Wes Craven once named his 10 favourite horror movies of all time
Horror cinema has been transformed over the years by a number of visionary filmmakers, from the grandfather of the zombie movie George A. Romero, to the contemporary greatness of Ari Aster, but, arguably, no director has done more for the genre than Wes Craven. Operating in the genre from 1972-2011, Craven revolutionised horror several times, inspiring the cannibal subgenre with The Hills Have Eyes in 1977 before improving slasher cinema with the arrival of Freddy Krueger in 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street.
As if he hadn’t proved himself in the world of horror cinema already, decades after he’d delivered some of his finest works, he would release a film that essentially re-evaluated the slasher sub-genre he helped to populate. 1996’s Scream was an ingenious horror movie that picked apart the very makeup of the genre, establishing Craven as a mastermind and sagacious overseer of all things gory and terrifying.
So, when the director revealed to fans his ten favourite horror movies of all time through an interview with The Daily Beast, fans across the world rightfully sat up to listen.
Including a number of classics, such as James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and F. W. Murnau’s iconic vampire film Nosferatu, which is soon to be getting a remake from Robert Eggers, Craven’s list is a delectable feast of guttural terror. With no picks past the 1970s, it’s clear that the filmmaker preferred the scares of classic genre flicks rather than the modern CGI-heavy offerings.
One of his most intriguing picks was the inclusion of the Ingmar Bergman crime flick, The Virgin Spring, which undoubtedly contains elements of horror. “The basic plot of The Virgin Spring, which was lifted off a Medieval tale, became the framework for The Last House on the Left,” Craven told the publication, “I found that really a stunning thing to be depicted in a movie where you have what in an American movie would be justifiable revenge, but at the end seeing how revenge can itself be a murder of the innocence of the victims, how they can transcend from being normal people to being victims to being murderers themselves. That was fascinating to me”.
Elsewhere, another interesting pick was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a classic mystery flick that many people wouldn’t consider a horror film at all. Speaking about his choice, he stated: “It is a very masterfully constructed, gorgeously photographed, and almost surreal film of impending threat and doom…these were the films that really inspired me to take the liberty of even what I did in Nightmare on Elm Street, where I could go into these macabre visions in a way that was permitted by the very nature of the film itself”.
Take a look at the full list of Craven’s all-time favourite horror movies below, which includes the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.
Wes Craven’s favourite horror movies
- The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)
- Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
- Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
- Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
- Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
- Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
- The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)
- War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953)
