Chapter 1The House on Castlewood

Foreword

They had survived a war. That was the part I kept returning to. The young men who began dying in American bedrooms at the end of the 1970s were Hmong, refugees from the mountains of Laos and Cambodia, resettled in Minneapolis and Seattle and Los Angeles after living through the kind of history that ought to have used up a person's whole allotment of terror. They had come to the safest country the century could offer. And then, in the ordinary dark of a rented room, with no wound and no cause a coroner could name, they were dying in their sleep. Some of them, before the end, stopped sleeping altogether. They drank coffee through the small hours. They were, the reports said, afraid to close their eyes.

A man in California read about them and could not let it go. He clipped the articles over a year and a half and kept them, and out of them he built a figure in a striped jumper and a brimmed hat, a burned man with knives for fingers, who murdered teenagers in the one place a body cannot defend itself. What stopped me, when I first understood the sequence of it, was the direction it ran. Wes Craven did not invent the fear of sleep and sell it back to a paying audience. The fear was already loose in the world, already killing people, already unexplained. He did not manufacture the nightmare. He reported it.

I did not expect to spend three years with a man who made slasher films. The genre, seen from a certain distance, looks like the opposite of everything a writer is trained to admire—crude where art is subtle, loud where art is quiet, in the business of degradation rather than of understanding. What held me was the person standing behind it: a former humanities professor who gardened, who was remembered by nearly everyone who worked with him as the gentlest presence on any set, and who then spent four decades manufacturing images so extreme that his films were censored, cut, and in some countries banned outright. The softness and the savagery were not a riddle I wanted to solve. They were, I came to think, the same fact seen from two sides, and it was the fact I wanted to understand.

I worked from the public record, which in Craven's case runs unusually deep. He was an articulate man who talked about his own methods for forty years, in interviews and commentaries and the long, patient self-examinations that intelligent people offer when they suspect no one is quite listening. There were the films themselves, watched and watched again. There was the trade and general press across five decades, the obituaries and the box-office ledgers, the ratings-board and courtroom paper that a career this contentious inevitably leaves behind. I did not have to reconstruct him from fragments. I had to read what was already there with the attention it had almost never been given.

I expected the childhood to be background—the material a biographer clears away to reach the work. It turned out to be the engine of everything. The strict Baptist household in Cleveland, the forbidden cinema, the theology that taught a boy to be afraid and to take the fear as proof the lesson had landed: I had assumed this was the standard-issue unhappy chapter that every artist's life seems to require. Instead I found the entire filmography folded inside it. Craven did not escape that house. He spent forty years turning it over in the light, and every film he made is another face of the same room.

What makes him worth a book is not that he frightened people, though he was among the most effective who ever did it. It is the argument he made with the frightening—that the thing a culture refuses to look at is precisely the thing it most needs to see, and that horror, the disreputable form at the bottom of every hierarchy, was the one honest enough to make it look. He was never nominated for the prizes that go to men who flatter their audiences. He is taught in universities now, which would have amused him, and which arrived, as these things do, a little too late for the man and just in time for the work.

I came to him a sceptic of the genre and something of a snob about it. I leave persuaded—not that the films are pleasant, they were never meant to be, but that the man who made them was doing serious work in a form the serious people had agreed to despise. That is the reversal a good subject performs on you. He sends you back to watch again, and to admit you had been looking away.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · The House on Castlewood

The boy who would teach America to scream grew up in a house where screaming was forbidden.

Wesley Earl Craven was born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, the second child of Paul Eugene Craven and Caroline Miller Craven. The family lived in a modest apartment on Castlewood Avenue, a block of working-class homes in a neighbourhood that was built to house the families of men who worked in the steel mills and machine shops lining the Cuyahoga River. Cleveland in the late 1930s was a city influenced by industry and immigration, a place where the Depression lingered in the faces of men who had known steadier work a decade earlier and where the coming war would provide both employment and anxiety in roughly equal measure. The Cravens were not a prosperous family. Paul worked as a machinist. Caroline kept the house. The economic margins of their life were narrow, and the emotional margins narrower still.

The defining fact of Wesley Craven's childhood was not poverty, though the family had little. It was religion. The Cravens were strict Baptists, not the mainstream, accommodating variety that had made its peace with American consumer culture, but the fundamentalist strain that regarded the world outside the church as a theatre of sin requiring constant vigilance. Caroline Craven was the engine of the household's religious discipline. She was a woman of deep and inflexible conviction, and the conviction that mattered most was that her children would be raised in the fear of God. The word "fear" is important. It was the operative word of Wesley Craven's childhood, and it became the operative word of his professional life, though the transformation of its meaning, from something imposed to something examined, from a tool of control to a subject of art, would take decades and cost him more than anyone watching his films would ever know.

