Wes Craven is an avid birdwatcher, enjoys doing The New York Times crossword puzzle every day and watches after the fish, cats and dog that he and his wife own.

‘He’s kind, gentle, witty and funny. … He’s not scary at all, at least not to me,’ said his wife, Disney executive Iya Labunka.

Craven even loves a good romantic comedy, according to the man himself. He is currently working on raising money for his own, ‘Susan’s Last Letter,’ in which a widower receives letters from his dead wife encouraging him to find new love.

The picture stands in contrast with the grim brutality and horror of Craven’s previous creations, including Freddy Kruger, the frequent guest-start of childhood nightmares from ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ and the ‘Scream’ trilogy.

‘The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself,’ Craven said in an interview.

Craven spoke to a Hendricks Chapel audience, which didn’t seem as much scared as enthralled by the horror god, Sunday at 5 p.m., care of University Union Speakers, in the year’s last UU Speakers event.

‘OK, you’re the competition, so I’m going to tell you all the wrong things,’ Craven said after asking how many film majors were in the house. ‘You’re going to put me out of work.’

The director, writer and producer has scared audiences for over 30 years, ever since falling into the role as a definitive leader of the horror genre with his first film, ‘The Last House on the Left.’

The world of Freddy Kruger, nightmares, rapes and murders, was not the one Craven always imagined for himself, he explained.

After receiving his master’ degree in writing and philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, Craven taught humanities at Clarkson College in Potsdam – a revelation met with laughter from the audience.

‘They’re still trying to explain that at the humanities department,’ he said, laughing himself.

While at Clarkson, the professor-turned-director began selling old text books from his shelves to buy a 15mm camera to shoot and edit a film with the college’s film society. When administrators pressed him to pursue a Ph.D. or not return the following semester to teach, Craven simply quit.

Though he taught high school English for a few years, Craven ultimately moved to New York and took a job as a messenger, earning only $65 a week from a post-production company.

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

That foot ultimately led to a request from the company’s owner and friend, Sean Cunningham, to write and direct a horror film. The result was ‘The Last house on the Left,’ which tested the boundaries of horror and violence.

The decensoring of violence – showing rapes, murders and blood – paralleled the stories and the images instantaneously coming from the Vietnam battlefields, Craven said. All his works have a political or sociological basis. The films raise questions of good and evil, their existence within the same people, and ethical questions, Craven said.

Craven’s newest film, ‘Red Eye,’ narrates an essentially terrorist act. A woman stuck on a flight with a seemingly-polite man ends up stuck in the middle of an assassination of a powerful man, and must help one of the operatives or her own father will be killed.

‘You never stop thinking about these issues; that’s what keeps you up at night,’ he said. ‘Life and death, morality, if you can find a path that is somehow more elevated … ‘

Horror films are often criticized because they are painful realities we often do not want to see happen to ourselves or see in ourselves, Craven said. He doesn’t think people go to these films to get scared – they do it to see their pre-existing fears crafted into a story.

Creating horror films is the careful balance between the blood, gore and the confrontation of fears, Craven said.

‘You can scare the bejesus out of them, but you can still make them think,’ he said.

This call to contemplation made Syracuse resident Ken Jackson II, a Craven devotee after he first saw ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ with friends. Jackson gave Craven his own standing ovation when the director entered.

‘It was definitely something where some of us were scared and some of us were intrigued,’ Jackson said.

While in New York recently to see ‘Julius Caesar,’ Craven said he noticed that even in the play, the weight of the reality of the blood shocked and quieted Caesar’s giddy assassins, who had killed him in spite of his armies and power.

The loss of innocence, the challenges of what happens to good people put in evil situations, the conflict between the civilized and the wild, cynicism and race are all challenged in his films, forcing those who watch to question society and the very question of evil.

‘There is something in horror and in the confrontation of fear that is extremely beneficial,’ Craven said. ‘Everything in life that’s worth having is preceded by fear.’

Published on April 17, 2005 at 12:00 pm