Wes Craven’s 10 Most Iconic Movies

When Wes Craven passed away in 2015, horror cinema lost one of its definitive legends. With a filmography that spanned just under 40 years, he gifted scary movie fans with several masterpieces and a litany of other cult classics, underappreciated gems, and even a top-tier sequel or two. Impressively enough, he also had ambitions to expand out of horror, most notably when he directed Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart. And Streep wasn’t the only ultra-talented performer eager to be directed by the legendary Craven, as he also worked with Bill Pullman, Ving Rhames, Eddie Murphy, Timothy Olyphant, Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Christina Ricci, Sharon Stone, and Ernest Borgnine.

Just missing the cut of Craven’s classics were Shocker, the preposterous Deadly Friend (which was essentially taken away from Craven, who intended it to be appropriate for kids as much as adults), the slightly underrated Scream 3, Scream 4, and Cursed (another one taken away from the director). From The Hills Have Eyes to Red Eye, these are the best and most notable films of Wes Craven’s career.

The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven’s directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, follows teen friends Mari and Phyllis as they leave their rural neighborhood to see a concert in the city. En route, they decide to buy some drugs for the evening, but instead find themselves tormented by four escaped convicts.

Has 1972’s The Last House on the Left aged particularly well? Surely not. Is it still a hair-raising and impressive directorial debut? Absolutely. The sexual assault shown in great detail is almost impossible to watch, but there’s also some guts in showing the victim’s parents get bloody revenge on the accosters. Sometimes Last House can come across as a standard exploitation film, but there are flashes of brilliance that help elevate it and make it a genuinely noteworthy horror film.

Stream The Last House on the Left on MGM+.

The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes follows the Carter family, including patriarch Bob, matriarch Ethel, their children Bobby, Brenda, and Lynne, as well as Lynne’s husband Doug and their baby, Catherine. They’re traveling cross country with the goal of vacationing in San Diego, but thanks to a family of savage cannibals, they only make it to Nevada.

Craven’s sophomore film is a little more well-rounded and elaborately constructed than Last House, but it still has the grim, grisly edge that made for a trademark in his early works. It never feels like a studio film so much as it feels like a nightmare that has captured the audience and incorporated them, not unlike The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There’s another assault scene here that is difficult to stomach, but the viewing experience for The Hills Have Eyes is altogether far more palatable than Last House. It still feels real, which is effective, just like its subtle humorous commentary on morality in America.

Stream The Hills Have Eyes on MGM+.

Deadly Blessing

Deadly Blessing is somewhat often overlooked when it comes to Craven’s early films. Perhaps this is mostly because it was sandwiched between The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s a more-than-worthy and fairly ambitious addition to his filmography. The narrative takes place on the border of two distinct communities, one contemporary and one a restrictive Hittite community. Tensions start to boil over when a series of murders occur, primarily targeting the latter group.

It’s pretty rare that a movie of any genre takes a look at the Hittite community, but that’s exactly what Deadly Blessing does. It never pokes fun at their chosen antiquated ways, but it does find subtle ways to incorporate those lifestyle choices in creepy ways (especially when it comes to Ernest Borgnine’s creepy and commanding performance). Toss in a young Sharon Stone, a genuinely surprising twist, and a gut-punch of an ending and it’s not surprising Deadly Blessing has seen its reputation slowly rise as the years have progressed.

Rent or Buy Deadly Blessing on Prime Video.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Even including Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the first movie that comes to most Craven fans’ minds when they hear or read his name. And for good reason, as it’s a wildly inventive and genuinely frightening masterpiece. The movie tells the story of four teens as they come to the realization they’ve been dreaming of the same razor-handed man, and most of them don’t live to tell the tale, as Freddy Krueger is exacting his revenge against the teens of Springwood, Ohio.

What Craven and his collaborators were able to pull off with a limited budget was and remains jaw-dropping. The spinning room used for Tina Gray and Glen Lantz’s death scenes was put to great use, resulting in two of the definitive scenes in a slasher film from the ’80s or otherwise. But what’s even better about A Nightmare on Elm Street is that it functions as more than a slasher film: it’s also a supernatural thriller with a brain. With an engrossing narrative and a star-making turn from Robert Englund, it’s one of Craven’s two best movies.

Rent or Buy A Nightmare on Elm Street on Amazon Prime Video.

The Serpent and the Rainbow

Even after the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven struggled for a few years. By his own admission, he made the dreadful The Hills Have Eyes Part II just to pay bills. Then, to make matters worse, his first intended-to-be-child-appropriate movie, Deadly Friend, was required by the studio to go through extensive re-shoots to add kill scenes so as to give disappointed test audiences more of what they’d grown to expect from the director. That said, at least those reshoots gave cinema history a scene where the late, great Anne Ramsey (The Goonies) has her head blown up by a thrown basketball.

