Wes Craven Quotations

Those are the only two films I've made in which I have significant ownership. So you can make a deal where a studio releases your film but doesn't have final cut. You have a lot of power that you wouldn't have otherwise.

I just feel it takes just one picture where it becomes common knowledge that Craven can do other things,

She has a quality that is missing in a lot of American girls now ...

I've seen the final cut and it's a lot of fun, ... It actually turned out pretty well and it ended up with everybody thinking, 'By God, John really knows what he's doing.' He pulled it off. Absolutely. He did a real, real good job.

There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.

Something like Nightmare On Elm Street, to me, was kind of an examination of levels of consciousness and the pain of facing the truth, and how easy it is to fall asleep, or want to fall asleep.

I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom.

I did have the resource of having taught Greek mythology and the history of Western civilization, and you can go back into the plays of Aeschylus and follow what happens when people seek revenge, and there are people plucking their eyes out. And Greek mythology is filled with all kinds of monsters and whatnot.

[I was] feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material.

I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one [film], because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in.