The 8 Best Wes Craven Movies Ranked
Wes Craven is gone but not forgotten. The soft-spoken horror auteur began his career as an English teacher at Westminster College in the 1960s. But in 1972, he burst onto the film scene with the low-budget shocker "The Last House on the Left." The film's disturbing subject matter alienated many viewers and critics, although some awarded the pic praise. Roger Ebert wrote: "Wes Craven's direction never lets us out from under almost unbearable dramatic tension." Craven found the overall experience negative and wanted to move away from horror movies. However, Craven's scripts outside the horror genre never garnered much interest, and so he returned to the world of horror with 1977's "The Hills Have Eyes." Now firmly established as a horror filmmaker, Craven would continue with the genre for the rest of his career (with two notable exceptions: the mostly forgotten 1999 Meryl Streep movie "Music of the Heart," and a segment in the 2006 anthology film "Paris, je t'aime"). Craven died in 2015, but his legacy lives on. Below, we've ranked 8 of the filmmaker's best movies.
8. Red Eye
"Red Eye" might be seen as one of Wes Craven's lesser entries, so much so that I'm guessing some folks will question why it's on this list while other titles are not. But here's the thing: "Red Eye" is a sturdy, effective mid-budget thriller, the type we don't get anymore. And I miss that! I miss these types of movies. While this film can't quite be classified as "horror," Craven does a bang-up job juggling the tension. In "Red Eye," the always-wonderful Rachel McAdams plays a hotel manager on a flight to Miami. The passenger next to her, played by Cillian Murphy and his startling blue eyes, ends up being a creepy terrorist who ropes McAdams' character into his plot to assassinate the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. Oh yeah, I should also mention that Murphy's character here is named Jackson Rippner. What's not to love?
7. The Serpent and the Rainbow
"The Serpent and the Rainbow" feels like one of Craven's forgotten movies — seriously, when was the last time anyone talked about this one? But it's the perfect movie in his catalog to rediscover. Based very, very, very loosely on a non-fiction book, the film follows a Harvard anthropologist (Bill Pullman) who heads to Haiti to investigate claims of zombies. And we're not talking about the shambling, brain-eating zombies made famous by George Romero and countless other zombie-based media; these are the "classic" Hatiain zombies — people who were thought to be dead only to be revived via religious rituals. The "zombies" here are conjured up via hallucinogenic drugs, which allows Craven to create some genuinely wild visuals — at one point, a man rips his head off and then throws it at Bill Pullman! That's cinema.
6. The Hills Have Eyes
"The Last House on the Left" was Craven's debut (more on that in a moment), but it was his second feature "The Hills Have Eyes" that solidified him as a bonafide horror filmmaker. In this nasty piece of work, a happy, normal suburban family is targeted by sadistic cannibals in the Nevada desert. Reviews for "The Hills Have Eyes" were a bit more positive than the reactions Craven got for "Last House," and the pic would end up spawning sequels and remakes. While the film's set-up is simple, Craven, ever the academic, packs in a wealth of meaning and subversive themes into the narrative, resulting in a gruesome finale in which the hunters become the hunted — as if the director is saying that any of us can become bloodthirsty savages if we're pushed too far.
5. The Last House on the Left
A controversial opinion: "The Last House on the Left" is a little uneven! The film shows its age, and Craven also added a pair of comic relief cops (complete with their own wacky theme music) that stick out like sore thumbs. But the influence of "Last House" cannot be denied. What started off as a script for a hardcore porn film morphed into a brutal revenge thriller, telling the story of a gang of thugs who brutally murder two girls. As fate would have it, the killers end up seeking shelter at the very home of the parents of one of their victims. And when the parents find out the truth, they enact bloody revenge. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," "The Last House on the Left" is the film that introduced Craven to the world, almost instantly making him a horror icon.
4. The People Under the Stairs
Craven took out the era of Ronald Reagan with his utterly bonkers "The People Under the Stairs." A sly commentary on gentrification and other evils of the Reagan era, the film even has two villains who are clearly modeled on Reagan and his wife Nancy. And just to twist the knife in further, Craven makes them utter freaks who don gimp suits and lock people up in their basement. It's one of the wildest movies the filmmaker ever made, and it's earned its place as a cult classic — it's also destined for a remake from Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions. While I'm curious to see how the remake shakes out, I have a feeling that nothing will ever measure up to the gonzo energy of the original. They don't make 'em like this anymore.
3. Scream
The horror genre was in a bit of a downswing in the 1990s (although there were still gems to be found if you knew where to look), and then came Wes Crven's "Scream." The 1996 meta-slasher penned by Kevin Williamson became a sleeper hit and helped revitalize the genre in a big, big way. Suddenly, horror was hot again! And all these years later, after all the sequels and rip-offs, "Scream" is better than ever. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the film is a legit masterpiece of the genre, and the fact that it's not even number one on this list is a testament to how much influence Craven had over horror during his career. Like other slasher movies before it, "Scream" follows a group of teens targeted by a masked killer. The twist, though, is that unlike other standard slasher movie victims, the kids here are well aware of the horror genre, and can therefore follow a set of rules to try to survive. It's a brilliant idea brilliantly executed.
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street
While "The Last House on the Left" was Craven's debut, it was "A Nightmare on Elm Street" that truly solidified him as a master of horror. One of the most influential horror movies of all time, Craven's slasher pic introduced the world to Freddy Krueger, a serial killer who stalks teens in their dreams. While Freddy would be watered-down and cartoon-ified by a seemingly endless barrage of sequels, the original is a scary, effective, highly inventive film that still plays like gangbusters. It also made Craven a blockbuster filmmaker — the pic was shot for just $1.1 million and hauled in over $57 million worldwide in 1984, a feat that simply didn't happen for horror movies back then. As a result, Freddy became a horror icon and a merchandising machine.
1. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
Okay, okay, I fully expect this to be controversial, but here we are — with "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" at number 1. But I genuinely believe this is Craven at the height of his creative powers. Before "Scream," the filmmaker dove into the world of meta-horror with this "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequel that blew up the normal timeline. Rather than craft a standard sequel, Craven set his film in the "real" world, where cast members from the original "Nightmare" movie find themselves targeted by Freddy. But this is a different Freddy than the one from the films; he's an ancient, seemingly eternal force of evil. It's a brilliant twist on the franchise and the genre, and Craven wasn't above giving himself a cameo (playing himself).