{"id":72154,"date":"2025-08-16T23:26:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T23:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/72154\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T23:26:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T23:26:10","slug":"the-movie-wes-craven-wanted-to-delete-from-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/72154\/","title":{"rendered":"The movie Wes Craven wanted to delete from history"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wes<\/p>\n

(Credit: Alamy)<\/p>\n

Sat 16 August 2025 16:45, UK <\/p>\n

By the late 1990s, horror was in desperate need of resurrecting, so Wes Craven<\/a> stepped up to the post and delivered one of the most beloved entries to the genre: Scream. <\/p>\n

While I\u2019d argue that Scream<\/a> is a lot funnier than it is scary, Craven\u2019s movie is an ingenious deconstruction of the genre\u2019s clich\u00e9d rules and regulations, like when Sidney rolls her eyes at horror movie victims who run up the stairs from the killer before doing exactly that. <\/p>\n

There are copious references to other terrifying classics, especially Psycho, and admittedly stupid lines (\u201cYou\u2019re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick or something\u201d), but that\u2019s what makes it so fun. The film injected some much-needed humour and self-referential meta goodness into a genre that was sadly getting as stale as that end slice of bread that you never get round to eating. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s funny though, is that Craven\u2019s career as a horror filmmaker contributed to the maddening clich\u00e9s he would later rip to shreds with as much ferociousness as Ghostface with his knife. After debuting with the controversial The Last House on the Left in 1972, Craven couldn\u2019t escape his title as a horror heavyweight with movies like the terrifying The Hills Have Eyes and the early Johnny Depp vehicle, A Nightmare on Elm Street<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, Craven managed to deliver some weaker films throughout his career, like Deadly Friend. The 1986 film wasn\u2019t authentic to Craven\u2019s vision, with Warner Bros meddling with the levels of gore and the tone of the narrative so much that he walked away from the movie incredibly unsatisfied. <\/p>\n

\"Deadly<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ Warner Bros.)<\/p>\n

Deadly Friend sees a teenage girl begin an unexpected killing spree after she is turned into a robot by her neighbour, but the movie clearly doesn\u2019t know who its audience is or what it\u2019s actually trying to be. Unlike his other gore-filled movies, Craven planned Deadly Friend to be a lot more tame, focusing on the sci-fi elements instead, but test screenings soon proved unsuccessful. So, with the demand to add more of his classic violence to make the movie a feast of blood and guts, Craven did just that. But still, the studio wasn\u2019t satisfied. <\/p>\n

Mark Canton, the president of Warner Bros, suggested changes that clashed with Craven and writer Bruce Joel Rubin\u2019s ideas. With demands for gorier scenes and less of a romance between the characters, the movie morphed into something that Craven no longer recognised. Yet, the studio still wasn\u2019t satisfied, and this explicit violence caused issues for the film\u2019s potential age rating and censorship.<\/p>\n

It seemed like no one could win, and Craven was wholly disappointed with the way his film had turned out. Talking to R.A the Rugged Man, the director revealed that certain scenes were meant to be a lot more intense, but sadly the studio intervened. For example, a scene in which an elderly woman\u2019s head explodes after being hit with a basketball was meant to be a lot different. \u201cThat scene was cut down. After her head gets knocked off, she ran around for quite a while like a chicken with its head chopped off. They forced me to cut a lot of gore from that film.\u201d <\/p>\n

Clearly, Craven is bitter about the way that Deadly Friend turned out, which also lost several million at the box office. The late 1980s proved to be a slightly weaker period for Craven\u2019s career, but by 1994, he had fully redeemed himself with the gloriously meta Wes Craven\u2019s New Nightmare. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credit: Alamy) Sat 16 August 2025 16:45, UK By the late 1990s, horror was in desperate need of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,12663,2839,30629,56,54,55,37177],"class_list":{"0":"post-72154","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-horror","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-scream","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom","15":"tag-wes-craven"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}