Top 50 Wes Craven Quotes

There will always be times where you think, ‘What went wrong? Why wasn’t that one more popular?’ You can’t always figure that out, especially if you think you’ve done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, ‘My Soul to Take,’ I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot.

It’s great to be thought of as the master of anything. Even idiocy. Master of idiocy, Wes Craven. But if it’s master of horror or fear or whatever, that’s great.

A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren’t so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?

That’s what’s great about the horror genre is that you’re getting a load of people together in the cinema at the same place and the same time, having them all experience extreme fear and come out alive at the end. It’s an uplifting experience, and there’s a sense of elation.

You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

A friend introduced me to Bob Shaye. He was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He was a Fulbright scholar, an excellent chef, and very knowledgeable about the arts.

In ‘Scream,’ there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.

My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was ‘Music of the Heart’ with Meryl Streep.

I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology.

I came from a very strict background.

A big part of directing is being strong in certain circumstances and taking the gamble and hope you don’t get fired.

A businessman can be as military as any politician.

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it’s equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.

Great horror films don’t win Academy Awards.

I remember going to a funeral at a very fundamentalist church, and I just had to get out of there. I went out in the parking lot and just sobbed. I think there was a sense of loss of that little boy not knowing if he was right or wrong. Everything I grew up with I had to walk away from.

How can you have ‘Scream’ without Ghostface? It’s like ‘Friday the 13th’ without Jason.

I don’t know, I always had an active dream life, and there’s something so profound and wonderful about a movie. It’s so alive. It’s so shared. The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you’re feeling is a profound event.

The thing of sitting in an audience and going into a dream-like state with several hundred other people that are sharing exactly what you’re feeling is a profound event.

It’s not an easy place to be – to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It’s not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it’s not a place that you want to go.

I didn’t see many films until I was in college teaching.

Whenever I go to have a meeting at Universal, the security guard just leaps to his feet and comes over, bumps my hand, and says, ‘Thank you! Thank you – I love your films!’

The whole business is changing dramatically, and the way fans follow and participate in movies, and make their own movies to emulate those movies, is profoundly different.

I couldn’t find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.

I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don’t take responsibility for other people’s work, frankly. It’s bad enough taking responsibility for my own.

I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected.

Hawks is great, ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre,’ ‘The Big Sleep’… He could do the Salt-of-the-Earth very well. He was a very smooth director; a very good film architect in terms of his storytelling.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

I did many things in my life – I painted, and I’d play guitar, and wrote and did many things. But it all seemed to come together in making movies, and almost accidentally.

I’ve experienced a great deal of, you know, ostracism from the making of films.

I’m the kind of director, at any given moment, an idea occurs to me, I’ll just do it.

I was always told that films were evil and such, but I started to realise what a load of crap it was that something this good should be forbidden. I had been allowed to read as much as I wanted when I was younger, so I recognised great art when I saw it; I just didn’t realise it would be at the cinema as well.

I was anathema in polite society after I made ‘Last House.’ People literally would grab their children and run from the room.

I had a musician friend once tell me that it’s not in the orchestra that you get the true test of the musicians but in the little trios and quintets where you really get to see if they’ve got the stuff. And the composer.

You have to be aware of what the audience’s expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren’t looking.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

Within the structure of ‘Scream 4,’ there is the film within a film, but that’s been part of the ‘Scream’ franchise since ‘Scream 2,’ when you had the ‘Stab’ franchise.

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

My whole background was in voracious book-reading.

I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say ‘Thank you’ a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people.

All I’m doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

Everybody is afraid of the unknown. Everybody is afraid of the people that they’ve done terrible things to!

In the ’60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I’d written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies.

If I’m going to be a caged bird, I’ll sing the best song I can.

‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ wasn’t that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. ‘Scream’ didn’t have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up.

My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, ‘That’s a wrap,’ after the last shot, fall over dead, and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me.

My brother and I both used to worry about dying at 40 because our father died at 40. That probably wasn’t terribly rational, since my father led a rather unhealthy lifestyle, shall we say.

I think I wrote the first draft of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ in ’79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.

When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.

I like to think I’m making films in the film business where movies are making enough numbers for the studios to let me keep working, but you also want those films to have content that makes you proud you made the film. That’s not easy, but it’s a fun puzzle to figure out.

There was a period around Columbine when horror films were being kind of assailed by the government. The studios got very afraid that they were going to be sued, and studios at about that time were all being taken over by corporations.