The Baptist household of the Craven family in the 1940s operated according to a set of prohibitions so comprehensive that they constituted, in effect, a worldview. Movies were forbidden. Dancing was forbidden. Card-playing was forbidden. Popular music was forbidden. Alcohol was forbidden, not in the casual way that many American families discouraged drinking in their children, but as a moral absolute, as though the act of consuming alcohol were itself evidence of spiritual corruption. The television set, when the family eventually acquired one, was monitored with the attentiveness of a censor. Wesley later recalled that the only films he was permitted to see as a child were a handful of nature documentaries and Billy Graham crusade films shown at church. The broader culture of mid-century America, its music, its movies, its restless postwar energy, was something he observed through a window but was not permitted to enter.

"I grew up in a white working-class family that was very religious," Craven said. "There was an enormous amount of secrecy in the general commerce of getting along with each other. Certain things were not mentioned. If there was an argument it was immediately denied." The secrecy was not incidental. It was architectural. The household ran on what was unsaid, and the children learned early that the silence was load-bearing—pull one thread and the whole structure might come down.

And then there was the theology of the night. "There's nothing like the fear of God or the Devil to spark off nightmares in an imaginative child," Craven said. The nightmares came early and they came hard. A boy whose waking hours were patrolled by the strictures of his mother's religion found that sleep offered no refuge, because the religion followed him there too, populating the dark with the fires of damnation, the presence of Satan, the infinite consequences of a single wrong thought. The nightmares were, in a sense, the household's most honest product. They were what the theology was designed to create. They were the fear working. Decades later, Craven would say: "I don't get nightmares. I used to when I was a kid, and I think part of making the movies that I make is to process those nightmares into films and thereby get control of them. It's like putting the genie back in the bottle." The adult's solution. The child had no such option.

This is the biographical fact that every subsequent account of Craven's life has noted, and rightly so, because it is impossible to understand his work without it. But the conventional reading, repressed child discovers forbidden fruit, rebellion ensues, is too simple. What the Baptist upbringing did to Wesley Craven was more specific and more lasting than mere repression. It gave him a particular relationship to fear itself. And it planted in him what he later described with the precision of a man who had spent years examining his own psychology: "When I finally got out of it, there was a sense of having been cheated out of a great deal and of having been misled a great deal. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the energy and ferocity of my films came out of that subconscious sense of having been shafted." In a fundamentalist household, fear is not an emotion to be managed or overcome; it is a pedagogical instrument. The fear of God, the fear of damnation, the fear of sin, these were not incidental feelings but the desired outcome of a religious education. Wesley Craven was raised to be afraid, and to regard that fear as evidence that the system was working. The child who fears hell, in this theology, is the child who has been properly taught. Fear is not a problem. Fear is the point.

What made Wesley different, what made him, eventually, Wes Craven, was that he noticed. He noticed the mechanism. He noticed that fear was being used as a tool, that it was being applied deliberately, that the people applying it understood its power. He noticed, too, that the fear worked. It controlled behaviour. It influenced thought. It determined what questions could be asked and what territory could be explored. Years later, when he made films that were explicitly about the way fear is used to control populations, films in which the monster is often a figure of corrupted authority, in which the danger comes not from the unknown but from the known, from the parent, the neighbour, the system, he was drawing on something he had learned in childhood. Not the content of the fear. The structure of it.

Paul Craven died when Wesley was five years old. "My father was dead," Craven said decades later, his voice carrying the particular flatness of a wound that had healed unevenly. "It was always a sense that I had—like nobody's around to really protect us because Dad's gone." The loss was devastating in the particular way that a father's early death is devastating in a household already organised around anxiety: it confirmed the worldview. The world was dangerous. The world took things away. The only safety was obedience, and the only obedience that mattered was obedience to God and to the woman who spoke for God in the Craven household. Caroline Craven's authority, already substantial, became absolute. She was now both parents, and the version of parenthood she practised was one in which love and control were not compatible but identical. To love a child, in Caroline Craven's understanding, was to protect that child from the world, and to protect a child from the world was to forbid the world.

Wesley had an older brother, Paul Junior, and a younger sister, Carole. The children grew up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a household where the outside world was regarded as a threat and where the instruments of that outside world, its stories, its images, its music, were treated as vectors of spiritual infection. The effect on Wesley was complex. He was, by his own account, an obedient child. He did not rebel. He did not sneak out to movies or listen to forbidden music in secret. He submitted to the household's rules with the compliance of a boy who had been taught that disobedience was not wrong but cosmically dangerous. But submission is not the same as agreement, and compliance is not the same as belief. Inside the obedient boy, something was developing that the household's theology had no name for: curiosity.

