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“It lives up to its title only intermittently,” Richard Harrington wrote in The Washington Post, typifying critical reaction. Those who turned out, that is: Released by Universal in time for the Halloween weekend, Shocker debuted to negative reviews and a poor box office. Audiences could be forgiven a sense of déjà vu. When Horace claims a victim, he does so with a quip and a smile amidst a lot of over-the-top fantasy sequences. (Craven helped script, but did not direct, the series’ second and best sequel.) Jonathan helps defeat Horace partly by following him in his dreams.
Specifically, the film bears a strong resemblance to Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street and, at its worst, to that film’s later, lesser sequels, which transitioned its bad guy, Freddy Krueger, from a terrifying bogeyman into sadistic wiseacre in an increasingly cartoony world. The story of a college football star named Jonathan (Peter Berg) and the brutal killer named Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi, now best known for his work on The X-Files) with whom he has a mysterious connection, Shocker takes a long time to get going and then winds up in some familiar territory once it does. Released in 1989, Craven’s Shocker has its defenders, but defending it means looking past the film’s pokiness and familiarity.
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He smuggled a hard-to-miss satire of the Reagan/Bush era’s treatment of the underclass into The People Under the Stairs and used Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to turn the Nightmare on Elm Street series into a metafictional ouroboros. But even working within horror, Craven’s filmography contains a remarkable amount of variety.
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They’ll be the ones for which Craven is best remembered, even if they don’t give a sense of the full scope of the highs and lows of his career.Ĭraven occasionally expressed regret that he didn’t get more opportunities to work outside the horror genre, whose confines he managed to escape for just two features: the Meryl Streep-starring 1999 drama Music of the Heart and the excellent 2005 thriller Red Eye (though the latter was packaged as a horror film via a misleading trailer). Yet, each in their own way, those three films changed the direction of the horror genre. Craven worked for decades and directed dozens of features. When Wes Craven died on August 30, 2015, at the age of 76, most of his obituaries dwelt on three films: Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. “Shocker” Proves that Even Wes Craven’s Lesser Films Had Something to Say
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