His next film was a return to form, both in regard to how he intended it to be a horror flick and how it was received by critics and audiences. Starring Bill Pullman as a Harvard anthropologist researching an alleged zombification brew in Haiti, it’s not quite standard Craven stuff and it’s not scare-a-minute, but that’s what helps The Serpent and the Rainbow stand out as so special.

Rent or Buy The Serpent and the Rainbow on Amazon Prime Video.

The People Under the Stairs

A financially successful but still underappreciated minor classic, The People Under the Stairs showed that Craven hadn’t lost his edge over other horror auteurs as the ’80s ended and the ’90s began. It’s also an admirable example of Black representation in studio cinema. The story follows a young boy, nicknamed “Fool,” and two adult thieves as they enter the wrong house. Specifically, the Robeson residence, where just behind the walls are dozens of kidnapped children.

Whereas his previous film, Shocker, tried far too hard to replicate the story beats and, of course, the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs stands entirely on its own in the director’s filmography. It does many things that could have blown up in Craven’s face but, instead, are pulled off without a hitch, from having a little boy as the protagonist to having two over-the-top incestuous landlords as the antagonists. Much of the impact is due to the strength of the performances by Brandon Adams and the duo of Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, but it’s also a film that displays Craven’s proficiency when it came to pacing and building tension.

Rent or Buy The People Under the Stairs on Amazon Prime Video.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

It may not be as frightening as the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is every bit as creative, just in a different way. It’s a movie that brings Freddy Krueger into the real world (where he again contends with a familiar face), and while it isn’t Craven’s meta masterwork it shows that he had a pretty firm grasp on that type of storytelling before it became remotely popularized.

To New Nightmare‘s credit, it’s far better than the fifth and sixth films, but it’s also a little too ambitious for its own good. Even still, while it can be short on scares, New Nightmare was proof positive that not only had Craven’s talent remained steady, but it had also grown.

Rent or Buy Wes Craven’s New Nightmare on Prime Video.

[RELATED: The Top 10 Slasher Movie Sequels, Ranked]

Scream

It’s pretty impressive that Craven directed not one but two of the absolute best horror films of all time. That alone put him in league with Halloween and The Thing director John Carpenter. And like with those two Carpenter films, it’s truly difficult to say which is better, A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream. Both a product of its time and timeless, Scream is engrossing from the first frame to the last. The story takes place over the course of just three days, when a group of teens receive ominous, horror movie trivia-focused phone calls that ultimately end in their deaths.

Scream is one of those projects where everything functions just as it should. And while Craven was certainly the architect whose tools and expertise kept the enterprise from crumbling in on itself, much credit is also due to the script by Kevin Williamson and the casting department. From the lead trio of Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox to supporting work from Drew Barrymore, Rose McGowan, and Jamie Kennedy (not to mention the villainous performances by Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard), everyone who should have been in Scream is in Scream.

Stream Scream on Max.

Scream 2

Scream 2 is nothing short of a hat trick. Almost identically received both in terms of critical and commercial appreciation, it’s a successful sequel on all fronts. And, considering the fact that a script leak really threw a wrench in things, it’s nothing short of a cinematic miracle. The plot again follows Sidney Prescott, now in college and once more finding herself wrapped up in a string of murders at the hands of one or more people in Ghostface costumes.

If one were to ask which of the first two Scream films is more iconic, it’s either a very slight edge for the first or an even split. That’s quite the compliment for a slasher sequel, especially one that was following a ’90s movie that opens with the introduction and death of a character played by Drew Barrymore. But with a similarly strong opening, this time in a movie theater, and other stand-out moments e.g. the stabbing of Dewey as Gail helplessly bangs on soundproof glass, the stalking and murder of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Cici Cooper, and the daytime death of Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks, it’s a sequel that meets its predecessor at its impressive level.

Stream Scream 2 on Max

Red Eye

Once the 2000s rolled around, fans worried that Craven had perhaps started to slip. But Scream 3 was toned down because of Columbine and Cursed was outright taken away from Craven by the Weinsteins. The best argument for Craven never having lost his directorial oomph is the movie that came out the same year as Cursed: the thriller Red Eye. The narrative focuses on a small cast of characters, primarily hotel manager Lisa Reisert, who is sitting on a plane next to Jackson Rippner, a seemingly nice guy who turns out to be an assassin hoping to use Reisert to accomplish his mission: kill the head of Homeland Security.

Starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, and Brian Cox, it’s one of the aughts’ best nail-biters, and while it has its horror elements, it’s also quite a bit out of Craven’s genre wheelhouse. It stands as the director’s final financial success, with the subsequent My Soul to Take and, unfortunately, Scream 4 both bombing.

Watch Red Eye on Paramount+.