Wes Craven Quotes

I was anathema in polite society after I made ‘Last House.’ People literally would grab their children and run from the room.

I didn’t see many films until I was in college teaching.

In high school, we would give away rulers to our friends that said, ‘Jesus loves you.’ I couldn’t put together the concept that Jesus loves you, but if you don’t love him back, you’ll burn in hell forever. I worried, ‘I’m rejecting the Holy Spirit, so I’m definitely going to burn in hell.’

How can you have ‘Scream’ without Ghostface? It’s like ‘Friday the 13th’ without Jason.

A friend introduced me to Bob Shaye. He was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He was a Fulbright scholar, an excellent chef, and very knowledgeable about the arts.

I didn’t even know what a horror film was. I kind of made it up as I went along.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was so important because it was such adult film-making – to see something that dealt with such an important issue and had such an enlightened outlook on the world.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

There will always be times where you think, ‘What went wrong? Why wasn’t that one more popular?’ You can’t always figure that out, especially if you think you’ve done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, ‘My Soul to Take,’ I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot.

The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

I’m the kind of director, at any given moment, an idea occurs to me, I’ll just do it.

In ‘Scream,’ there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.

‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ wasn’t that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. ‘Scream’ didn’t have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up.

Great horror films don’t win Academy Awards.

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn’t matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

Within the structure of ‘Scream 4,’ there is the film within a film, but that’s been part of the ‘Scream’ franchise since ‘Scream 2,’ when you had the ‘Stab’ franchise.

Everybody’s making horror films and, to me, not especially well.

I was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I’ve come to terms with it.

Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn’t the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn’t seen anybody else.

I couldn’t find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.

I think I wrote the first draft of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ in ’79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.

My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was ‘Music of the Heart’ with Meryl Streep.

A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren’t so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?

A businessman can be as military as any politician.

Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.

When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.

Whenever I go to have a meeting at Universal, the security guard just leaps to his feet and comes over, bumps my hand, and says, ‘Thank you! Thank you – I love your films!’

When you do a film like ‘My Soul to Take,’ and people think it sucks, that hurts. We put a lot of work into it, and it’s a good film, but you go on.

I came from a very strict background.

I like to think I’m making films in the film business where movies are making enough numbers for the studios to let me keep working, but you also want those films to have content that makes you proud you made the film. That’s not easy, but it’s a fun puzzle to figure out.

I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don’t take responsibility for other people’s work, frankly. It’s bad enough taking responsibility for my own.

The whole business is changing dramatically, and the way fans follow and participate in movies, and make their own movies to emulate those movies, is profoundly different.

I’ve experienced a great deal of, you know, ostracism from the making of films.

You have to be aware of what the audience’s expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren’t looking.

The ‘Scream’ series is unique in that it’s an ongoing murder mystery, even though it’s a different killer, so if you know who that killer is, then half of the fun of the movie is gone.