SLASH : FLYING HIGH WITH A SULTAN OF SLASH

When a visitor arrived at horror film maker Wes Craven’s house the other day, it seemed totally appropriate that the first of his pets to offer a greeting was a black cat.

Craven is the Edgar Allan Poe of the American cinema, the director of such blood-drenched shockers as “The Last House on the Left,” “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Swamp Thing.” His biggest hit, “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which grossed more than $20 million in its opening run this winter, makes its home video debut this week with an initial order of 100,000 copies, making it one of the year’s few “platinum” videos.

With their strange brew of gore, sex and unsettlingly surreal images, Craven’s films have provoked heated critical debates, with one critic lambasting them as “sleazy slasher pictures,” the next reverently comparing “Last House” to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring.”

If horror buffs agree on one thing, it’s that Craven’s films aren’t for the squeamish. As a Washington Post reviewer recently noted, “If you laid all the styptic pencils in America end to end, you still couldn’t staunch the flow of blood in ‘Nightmare.’ ”

According to Craven, fisticuffs have frequently broken out in the midst of his films, with some audiences actually storming the projection booth. On the other hand, when “Nightmare” was shown here earlier this month, several fans greeted a particularly bloody scene with the chant, “Bring on the buckets!”

You may be outraged, disturbed or fascinated, but no one leaves--or storms out--of a Craven film unmoved.

“There’s really nothing quite like a horror film audience,” explained Craven, a genial 45-year-old former humanities professor (and amateur pilot) who lives with his wife, Mimi, near the Santa Monica airport. “It’s almost as if you have all these carbon granules packed into a telephone receiver, with each granule transmitting the electricity to the next--the more people you have, the better it seems to work. I don’t think you’d want to see one of my movies by yourself, unless you’re someone like John Hinckley.

“My favorite audiences are the ones in New York, on 42nd Street. They’re probably the most discerning moviegoers of all--alert and opinionated, with no prejudices against the genre.”

Craven grinned. “And when they don’t like something, they let you know it--they talk to the screen; they throw things. Like Shakespeare said, ‘You have to get the groundlings as well as the court,’ so it’s nice to have the 42nd Street crowd on my side, as well as at least some of the critics.”

Witty and erudite, as much at home quoting Aeschylus on tragedy as in debating the MPAA rating board’s views on razor slashes, the bearded film maker seems an unlikely master of what he good-naturedly termed “the pituitary cinema.” Outfitted in a wool sweater, white painter’s pants and boat shoes, he looked as if he should be lecturing college kids on medieval romance, not killing them off in droves in his films.

Reared in a fundamentalist Baptist household--”my mother literally thought the world was created in six days”--Craven didn’t even see a real movie until he went away to college.

“We weren’t allowed to do much of anything--drink, smoke, play cards, have sex or go to the movies. I was the quirky kid who read books all the time, painted, wrote poetry. So when I began to find my own way, I was very separated from the entire family. You wouldn’t exactly call me a rebel, because I had a very strong religious streak, but there was zero dialogue between us. We couldn’t talk about anything.”

After getting a master’s in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, teaching at several colleges and even contemplating entering the Episcopal ministry, Craven eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a film editor before directing his first feature.

“It took a long time to purge myself of any organized attempts at figuring out the riddle of existence. Finally, I guess I came to an end of my Candidian search and realized that the best of all possible worlds was film making.”

Craven insisted that his films, despite their graphic gore, still have a strong moralistic point of view.

“I don’t just carve people up on screen,” he said. “You can’t solve everything with violence and revenge. You can go as far back as the Greek philosophers to see that the chain of revenge has to be stopped or it’ll go on forever. It’s obvious that the old-fashioned, John Wayne philosophy--that violence can cure your ills--doesn’t work anymore. You have to be like Nancy (the heroine of ‘Nightmare’), you have to turn away from the darkness or you’ll end up just as evil as what you’ve destroyed.”

In Craven’s latest film, the teen-age characters share the same nightmare--they’re all pursued by a shadowy, chilling figure whose arms have gloves rigged with razorlike steel claws. The real fright comes when the kids discover that their nightmare is no dream.

It’s no coincidence that the film’s most terrifying moments always unfold when the kids are at their most vulnerable, either in bed or in the bath. “Those are the most private places, where you’re alone, in an almost pristine state,” Craven said. “I think the real force of horror films has its roots in childhood--in your dreams and primal fears--when the parts of ourselves that we understand the least are the most involved.

“I remember when I was a kid, and my parents were going through a tough time before their divorce, that I had terrible nightmares. I’d lay awake, terrified not just of the nightmare I’d had but scared to even go back to sleep.

“When people go into a theater and they shut off the lights, it’s as if they’re entering the darkness of sleep and dreams. To me, a good horror film should be just that--a compelling dream, not just a catalogue of new ways to knock off teen-agers and show off your latest special effects.”

Unfortunately, not everyone always notices these subtle distinctions. Craven acknowledged that after “Last House” was released, he was treated as a “pariah” and was unable to work for more than four years.

Craven wagged his head. “I think a lot of people thought I was Charles Manson. I’d go meet people at the studios and you could see their faces get very strange. After they’d talked to me for a while, they’d admit that they’d expected to see a crazy man with wild eyes and long, straggly hair.

“I’d be at a dinner and when a friend would tell people what movie I’d made, they’d literally get up and walk out of the room. Let’s face it, it’s just not socially acceptable to make horror films.”

However, since the success of “Nightmare,” Craven has been able to broaden his cinematic scope, filming a quintet of coming “Twilight Zone” episodes, including several comic sequences. He’s also landed a development deal at Warner Bros. and is adapting the best seller “Flowers in the Attic,” scheduled to go into production as a feature this fall.

“I feel as if I’ve finally come out into the light,” he said. “For years, every script I’d get opened with a point-of-view shot of someone stalking a nubile teen-age girl. It got pretty dispiriting--’Hey, nubile girls hit the dust; call Wes Craven.’ Now I’m getting to work with established stars and use a lighter touch, instead of always directing someone with a knife in their hand.”