A Gallery of Craven Images

Horror director Wes Craven can remember when people got up and left dinner parties after learning who he was. After all, he was someone who made movies with titles like “Swamp Thing,” “Invitation to Hell” and “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

But the former college professor would tell anyone who stayed to listen that he really stumbled onto horror as the genre of opportunity and personally abhorred violence and gratuitous blood-letting. What interested him were myths and dreams. He had always wanted to do more than scare people.

Craven’s new film “Shocker,” a fable about a murderous TV repairman who is put to death in the electric chair only to be transformed by the voltage into something more terrifying, will hardly be mistaken for a romantic comedy, but neither is it as gruesome or simple-minded as the plot outline might suggest. To hear Craven talk about it, the film sounds scripted for a social studies class.

“It’s obviously a fantasy, but it has to do with my take on evil,” he said. “That if you use an essentially brutal device to end something, you’re simply perpetuating it.”

Horace Pinker, the villain of “Shocker,” played by Mitch Pileggi, manages, through a pact with the devil, to transmogrify himself into an electric current so that he eventually is able to come into homes through their television sets, entering and possessing his victims at will. “It’s a simple paradigm of the way evil can mutate and move through a culture, starting with a specific act and then entering the media,” the director said. “Now, I’m not going to say that to the kids, but they know it’s true. They recognize it when they see it.”

Craven, who it might be said looks nothing like the sound of his name, was born in 1939 in Cleveland and grew up in a fundamentalist home where movies of any kind were considered invitations to hell. Tall, open-faced and dressed Hollywood hip on a recent morning in Universal City, he said he is not at all uncomfortable working in a genre whose audience is composed largely of teen-agers.

“I have a natural affinity for teen-agers probably because I’m arrested in maturity myself. I’ve had kids, I’ve taught kids. Also over the 20 years that I’ve been making films, a generation has grown up that recognizes they’re more than slash-and-burn films.”

The same cannot be said for certain members of his family, notably his mother, who to this day has never seen one of his movies. “She’s never been in a theater,” he said.

When he began writing screenplays on the East Coast in the late 1960s, after suddenly quitting the academic world he had trained for at Johns Hopkins University, Craven fell back on the stories he knew best as a professor: the Greek myths. He found the Greek myths to be more than serviceable as models for horror films.

“That is essentially what they were: the horror films of their time. Odysseus goes into the cave and meets the Cyclops, Charybdis and all these monstrous things that represent elements of human experience, the descent into hell and coming back out. You just deal with those very primal, very basic human experiences.

“The remarkable thing about horror films is you can do anything you want with that format, from making a piece of crud to making something that can express a profound element of your world view. They are one of the modern myths, sort of like Joseph Campbell on acid.”

The world view offered in “Shocker” seems to have something to do with the insidious power of television, although the director, who also wrote the screenplay, insists this line of reasoning not be taken too far.

“I’m simply pointing out that television is a very powerful, omnipresent force in our lives. It is in a sense the cerebral network that is developing over the the surface of the planet as a manifestation of the next evolutionary step up in human intelligence. You can’t say it’s just a set, it’s just the tube. It’s a major event in human consciousness.”

Yet it is the power of dreams and our inadequate understanding of them that seems most to have preoccupied Craven throughout his 10 films, the best known example being his “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the popular 1985 thriller about a putrefying zombie who stalks teen-age girls through their dreams. The film introduced the character Freddy Krueger (along with his scalpel-bladed fingers) to the front ranks of horror heavies.

The scenario for “Nightmare” came to Craven after reading a series of news stories about the mysterious deaths of several Southeast Asian immigrants, all boys, in Orange County. The boys each reported experiencing nightmares so terrifying they couldn’t tell their parents or friends about them. Neither could they sleep, but eventually when each boy finally did go to sleep, he died--with no clear physiological explanation.

“I got the idea that the killer exists only in their nightmares. If they’re awake, they’re safe, but if they sleep, they enter his world, and he kills them in the dream. But they also die in real life.

“I don’t think of Horace Pinker or Freddy Krueger as real people. They are elements of the human psyche, and that’s what frightens me.”

Craven does not think of himself as the “Guru of Gore,” as he has occasionally been called. He believes he is “careful” about violence in his films.

“I try to depict it as real,” he said, “but I also try to show that violence is not a viable solution. My films are basically about survival rather than vanquishing.”

One of the most alarming sequences in “Shocker”--the scene he feels is the most effective in the film--is one in which Pileggi, as Pinker, bites off a prison guard’s fingers just before he is to be executed.

“Not because it was blood and guts and entrails everywhere, which it wasn’t. It was just the animal ferocity of it. That’s hard to come up with and hard to contain in your own mind. Because it is a real force, and you can feel it when you’re doing those scenes on the set. People get giddy or they get silent. Because it’s not a comfortable thing to be dealing with.”

And Craven looks to “a film like ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ Its very title reeks of exploitation and tawdriness. But the energy level attained in that film is incredible. And in a sense the sort of ferocious honesty of it is unapproached. When I watched it I was absolutely appalled and afraid. I felt like (director Tobe Hooper) was insane. I know when people watch my films they think the same thing.”