R.I.P. Wes Craven

Writer-producer-director Wes Craven died Sunday at the age of 76.

It is late here on the East Coast, and I am in shock. It is about 11:15 p.m. as I write this, and I just learned of the death of Wes Craven. The horror master behind such great films as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and Scream was 76. According to a release from his family, he died of complications related to brain cancer.

It does little justice to Craven to list his credits, though the films he worked on are nearly all exemplary of his particular genius. He was more than his films. He was the influence and impact his films had on a generation of filmmakers such as Sam Raimi, Frank Darabont, and Eli Roth, among many others. He was an absolute legend, and though his last film was 2011’s underrated Scream 4, his impact is felt still in a million places.

Craven on the set of Scream.

On a personal level, Craven’s work was formative for me. As a child who grew up watching way too many horror movies for my age, I loved Craven’s films above all others. I have vivid memories of being 9 years old and sitting in the den of a friend’s house, watching a taped copy of the Scream director’s cut. It was recorded off HBO onto a VHS I only replaced with a DVD last year. I was the Ghostface Killer for Halloween three years in a row. The first time I saw a movie on opening night was the release of Scream 3, and I took a first date to see Scream 4.

None of that, however, compares to my relationship to A Nightmare on Elm Street. To this day, I will argue Freddy Krueger is the perfect horror villain, a creation entirely of Craven’s own making. If one can have scars in a good way, the Nightmare films left them on me. My grandparents were convinced enough of my maturity when I was a child to let me rent the Nightmare on Elm Street films and watch them in the living room during the summer days at their house while my dad was at work.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

I remember my grandmother taking me to the library, and I checked out a Freddy Krueger novella and a behind-the-scenes, making-of Nightmare on Elm Street book. I was convinced I could copy the formula for fake movie blood and tried, though I do not know now, nor was I probably certain then, just what I planned on using it for. All I knew was the Nightmare on Elm Street people used it, so I wanted to use it. I still cite that book as one of the reasons I have always wanted to be a filmmaker.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, well, there are your good scars. I was maybe 9 or 10. I was up late in an unfamiliar home and could not sleep, so I stayed up, pulled a VHS copy of New Nightmare off the shelf, and watched it all night. One of the clearest movie-related memories of my childhood is the babysitter in New Nightmare being dragged across the ceiling of a hospital room. I was not afraid, just quietly in awe. That image has stayed with me, and I hope it stays with me forever – a good scar.

Maybe I am rambling now. It is hard to put your thoughts together in times like these. The movie world is a worse place without Wes Craven in it, but we are all better for having had him in our world. I feel sorrow for his family, his friends, and anyone who knew him. And I feel shock. Be well friends.

Ha! Judd Apatow and Sick in the Head

Writer-producer-director Judd Apatow's book Sick in the Head is an essential read.

When you’re always picked last, you always get the worst position, like right field in baseball. Then, since you are always in the worst position, the ball never comes your way, so you never get a chance to show anyone that you are, in fact, good at this sport. But the truth is, you are not good at this sport because you are never involved in a play, because you are always in the worst position. When it is time to step up to bat, you feel so much pressure to do something incredible, like hit a home run, that you usually whiff. If you somehow manage to get a hit, your accomplishment is ignored by your peers, who chalk it up to luck … Then the kid who is picked last never gets a girl to like him, because he has been labeled a loser. Therefore, what else is there to do except decide that everyone else is the loser and you are the cool one?

– Judd Apatow, Sick in the Head, “Introduction: Why Comedy?”

I have a short list of celebrity idols – the people on whose careers I wish to model my own, whose work ethic I admire, and whose approach to life and philosophy either lines up with mine or more likely has directly informed mine. Roger Ebert, Woody Allen, Sam Raimi, Albert Brooks, Dan Harmon. In ways both large and small, these people have made me the person I am and give me targets for the person I want to be.

Recently, another prominent figure has cropped up whose views on work and life I find intoxicating. Much to my surprise, he comes from the world of comedy: Judd Apatow. Now, I enjoy comedies (see above: Allen, Brooks, Harmon), but it is not really what I do. I am drawn to the dark, the serious, and the macabre, but seen in that light, maybe it is not so surprising. The old cliché often seems true: There are few people darker or angrier than comedians.

Apatow discusses this topic at length in his recent collection of interviews with comedians, Sick in the Head. He is fascinated by what drives comedians to do what they do and how a few performers – notably, Jerry Seinfeld – pull off the trick of being funny and being happy. It is among the many themes running through the book, a New York Times bestseller released earlier this year.

My copy of Sick in the Head, signed by Apatow.

