I can no longer watch horror movies, and that's thanks to Wes Craven — which is actually a compliment.
The writer-director-producer was just that good at scaring audiences, and some of us have a limit for how much fear we can take. His movies turned completely innocuous things, like beds, concerts and road trips, into instruments of horror. And at some point, I realized that it wasn't normal to think, “I hope Freddy Krueger doesn't reach up and grab me” every time I took a bath.
Craven died Sunday at 76, but I, for one, will still be thinking about him and the movies he made for a long time to come (and maybe more often than I'd like). Here are some of the everyday objects and occurrences that might prompt us to remember the master of terror.
Baths
If Nancy was afraid to fall asleep, why on earth did she decide to get into a hot bubble bath? It might have been strange logic, but it wasn't enough to make the scene in 1984's “A Nightmare on Elm Street” any less traumatizing as Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) nods off and Freddy Krueger's knife nails emerge, reaching up through the strategically placed bubbles between Nancy's legs. The suspense plays out perfectly, taking a breather for some comic relief as Nancy's mother calls through the door that she's heating some warm milk for her daughter. “Warm milk? Gross,” Nancy says under her breath, rolling her eyes in a retort familiar to anyone who was ever a teenager.
But as quickly as the tension eases, it's back once Nancy nods off again and gets dragged under the bubbles into a suddenly deep body of water.
Baths have never been the same.
Concerts
What could be a more commonplace teen experience than heading to a concert with friends? But “The Last House on the Left” transformed that rite of passage into a cautionary tale. When two girls are abducted by a gang of escaped convicts, they are sadistically tortured and brutally murdered. None of what happens to them can be recounted here — or maybe it could be, but I don't feel emotionally prepared to revisit it all, so just trust me: Don't go to concerts. Or if you do go, definitely don't try to buy weed off any strangers.
Dreaming
Falling asleep was a deadly event in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but it wasn't the only Craven movie that made slipping into R.E.M. seem like a very bad idea. “The Serpent and the Rainbow” starred Bill Pullman as an American ethnobotanist traveling to Haiti to track down a drug that can resurrect the dead.
Once he's there, he's stalked by the commander of the Haitian secret police, who doesn't just arrest and torture him in real life, but also stalks his subconscious, showing up in the American's dreams. And if there's one person you don't want to see when you turn out the lights, it's the guy who drove a nail through your scrotum.
Garage doors
“Scream” left a lot of unsavory images imprinted on our brains. But one of the most memorable was sassy teen Tatum (Rose McGowan) trying to escape from the masked murderer by crawling through a dog-door inside of a garage door — only to have the garage door start going up. It didn't end well. And that's how a modern-day convenience became a horrifying way to go.
Cross-country drives
It's not that you can't take long road trips. It's just that you shouldn't get out of your car. Not even to buy gas. Otherwise you might end up like the poor family in “The Hills Have Eyes,” who are terrorized and murdered by a clan of cannibals, who are all named after planets.
Cross-country flights
It's not that you can't book a long-haul ticket on United, it's just that you shouldn't talk to anyone, even a seemingly friendly old lady. You just never know, so keep the headphones on! Otherwise you might end up like Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) in “Red Eye.” The hotel manager falls prey to a deadly terrorist (Cillian Murphy) that wants her to help him with an assassination plot, or else.
The suburbs
If you think a tree-lined street of cookie cutter houses seems like a pleasantly quiet place to live, then you obviously don't know about all the psycho killers prowling in the shadows. For a refresher, watch pretty much all of Craven's movies.
Beds
Before Johnny Depp was Johnny Depp, he was just collateral damage in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” He played Nancy's boyfriend, Glen, and his untimely end happened in the safest of safe havens: his own bed. But sometimes a bed is not a bed. Sometimes a mattress will suddenly start receding into a bed frame and suck you in with it, just as soon as you've gotten comfy. And then it'll spit you back out as a horrific geyser of blood.
Craven taught us that you shouldn't doze off anyway (see above: Dreaming), but if you do, maybe you should do it in a sleeping bag on the ground.
People
Not all people, of course. Just cops, janitors, witch doctors, escaped convicts, desert-dwellers, the cute chatty guy seated next to you on your flight, that dude filling up his tank at the gas station, people named after planets, your high school boyfriend and extremely pale children. To name a few.
WASHINGTON POST-BLOOMBERG