Wes Craven’s Nightmare Faith

Over centuries, we are told, fire-and-brimstone preachers have perfected the art of exploiting our darkest fears—damnation, hell, torture, exposure, guilt, transmission—to pack the house and fill the coffers. Some of these hucksters may be more obviously fraudulent than others (Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry has nothing on James Joyce’s Fr. Arnall in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but in the end all these churchmen are out to turn a profit on darkness, bafflement, and hunger.

If this is so, it is hard to think of a better exemplar of the type than filmmaker Wes Craven, who died earlier this week at age 76. Raised in a conservative Baptist home and educated at Wheaton College, he would go on to make millions by putting the fear of—well, something—into viewers of movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream series.

Though Craven was vocal about his rejection of the faith he had been raised in, he was also always ready to acknowledge its influence on his work. The nightmares he brought to the big screen were based on the visions of hell in sermons he heard at his parents’ fundamentalist Baptist church. Yet Craven could never bring himself to believe—or at least not to believe in Jesus.

“Hell was more believable than believing in Jesus, oddly enough. If you believed in Jesus, there was supposed to be an immediate presence and knowledge of him. Whereas with hell, you wouldn’t know about it until you were dead,” Craven told biographer John Wooley.

Unlike the many apostates that leave Christianity with a vague notion that God is nice and people ought to be, too, Craven held on to the darker parts of the faith. Like the anti-hero of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, he felt that “Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.” He would tell his Wooley that these dark visions “had an immense impact on every facet of my life.”

It shows. In his breakthrough film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, religious imagery and moral themes combine to form a drama of endangered souls. Two teens have sex and are visited with death. Two others don’t when the girl refuses, but the boy, a tiny Johnny Depp, poutily says, “morality sucks.” Too true: in fact, it sucks him into a pit and spits him up in a stream of blood. (Not to worry: violent death did little to slow Depp’s career.) Evil stalks the film’s world, but grace is nowhere to be seen. The one young character who survives does so with no help from others. The first time she sees the killer, she offers up a prayer: “Please, God . . .” The killer’s reply (and we may trust that it is Craven’s as well) is to name the violence she fears: “This is God.”

Homes without fathers face spiritual attack; sins of the parents visit the children; illicit sex tends toward death; evil spirits cling to evil objects; Catholic knickknacks do not avail; the bottle lets you down; grace is nothing, effort all: It’s an almost perfect distillation of the teaching of Bill Gothard, the rigorist preacher and fellow Wheaton alumnus who was filling stadiums at the same time Craven was packing theaters.

Craven’s films changed over time, perhaps because his beliefs did. He continued to find success, most notably through the Scream franchise, but the outright irony of those films—their cynicism not just about the operations of grace but also about the reality of evil—compromised them. Was horror scary or funny? Could death be taken seriously or not? One cannot make films about evil if one has ceased really to believe in it, and Craven’s winking at the mechanics of his genre seem to indicate a further attenuation of belief. This second loss of faith led, as David Thomson noted to “a frenzied, disdainful redoubling of nastiness because no one really believes in it.” If in the end Craven’s basically liberal outlook overwhelmed a more conservative imagination, at least the contest between the two gave us a few good scares.