The premise of the book is simply that Apatow has spent his life in comedy and talking to comedians about their craft. At its most basic, Sick in the Head is a collection of this accumulated knowledge related through interviews with famous comedians at various points in their careers. However, beneath the surface, it is much more than that. It is a guide for overcoming fears and anxieties, for putting our troubled pasts behind us, and for carving out a better future for us and ours.

My single biggest takeaway from the book – which is as revealing about Apatow as it is about his interview subjects – is, to paraphrase Nike, just to do it. We all have problems. We all have concerns. We all have excuses. In the end, none of that matters. There is either action or inaction. Admittedly, this is the kind of moral shared elsewhere countless times, but for me, to hear it articulated by people I admire so much while learning of their personal struggles, well, it is invaluable.

Fellow writers will attest to this: Writing often is easy; sitting down to write is one of the hardest things in the world. Sick in the Head inspires me to write. It makes me want to sit down and fill blank page after blank page with ideas, and I cannot convey how empowering it is simply to have the will to write.

I recently returned from Hollywood, where I was in town for three days to pitch movie ideas to studios, agents, and managers, which is a draining and dispiriting process even when it goes well. I packed only the essentials – a change of clothes, some toiletries, and an autographed copy of Sick in the Head. I read it the whole flight there and the whole flight back. I read it in my hotel room. I read it at the bar. There is something essential in those pages, something that got me through times when I felt bad or exhausted or like packing it in and going home.

I don’t know that I can ask for more from a book than the will to carry on. I don’t know that I can ask for more from anything. So, thanks, Judd Apatow, and thanks to everybody who inspires anybody to do better.

31 Days of Horror: Army of Darkness

Bruce Campbell shows us his boom stick in Army of Darkness.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 29: Army of Darkness (1992)

Bold, charismatic leaders may not win wars, but they lead great armies. By the time Army of Darkness, the third film in the Evil Dead trilogy, rolls around to its epic conclusion, Bruce Campbell’s Ashley J. Williams has completed the metamorphosis that began in Evil Dead II. He is a leader of men, ready to take his troops into battle against a strong, superior, and supernatural enemy.

Onscreen evolution is easy to chart: We see actions translated either as cowardice or bravery, and we see competence translated as either success or failure. What is more difficult to appreciate is the evolution of the leader behind the camera, and like his heroic creation, director Sam Raimi is a bold, charismatic leader of men and women.

By the third film in his legacy-making trilogy, Raimi has gone from clearly talented novice to impossible-to-deny master of the craft. Army of Darkness is Raimi’s fifth feature film and would be the last time the horror maestro would tackle the genre for nearly two decades until his near-perfect Drag Me to Hell. For the lead into a 17-year horror hiatus, he threw everything at the wall, including a couple kitchen sinks. What he and his highly qualified cast and crew produced is a glorious exercise in excess, an over-the-top, genre-bending mash-up of everything Raimi holds dear.

Ash has been transported back to medieval times along with his car, his chainsaw, and his shotgun.  These accessories – which by this point, in ways both literal and figurative, are as much a part of Ash as his good hand – make him virtually a god in this mostly in-the-dark society. The first impression he makes is to kill a couple of the un-killable Deadites, an act which is now so commonplace as to almost be beneath him.

There is no denying that even at a rapid-fire 81 minutes, the plot gets convoluted, and it gets there quickly. To vanquish the Deadites for good, Ash must find the “Necronomicon,” which you may recognize as the book that got him into all this trouble in the first place. Along the way, there are wenches and women, wizards, magic, an army of tiny Ash’s, and the evil version of our intrepid hero –named Badash, no doubt with a wink and a nod.

Raimi’s influences are as much the Three Stooges and Jason and the Argonauts as anything from the first two films in the series. The comedy and old-school effects come flying from moment one, and coming from someone who has loved just about everything Raimi has done, I have to say this film feels the most like the one he was born to make. He clearly relishes the vastly increased budget – going from about $350,000 on The Evil Dead to $13 million on this picture – and puts every dollar on screen.

If some of the effects look hokey to modern eyes, well, they looked that way to viewers in 1992, as well. It is a purposeful effect, and if you are on Raimi’s wavelength – which you must be if you have made it this far in the series – you will love it. This is a director who showed enough talent and achieved enough success to warrant this kind of investment from a studio, and he used it to make the kind of movie he would have made for free in his parents’ backyard with even a few of the same actors.

The reason Army of Darkness hold up after all these years and what makes it worthy of rewatching is the do-it-yourself spirit of the cast and crew. Raimi went on to make some of the biggest, most expensive movies of the new century with the Spider-man series and Oz: The Great and Powerful, and there are wonderful thing about those movies, but when I really want to enjoy myself and be reminded why movies are fun, I will take Army of Darkness and the brilliant glow of a guy making a movie with his friends.

