Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [117]
Offscreen, De Palma and Allen’s marriage was falling apart. Allen lost a child, an incident that she pinpoints as the beginning of the end of the relationship. De Palma says he has learned that there are problems inherent to a relationship between actors and directors. “You go into show business to hang out with pretty girls, but when you get involved it can affect your work,” he says in a phone conversation from his home in Greenwich Village, adding: “Problem is you start to feel like a manipulative mind-fucker and you are not helping the material. The director has to stand behind the camera.”
Of all of his peers, Craven had the most enduring success within the genre, growing into the most commercially successful director in horror. He managed this by staying ahead of trends and reinventing the genre in three different decades. In fact, his career mirrors the major shifts of the genre, beginning in the era of New Horror, when he ushered in an angry, assaultive, realistic style with The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the nightmares were more surreal than what happened in the mundane suburbia and noirish campsites of earlier serial killer movies. Craven, fascinated by dreams, felt that horror needed to be not just “about fighting the monster but about the framework of reality itself,” so he built the blurring of reality and dreams into the architecture of the story, borrowing from Polanski’s Repulsion.
As the sequels kept coming, however, Freddy action figures, and a Freddy rock album with songs such as “Do the Freddy,” went on the market. The selling of this character was truly remarkable when you consider that Craven originally imagined him as “the ultimate bad father,” whose name derived from the rapist Krug in The Last House on the Left. Craven renounced the movies and quit the series in the late eighties, but he paved the way for the commercialization by making a killer that was easier to relate to. Freddy told jokes. His name was kind of fun. He didn’t wear a mask. And by 1990, those knife fingers would become a source of sympathy and eccentricity in Tim Burton’s romantic ode to sentimental monster movies, Edward Scissorhands, starring Johnny Depp (whose debut was A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Vincent Price.
The self-consciousness of the genre presented another opportunity for the resourceful Craven, which he exploited in New Nightmare, his 1994 meta-movie that used the Freddy franchise to comment on the state of horror. Craven played himself struggling to come up with a new installment of Nightmare on Elm Street. He dug even deeper into the now-established architecture of the horror film two years later with the incredibly popular Scream series that packaged the brutality of serial killer movies with the critical acumen and wit of an episode of The Simpsons. The subject of these movies was the conventions of 1970s horror—or at least the conventions established by movies like Halloween. The knowing winks at past horror movies are actually nothing new. Halloween itself was a movie about horror movies, and another decade earlier Targets was an insightful essay disguised as a horror movie. But Scream went further than any other movie in singling out how the “rules” of the horror film were primarily established by the New Horror.
In his screenplay for Scream, Kevin Williamson has the character Randy (played by Jamie Kennedy) spell out the horror formula like a true fan. Repeating the criticism of countless critics of Halloween, he explains: “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive in a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex.” There are nods to the trick ending from Carrie and a further exploration of the frightening possibilities of a ringing telephone. But the most intriguing recurring joke in the screenplay concentrates on an extended debate about the question of motive.
At the end of Scream, Randy says motive is incidental.