Curiosity in a fundamentalist household is a subversive force, because fundamentalism depends on the sufficiency of its answers. The questions are already answered. The text is already written. The truth is already known. To be curious, genuinely, restlessly curious about how things work, why people behave as they do, what lies on the other side of the boundary, is to challenge the system at its foundation, not by arguing with its conclusions but by implying that its conclusions might not be complete. Wesley Craven was curious. He read everything he could find. The household did not forbid books in the same way it forbade movies and music, an inconsistency that many fundamentalist households share, and one that has produced more defectors than any amount of external pressure could, and the boy read. He read voraciously. He read the Bible, which was expected, and he read it carefully, which was less expected, and he began to notice things about it that his Sunday school teachers did not emphasise: its violence, its ambiguity, its contradictions, its frank engagement with the darkness of human behaviour. The Bible, read honestly, is not a reassuring document. It is full of murder, betrayal, deception, and suffering, and the God it describes is not always the benevolent figure of Sunday morning hymns. Wesley Craven read the Bible and found, within the text that was supposed to protect him from the world's darkness, a catalogue of darkness as comprehensive as anything the world had to offer.

He also read everything else the household and the local library made available. Adventure stories. Science fiction. History. The reading was not systematic in the way that an academic's reading later become; it was the reading of a hungry child in a house where most forms of nourishment were controlled or forbidden. Books were the one door that was left unlocked, and he went through it repeatedly, returning each time with more questions than he had carried out.

Cleveland in the 1940s and 1950s was not a city that encouraged introspection. It was a factory town, a place where men worked with their hands and where the measure of a life was stability: a steady job, a family, a church, a house that was paid for. The ambitions that were forming in Wesley Craven, ambitions he could not yet name, because his household had not provided him with the vocabulary to describe what he wanted, were ambitions that pointed away from Cleveland and away from everything Cleveland represented. He wanted to know things. He wanted to understand things. He wanted, specifically, to understand why people were afraid and what that fear did to them, though it would be years before he could articulate that question in those terms.

The neighbourhood around Castlewood Avenue was a neighbourhood of small certainties: the church on Sunday, the factory on Monday, the rhythm of a life that repeated without significant variation from one year to the next. The Craven household participated in this rhythm but also stood apart from it, because Caroline's version of Christianity was more rigorous than most of her neighbours'. The other children on the block went to movies. They listened to the radio. They participated in the ordinary pleasures of American childhood in the postwar years, the comic books, the Saturday serials, the baseball games on the radio. Wesley did not. His isolation was not physical but cultural. He lived among other children but was not permitted to share their world, and this produced in him a particular form of loneliness: not the loneliness of the child who has no friends, but the loneliness of the child who is always, in some fundamental way, a visitor in the world his friends inhabit.

This loneliness had consequences. It taught him to observe. When you cannot participate, you watch, and watching, close, sustained, analytical watching, is a skill. Wesley Craven became an extraordinary watcher. He watched the other children and noticed what frightened them, what excited them, what they talked about when they thought no one was listening. He watched the adults in his church and noticed the gap between what they professed and how they behaved. He watched his mother and noticed the machinery of control beneath the language of love. He was developing, without knowing it, the two skills that would define his professional life: the ability to see what people are afraid of, and the ability to understand why.

The household's regime of prohibition did something else, too—something the prohibitors had not intended. "One of the bad things that came out of that, obviously, was the fact that it forbade a lot of things, things that everybody is deserving of, from movies to sex," Craven said. "It tended to be a very secretive world. They did not discuss a lot of things. That really influenced me and now I have this overwhelming urge to know the truth about everything." The urge was not academic curiosity. It was the specific, urgent need of a person who had been lied to—systematically, comprehensively, with the best intentions—and who had decided, without yet knowing how or when, that the lying would stop.

And one night, when he was eight years old, the window taught him something that the church and the household never could.

He was in bed, second floor of the apartment on Castlewood. His father was dead. His brother Paul was somewhere in the house. His mother was asleep or praying or both. And from outside came a sound—a scraping footstep on the sidewalk below.

Wesley went to the window.

A man was standing on the sidewalk. A drunk, dressed in a dark jacket and a brimmed hat, the kind of hat that working men in Cleveland wore. He had stopped walking. He was looking up. Not at the building. At Wesley's window. Into the boy's eyes.

Wesley jumped back into the shadows. He pressed himself against the wall and waited. A minute. Two minutes. An eternity measured in the heartbeats of an eight-year-old who had no father and whose God was a God of punishment. Then he crept back to the window, slowly, the way a child approaches the thing that frightens him most, which is to say the thing he most needs to see.

The man was still there. Still staring. Still looking directly at him, as though the shadows offered no concealment, as though the boy were lit from within by his own fear.

Then the man turned and walked into their building.