Tomorrow, for the penultimate entry in our series, we go straight to the top. We have explored the bloodiest, the most violent, the craziest, the darkest, and my personal favorite, but on Day 30, we are just looking at the best. I know we said this is not a best-of list, and it is not, but the month would not be complete without a superlative exclamation point somewhere.

31 Days of Horror: Evil Dead II

Bruce Campbell is groovy ... and a little insane in Evil Dead II.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 28: Evil Dead II (1987)

Groovy.

It would be hard to own a word as thoroughly as Bruce Campbell owns the word “groovy.” The man just radiates groove. For crying out loud, his Twitter handle is actually @GroovyBruce. The screening I attended last year of Fede Alvarez’s fantastic remake, Evil Dead, was a raucous, jubilant affair with a packed house of people who knew what they wanted and got it. They cheered, cringed, and laughed their way through the whole movie – and I was right there with them – but the biggest cheer of the night came in the three-second after-credits moment when Campbell appears in near silhouette as Ashley J. Williams and says, “Groovy.”

The transformation of Campbell from Bruce Campbell Actor into Bruce Campbell Ambassador of All Things Groovy took place right here in Evil Dead II. Director Sam Raimi has always taken a perverse delight in tormenting longtime friend and collaborator Campbell. This is egged on by the fact that Raimi has not just a little contempt for his and Campbell’s most famous creation, going so far as to call Ash the equivalent of a clueless moron.

To be fair, the Ash who shows up at the cabin in The Evil Dead is a bit of a bumbling fool, but what can any of us say we would do when faced with an ancient and unstoppable evil? Evil Dead II is a direct sequel to The Evil Dead, though some confusion is created by its opening 10 minutes, which play like the events of the first movie told as a short film. This was necessitated by Raimi’s desire to recap the first picture for the audience coupled with an inability to obtain the rights to the footage from The Evil Dead.

As it is, for the uninitiated, it could read as though Ash is returning with a new girl to the cabin of his previous torture. To Raimi, the distinction makes little difference, a view he addresses on the DVD commentary, saying that people have asked if Ash would be so stupid as to return to the cabin. In Raimi’s view – yes, yes he would. So, sequel, remake, unrelated standalone film, it does not matter. Ash is at the cabin, and the dead are on the loose.

However, this is not the old Ash. Whether you want to say he has evolved from the events of the first movie or this is a reimagined take on the character, this Ash has gone from apprentice to master in the art of killing Deadites. The Ash of Evil Dead II is resourceful, cunning, brave, a little crazy, and just a bit sexy, if that is your thing. When fans get their Evil Dead tattoos, this is the version of the character they get. He is beaten and bloodied. His shirt his torn. He has lost a hand and replaced it with a chainsaw, and his good hand carries a shotgun. To put it briefly, Ash has got his groove back.

Campbell carries the first half of the movie basically on his own. It takes a long time for the supporting characters to show up, and by the time they do, the audience really could care less about any of them. All we want to know is the fate of our hero. Campbell gets knocked in some corners for being a B-movie actor – a moniker he has embraced if we go by the title of his autobiography – but the quality of his film projects has no bearing on the quality of his performances. I will take an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance from Campbell any day over some of the stuffed-shirt performances so often heralded.

In one of my favorite scenes in film history, the inanimate objects of the cabin come to life and shriek with laughter at Ash’s predicament. By this point, we can forgive Ash for having gone a touch insane, and he returns their shrieking with a maniacal burst of laughter of his own. What I remember is a rocking chair, a mounted deer head, a particularly sinister lamp, and an unhinged, all-or-nothing performance from Campbell.

It is hard for me to discuss Campbell without sounding like a gushing fan, but I embrace it. I have been a fan since before I knew who he was. He lends his voice to the main character from one of my favorite video games as a child – “Pitfall 3D.” To me, Pitfall Harry was as cool as Indiana Jones, and Campbell is Pitfall Harry. Then I saw Evil Dead II. I was too young to understand everything I was seeing, but the visceral thrills and unmitigated joy I felt watching that movie could not be matched by anything else.

For all intents and purposes, Evil Dead II is a horror-comedy, a genre changeup from The Evil Dead. It features Raimi’s love of Three Stooges-style slapstick and the kind of wild pratfalls of which Campbell is a master. It is a near-perfect exercise in genre blending that is sometimes regarded as superior to their first effort. I cannot go that far because the first time is always the best, but this gets damn close, and as experiences go, Evil Dead II is damn groovy.

Tomorrow, we bring the Evil Dead series to a close with yet another genre switch and a hell of a lot of medieval insanity.