Wes Craven is a Hopkins alum perhaps best known for scaring millions worldwide, creating horror classics such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.
Although his films have certainly quickened the pace of my heart, sitting in Craven's elegant but by no means ostentatious living room was an entirely different experience. Trickling water from a fountain outside was soothingly audible and one of his cats took the opportunity to jump onto my lap and meow playfully.
Before meeting Craven I had read the surprised exclamations of previous interviewers, who had expected to meet Freddy-incarnate and instead found themselves face-to-face with a well-spoken former humanities professor. Despite being forewarned, I must admit to being nearly as taken in as they were by his calm and thoughtful demeanor.
Craven described growing up in a religious family, and then matriculating to Wheaton College in Illinois, which he found to be similarly devout.
"I was the editor of the literary magazine my junior year, and it got cancelled by the president of the college who denounced me from the pulpit," he said. "I'd published two short stories: One was about an unwed mother, and one was about a woman who was having a relationship with a black man."
Elliot Coleman was formerly an ordained deacon who had left the Cathedral of St. John in order to go into publishing, according to the Hopkins Named Professorships Web page. At the time of Craven's public humiliation in Illinois, Coleman was leading the Writing Seminars department at Hopkins, which he had founded nearly two decades before. Craven heard about the Writing Seminars program and sent off some of his "controversial" work.
"I sent him some stuff and he was very interested," Craven said. "And so after I graduated ... I hitchhiked to Hopkins and showed up: no money, no plan, no nothing. And Elliot accepted me and gave me a scholarship. I became his assistant, and then I got a student loan to pay for the rest."
Craven earned a Master's in Philosophy and Writing Seminars in 1964, after one year of studying under Coleman. Coleman - who, according to Craven, had known the likes of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce personally - was a great inspiration as a writer and as a guide.
"The presence and the tutelage of Elliot Coleman was immensely important," Craven said. "Coming out of fundamentalism into the world as they call it - which is as good a term as any - can be wrenching, because you can't leave it without one part of your brain that's been inculcated with this stuff for fifteen, 20 years [saying], 'You are backsliding, you're working with the devil,' all these horrible things. Elliot was one of the first adults that said, 'You know what, that particular version of Christianity is totally [messed] up, don't worry about it.'... God bless everybody that's in that kind of religion, but if you're somebody who transitions out of it it's not an easy transition at all, and if somebody can help you feel OK about it that's really an important person. Elliot was like that."
His time at Hopkins was "very intense," during which he wrote a novel and read a great deal.
"My year at Hopkins was just enormously important ... I swear to God we read every single important novelist of the 20th century and late 19th century..." Craven said. "Coleman ... had a wonderful depth of knowledge, and the students were from all over the country and weren't Christian so, you know, it was my first time exposed to somebody who was different, so it just opened my eyes to the world."
After graduating he got a job selling rare coins from a Baltimore department store before the death of an English professor in Pennsylvania led to his surprise hiring.
"I got a call- 'Can you come tomorrow? '- and I literally got on a flight and taught classes the next day."
After years of teaching and little success getting published, Craven decided to move to New York and try his hand in the film business. Before coming to Hopkins, because of his religious upbringing, he had seen few films and consequently never thought of going into the industry. The first glimpse of a possible nascent talent in the field came when Coleman told him his novel "would make a terrific movie," calling it extremely "visual."
"I took that as a sign that I wasn't a good writer. I took everything negative. In those days, I was sure I was a total sham," Craven said. "That's the only indication that I had a talent that I didn't know about."
Financial difficulties while following this dream lead to a string of jobs ranging from high school teacher to cab driver, but eventually landed Craven in a motion picture post-production house as a messenger. With a Master's degree, he quickly moved up the ranks but was eventually fired for making a "stupid" mistake, splicing a print A-C-B instead of A-B-C. Still, he had picked up skills that would come in handy down the road.
Years earlier, while teaching, he had made a short film with some students, but he admits they were extremely amateurish.
"None of us knew what we were doing," he said. "Nothing about technique. We literally spliced it with scotch tape and scissors, and we didn't know how to put a soundtrack with the picture so we just had a tape-recorder playing."
The skills he learned while working in post-production meant he could get other jobs in film. In 1972 The Last House on the Left came out, a movie he had written and directed. It was so gruesome for the time that those involved had to initially fake an "R" rating to bring it to theaters after the shocked ratings board wouldn't even give it that, according to Craven. Perhaps for that very reason, the auspicious film led to years of success in horror for Craven, as well as a more recent expansion into other genres.
In 1999, he directed Music of the Heart, a drama that didn't make a fortune but got its fair share of critical acclaim. (The New York Times wrote: "...an affirmation of the power of music to provide beauty, pleasure and a sense of accomplishment. Not a bad reason for Mr. Craven to have sidelined the claws and hatchets this time.").
Craven's current project - which may eventually be titled 25/8 after a line in the film about the Devil working 24/7 but God working 25/8 - bears some similarities to Noah's Ark: The Diaries of a Madman, the unpublished novel he wrote while at Hopkins.
"[It's similar] in the sense that it has a character that sort of is an amalgam of other characters," he said, going on to reminisce about his time in the Writing Seminars program.
"Hopkins was an enormously significant year in my life," Craven said. "It was my entrance to the world at large."
He added, "Baltimore is one of the best places to be for spring that I could remember - I just remember that whole place just came into blossom. Everywhere you walked there was the smell of flowers ... which, for somebody who'd lived in the north, was really a unique experience."
What about Baltimore winters? "I can't remember the winter there at all," he said, sounding a bit surprised at the forgotten season. Perhaps an unconscious inspiration for his 1985 film Chiller?
