Over centuries, we are told, fire-and-brimstone preachers have perfected the art of exploiting our darkest fears—damnation, hell, torture, exposure, guilt, transmission—to pack the house and fill the coffers. Some of these hucksters may be more obviously fraudulent than others (Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry has nothing on James Joyce’s Fr. Arnall in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but in the end all these churchmen are out to turn a profit on darkness, bafflement, and hunger.
If this is so, it is hard to think of a better exemplar of the type than filmmaker Wes Craven, who died earlier this week at age 76. Raised in a conservative Baptist home and educated at Wheaton College, he would go on to make millions by putting the fear of—well, something—into viewers of movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream series.
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