real. The motif is also evident in many of his other films, even lesser efforts like 1982’s Swamp Thing, based on the DC comic series, mutilated-by-reshoots werewolf drama Cursed (2005), or his second-to-last film, 2011’s reincarnation-based slasher My Soul to Take. All feature characters making clever and productive use of supernatural burdens placed on them.
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) begins with a reminder of duality. A title card that explains that in the imagery of Haitan Voudo, the “serpent” represents Earth, and the “rainbow” represents the Heavens. The movie is in some ways a “science vs religion” tale, about a white anthropologist who has traveled to Haiti to learn the supposed secret behind “zombie powder,” a substance that can chemically induce a state indistinguishable from death. The movie takes these ideas seriously, although the author of the putatively non-fiction source material is no longer considered credible. It also attempts, at least, to deal with the ongoing civil unrest and eventual overthrow of dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier and his authoritarian regime. As such, encounters with the secret police, especially a sadistic apparatchik called Peytraud (Zakes Mokae) are more of a threat than the supernatural.
Although Dennis (Bill Pullman) succeeds in his mission to get a sample of zombie powder out of the country, he is compelled to return and face off again against Peytraud, who has demonstrated true mystical abilities. Only through the good magic of his love interest Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson) and allies like Lucien (Paul Winfield) is he able to defeat his torturer and condemn his soul to its resting place. This confrontation is intercut with news of the fall of the Duvalier regime, and Dennis and Marielle emerge to a free Haiti, political and spiritual health living in harmony once again. Although obviously from a white American perspective and starring a white character, the film does treat these topics with genuine spirit and seriousness of purpose. And when viewed in the context of the other movies, it makes for a more diverse and compelling portrait, broadening the ideas of good and evil outside of a white Christian context.
Only a year later, Craven returned to close the loop on the gimmick slasher with a gnarly heavy metal power chord of a movie, Shocker. In the intervening years Freddy Krueger had become a comedic, cartoony character, just another ‘80s brand to slap on merchandise. And so out comes a new character with quips, attitude, and a performance to match from Mitch Pileggi. Shocker is the story of Horace Pinker (Pileggi), a serial killer who splits his time between television repair and black magic. Then, in the electric chair, he beats death to become pure electricity, motivated by a grudge against he film’s hero, Jonathan (future director Peter Berg). Eventually, it’s revealed that Pinker is in fact Jonathan’s biological father. On the commentary track, recorded years after the film’s release, Craven remarks ruefully that he wrote a movie about a son’s relationship with his father, and gave the character the same name as his own son.
When Pinker uses his ability to transform into a television signal, Jonathan follows, and the movie ends on a whirlwind climax featuring the characters traveling across the different TV channels and interacting with movies, news footage, and so on. It’s at this point of the movie where you’ll know for sure if you love or hate it. This sequence gushes with ideas, jokes, a few genuine scares, and metafictional play. You can practically hear hooting and hollering from the ’89 theater audience. Is the movie a supernatural thriller, a slasher with wild and wacky comic book rules, a commentary on media violence? Why not all three?
Just as Dennis Allan was able to learn white magic to fight his tormentors, Jonathan has to manipulate TV signals alongside Pinker. Unfortunately, there’s no magic in The People Under the Stairs. Here the same idea is mapped onto America, with inbred, isolationist, racist, misogynist, psychotically religious white landlords called “Mommy” and “Daddy”, played by actors Wendy Robie and Everett McGill, respectively, representing the upper class, and Fool (Brandon Adams), a young Southern LA kid, representing everybody else. When he’s accidentally trapped in their house while trying to rob it, he learns what a horror show it is, and it reads as a metaphor for the awakening of racial consciousness: Fool sees with clear eyes that the white power structure will never cede control gracefully, and will let the rest of society starve itself into violence and insanity if need be.
Even when he successfully escapes, he has to sneak back in to free Alice and other innocents being held captive by the villains, putting himself at great personal risk. Unlike Dennis, Fool can’t draw on the power that the villains have, like guns, a trained dog, traps, and even a studded leather fetish suit that “Daddy” emerges in after a sudden sharp cut in one of the film’s best sequences. Fool has only his wits and occasionally his smaller size to use to escape this death maze called America.
At moments, it reads as a profoundly cynical movie. But Craven’s sentiment re-emerges as the film goes on: Fool not only rescues Alice and the others, he engineers Mommy and Daddy’s own downfall and redistributes their wealth with explosive force, raining cash down on the gathered community who are finally free of these oppressors. All three films end with scenes like this, whether they be in Haiti as democracy is restored, in suburban America where a power outage forces neighbors outside to see each other, or in the inner city, with money wafting down from the sky, back to the community that originally earned it.
1994’s New Nightmare wraps everything up in a neat little package. The movie is a meta sequel where he, Langenkamp, Englund, and others play themselves. He puts himself on screen writing a script that is a vision of the genuinely supernatural events to come in the story. It plays a role in helping to defeat the “real” Freddy, a demonic entity enraged by the continuing production of the movies. Like Shocker, it plays with the media perception of the characters. We get to meet the “real” Robert Englund, a kindly jokester who likes to paint and only brings out Freddy as a gag. Even John Saxon, who played Nancy’s father int he first film, returns as a mentor figure. The movie rhymes with the original, bookending this cycle of horror fantasies. As a storyteller, Craven has his characters rewrite their own narrative, not content to be squeezed into one outcome. It’s fitting that he caps off this period by doing it literally, and for himself. Of course, he wrote a happy ending.