The Wes Craven movie Stephen King calls a “crapfest”
Due to the prolific nature of his output and the wide-ranging appeal of his works, Stephen King is considered by many to be one of the most influential figures in the landscape of contemporary horror. In addition to the numerous best-selling books that have captured and terrified fans all over the world, King’s unique creations have also been turned into iconic adaptations that have cemented his extensive legacy in popular culture.
While King’s oeuvre is enough to justify his authority over the genre, the writer has also worked as a columnist and has written about music, films and TV shows that have influenced modern cultural frameworks. In recent years, King has mostly posted his opinions on social media platforms like Twitter, but that wasn’t always the case. For a while, the revered author wrote regular pieces for Entertainment Weekly about art and culture.
In one of those pieces, King denounced a film by another one of horror’s masters: Wes Craven. While noting down his observations about the greatest films of 2009, King highlighted the brilliance of Dennis Iliadis’ remake of The Last House on the Left. The 1972 original was Craven’s directorial debut, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Although it has become a cult classic now, The Last House on the Left put a dent in Craven’s reputation because of its explicit nature.
“We approached Last House as a story that already existed,” Craven explained. “I saw it in Bergman’s film, and Bergman saw it in a book-tale in a minstrel song that had been around in his country for several hundred years. So we thought that here’s a great story that has lasted for centuries, the basic core of it. An innocent girl and a more worldly-wise girl go off, and they go off on…a pilgrimage, basically, in the original tale and encounter terrible people who do terrible things and then by accident end up in the house of the parents.”
Initially, audiences and critics were disturbed by Craven’s sense of humour in the film and the use of sexual violence. Over the years, many horror fans have re-evaluated it as a subversive addition to the corpus of ’70s horror. Despite this, King maintained that the remake was far superior and called Craven’s debut a “crapfest”. He wrote: “Easily the most brilliant remake of the decade, and not just because the 1972 original was such a crapfest.”
“This beautifully photographed — but hard to watch — movie is the standard by which all horror/suspense films should be judged,” King added. “The acting is superior (Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul is especially fine), the story makes sense, and, most importantly, Last House‘s moral compass points to true north. We don’t want these creeps back for six or eight sequels; they are monsters, and we want them dead. This film is on par with The Silence of the Lambs.”
