Craven was my first favourite director

I was far too young to be watching A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge when it came out on video in 1986, I knew that five minutes into the film. I was only 11 years old and should not have been watching teenagers getting sliced up by the bastard son of a thousand maniacs, and I was definitely too young to get all the subtext.

But I was at my cousin Maria's house and she was looking after me for the afternoon and had decided some fairly softcore horror was what I needed to get through a Saturday. She's 12 years older than me and just about the coolest person I've ever known. She was the same cousin who also took me to the earliest film I ever remember seeing - the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve - so she set me up for life, really.

So I watched A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge and I was much too young for it and I also thought it was thoroughly excellent. It was funny and scary and trippy in a way my usual diet of Star Trek and Indiana Jones films were not, and it was a wonderful way to spend a Saturday.

I spent the next few years getting my hands on any horror movie I could, even though I was frequently denied by the age restrictions. It took me another couple of years before I saw the first Nightmare On Elm Street, and it was such a genuinely lift in quality that it actually changed the way I started watching films, because I was finally realising that some people were better at making movies than others, and Wes Craven was one of them.

Even as a very small human, I understood that some films were just better, and now it was becoming clear that they were better because of the talent behind the camera. As much as part two was fun, the original Nightmare was slicker, and more stylized, and scarier. It was still just a bit silly - the long arms might have been the funniest thing I'd ever seen outside of a Airplane film at that age, and the mom getting sucked into a door was a terrible last shot to go out on - but it was just a higher standard of film.

So I made a note of the director's name, and I never missed a Wes Craven film after that. Some of it is obviously brilliant, like Scream and his New Nightmare, and some of it is criminally underrated - I still think The Serpent and The Rainbow never got its due and that The People Under The Stairs in a modern classic. 

But his films were so thoughtful on every level - the plot, the camera shots, the moodiness, it all shined with Craven's intelligence, and he was the first director outside of George Lucas I could name, and whose work I actively sought out. 

Around the same time I became aware of other comic creators, writers and artists who always delivered a consistent quality, and learned to follow them too. I realised that things that had names like Grant Morrison or Alan Moore in the credit box were always better than others, and that it was worth following those names, to immeasurable rewards. And I started to obsess in the same way over single bands, and listen to everything they did.

And I did swiftly become more enamored of other movie directors, and my movie tastes grew in all sorts of different directions. But Wes was the first name in the credits i looked out for, and started to follow, and what a wonderful path it has been.