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.
Interpretation
Understanding audience expectations can help create surprising and impactful work.
Wes Craven emphasizes the importance of recognizing audience expectations in creative endeavors, suggesting that true artistry involves not just meeting those expectations but subverting them to create a powerful surprise. This approach can lead to more engaging and memorable experiences for the audience, challenging their perceptions and delighting them in unexpected ways.
In practice
During a film festival, discussing how a director completely flipped the script on traditional horror tropes.
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.
If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.
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 was paralyzed from the chest down when I was 19, so I kind of put my head together about dying, and I think I've come to terms with it.
Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn't the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn't seen anybody else.
Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they've never heard a piano or seen a piano.
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