Why Wes Craven is the greatest horror movie director of all time, according to science
The reason why horror has always been and always will be one of cinema’s most popular genres is a simple one: people love getting scared shitless.
Viewers have always turned to cinema for thrills, spills, and emotion, and there are few easier ways to trigger a response than terrifying the life out of them. Whether slasher, splatter, supernatural, demonic, comedic, atmospheric, or disturbing, audiences will always want more.
Countless directors have planted their flag in horror and stayed there for the majority of their careers, while others have started life peddling frights to the masses before segueing into new genres and bigger budgets. Horror is arguably the industry’s most fertile proving ground, but it takes a true master of the macabre to become known as one of the all-time greats.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper, Night of the Living Dead creator and zombie godfather George A Romero, The Evil Dead‘s Sam Raimi, the phantasmagorical Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Eli Roth, James Wan, Hideo Nakata, William Castle, and Mario Bava are just some of the names who’ve delivered spine-tingling tales on a regular basis, but none of them are among the all-time greats. According to science, at least.
It’s not a popularity contest, and the debate over which horror director can be called the best is a completely open-ended one, so the boffins instead focused on the data. Poring through the numbers, researchers from the University of Turin examined a sample size of 20,000 directors and almost 50,000 films to determine their findings based on how many movies a filmmaker helmed in the genre, how much critical acclaim it received, how it fared in user-generated online reviews, and the influence it exerted over other pictures in the years following its release.
As a result, it was decreed that Wes Craven is the single greatest horror director of all time. Considering he single-handedly reinvented the medium with Scream in the mid-1990s, ushered in the age of the self-referential antagonist a decade previously with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and was at the forefront of the ‘Video Nasty’ outrage with The Last House on the Left, it seems fair.
Second place went to David Cronenberg, who doesn’t consider himself a purveyor of big-screen horror despite helming countless horror flicks like The Fly, The Brood, and Scanners, so it’s best that nobody tells him about the science. Hammer Films legend Terence Fisher directed the iconic production company’s Dracula, The Mummy, and The Curse of the Werewolf and takes third place, with fourth going to the inimitable John Carpenter, and Argento’s mentor Lucio Fulci rounds out the five titans of terror.
All of them are worthy of the horror Hall of Fame, but Craven was named by no less of an authority than the scientific community as the finest filmmaker horror has ever had to offer.