Wesley heard the front door open. He heard footsteps on the stairs. His brother Paul, older and braver, grabbed a baseball bat and went downstairs. The man was gone. He had disappeared into the building and out of it, or into it and nowhere, and the boy was left with the image that would, decades later, become the face of Freddy Krueger: a man in a hat and a dark jacket, staring up from the street, knowing exactly where the child was, walking into the place where the child was supposed to be safe. The drunk's name, if he ever had one Wesley knew, has not survived. He was anonymous on the sidewalk; he remained anonymous in the boy's memory; what he gave the future filmmaker was an image, not an identity.

A separate childhood bully, encountered at the corner where the boys collected their newspapers, would later contribute the other half of the figure. That boy was named Fred Krueger, and he used to try to beat Wesley up. The name stayed with Craven the way a small grudge will—petty, durable, available—until, decades later, he attached it to the image from the window and made the two of them into a single creature.

The 1950s arrived, and with them the particular anxieties of the Eisenhower era: the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the barely suppressed panic beneath the surface of American prosperity. Cleveland participated fully in this anxiety. The city's industries were retooling for a new kind of production, and the fear that had been diffuse during the war, fear of the enemy, fear of defeat, was concentrating into something more specific and more durable: fear of annihilation. The duck-and-cover drills in Wesley's school were, in a sense, a secular version of the fear-based pedagogy he knew from home. Cover your head. Stay low. Be afraid. The fear will keep you safe.

Wesley Craven moved through his adolescence in this atmosphere of doubled fear, the theological fear of the household and the geopolitical fear of the era, and began to develop the intellectual framework that would eventually produce his films. He did not know yet that he would make films. He did not know yet that film existed as a medium available to him. What he knew was that fear was interesting. It was interesting because it was everywhere and because no one seemed to want to talk about it honestly. The church talked about fear as a tool of salvation. The government talked about fear as a tool of preparedness. No one talked about fear as a thing in itself, as an experience with its own texture, its own logic, its own capacity to reveal truths about the people who felt it. That conversation, when it came, would be conducted not in a classroom or a pulpit but on a screen, in the dark, in a room full of strangers. But that was years away.

For now, he was a boy in Cleveland, reading books in a house where the television was watched with suspicion and the cinema was treated as a temple of sin. He was smart. He was quiet. He was obedient. And he was paying attention to everything.

The public school system of Cleveland in the late 1940s and 1950s was adequate but unremarkable, a system designed to produce workers for the factories that ringed the city, not to cultivate the kind of intellectual ambition that was stirring in Wesley Craven. He passed through the Cleveland public schools without leaving much of a mark on them, or they on him. Whatever formal instruction those schools provided, the decisive education of his childhood happened elsewhere, at home and at church, in the fundamentalist Baptist world that governed every hour outside the classroom and that treated the life of the mind as a danger to be managed rather than a capacity to be developed.

He was a good student, consistently near the top of his class, and his teachers recognised his intelligence without quite knowing what to do with it. In a different household, he might have been encouraged toward one of the professions that ambitious Cleveland families aspired to: law, medicine, engineering. In the Craven household, the trajectory was different. Caroline Craven's ambitions for her children were spiritual, not professional. The best thing a young man could do with his life, in her understanding, was to serve God, and the most direct way to serve God was to study scripture and prepare for ministry.

Wesley did not resist this trajectory. He had not yet developed the capacity for resistance, or perhaps more accurately, he had not yet developed the awareness that resistance was possible. The household's authority was total, and its logic was circular in the way that fundamentalist logic is always circular: the rules exist because God requires them, and God requires them because they are in the Bible, and the Bible is true because it is the word of God. To question any element of this system is to question the entire system, and to question the entire system is to invite damnation. For a young man raised in this environment, the cost of doubt was not social disapproval; it was eternal suffering. The stakes were, quite literally, infinite.

So Wesley Craven prepared for a life of service. He studied. He attended church. He participated in the rituals and rhythms of Baptist life with the earnestness of a young man who had been told that his immortal soul depended on his compliance. And beneath the surface of that compliance, in a place he could not yet access or name, the questions were accumulating. They would not be answered for years. They would not be fully articulated for decades. But they were there, building pressure in the silence of a house on Castlewood Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, in the years when America was teaching itself to be afraid of the future and a boy was learning, without knowing he was learning, to be the man who would make the nightmares visible.

Wesley's path forward was, in one sense, already determined. He would go to a Christian college. He would study the subjects that a Baptist household considered appropriate. He would remain within the orbit of the faith that had influenced him. But in another sense, the sense that matters biographically, nothing was determined at all. The boy who left Cleveland for Wheaton College in 1957 was carrying with him a set of observations, sensitivities, and unanswered questions that would, over the next fifteen years, transform him into someone his mother would barely recognise. The professor who became a filmmaker. The Baptist who became a horror auteur. The obedient son who made The Last House on the Left.

All of that was ahead. For now, in the house on Castlewood Avenue, the rules held. The television was monitored. The movies were forbidden. And the boy read his books, and watched the world through the window, and waited, though he did not know he was waiting, for the door to open.