Died director Wes Craven, Freddy Krueger lost his father – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                 

 
                         

Creator of Freddy Krueger, one of the “bogeymen” most celebrated of American genre cinema, the American director Wes Craven died Sunday in Los Angeles. The filmmaker, 76 years old, had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

                     

                         With his death, it is also one of the most important names in the evolution of horror cinema that disappears. Ti West director, one of the latest gender exponents, honored him on Twitter saying “Wes Craven did things that others can not do.” The British critic Kim Newman, a leading expert of fantastic cinema, wrote that the director “reinvented the horror movie four times, when most even once the can”, and actor Bruce Campbell, the hero of the movie Evil Dead Sam Raimi said that Craven “showed us the way forward.”

Craven was part of a generation of filmmakers coming from the independent scene that made the horror film, traditionally seen as sensationalist cinema to a teenage audience in a distorting mirror of American society, and a reflection on violence and impotence that the petty-bourgeois comfort of the “American dream” contia. As Night of the Living Dead George Romero (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Tobe Hooper (1974), the first two director’s movies, The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Eyes of the Mountain (1977), put normal people face the horror hidden in situations where the rules of civilization no longer applied.

In the first – inspired by Virgin of the Source Ingmar Bergman – the abduction and murder of two teenage girls by a bunch of psychotic criminals takes the parents of one of them putting a brutal revenge ; the second, a family of campers is seen grappling with a group of cannibal savages. Rotated with little money and produced independently, the two films anticipated the wave of slasher movies , bloody ribbons and populated by psychopathic killers, and became emblematic of a new approach to horror movies, both popular and cinematic shared with a number of contemporary directors. Beyond Hooper and Romero, this generation would still part names such as John Carpenter ( Halloween , The Evil Back and The Fog ), John Landis ( An American Werewolf in London ), Joe Dante ( Piranha , The Howl of the Beast ), or Sean Cunningham ( Sexta- Monday 13 ), which was in fact a regular contributor to Craven.

But viewers less experts remember the filmmaker by far more media movies and equally significant influence. It was Craven who launched one of the “bogeymen” most iconic of horror movies, Freddy Krueger, a disfigured killer blades in the hands invades the dreams of teenagers and kills them in their sleep, incarnated by Robert Englund and revealed in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Playing with the idea of ​​the border between dream and reality, the film-founder of Krueger mythology helped launch the production company New Line, which would explore the character over eight other films, a television series and a remake . Of these, Craven was only connected as a writer to the third episode, and directed in 1994 The New Nightmare .

This last film, in which Freddy is a character in a film that begins to manifest in the real world, would eventually anticipate somehow the series that would become the most successful Craven ticket. The director, who had graduated in philosophy and seemed destined for an academic career before turning to the cinema and pay the bills directing pornographic films, found a “soul mate” in screenwriter Kevin Williamson and his idea of ​​a series of real crimes that seemed to meet all the “rules” of fictional crimes of horror movies, investigated by the like lovers seeking to anticipate the next step.

The result, Scream – Screams (1996), was a horror film about horror movies, made with humor post meta-narrative -modern very typical of his time, simultaneously respectful and subversive. Craven directed between 1996 and 2011 all four films in the series, three of which were written by Williamson, but no longer directly involved in the recent television series.

For such an influential filmmaker However, Craven had a peculiarly unbalanced path. One of the first if you should (and less successful) adaptations of Heroes comic-books American Swamp Thing (1982), and among its two dozen long -metragens count up a handful of failures: a forgotten sequel to The Eyes of the Mountain ; a horror comedy with Eddie Murphy, Vampire in Brooklyn (1995); or an atypical melodrama, Heart Melody (1999), who gave Meryl Streep yet another nomination for the Oscar. A new collaboration with Kevin Williamson around the myth of werewolves, Damned (2005), was the victim of interference in production, and My Soul to (2010), experience with 3D, almost was not released (none of them reached the Portuguese rooms).