Oliver Sacks and Wes Craven: the Human Brain and Horror Films


One man, with almost tender, compassionate and literary style, wrote about the human brain. Another man gave us nightmares.

OLIVER SACKS

Oliver Sacks, who died of cancer at the age of 82, is listed principally as a neurologist, as is Ben Carson, one of many who seeks the Republican nomination for president. He was in truth, quite a bit more than that.  His practice was medicine, but he explored it further through research, through unparralled writing, through books and an empathy that more closely resembled that of a poet.

Sacks explored the pathways and byways of his specialty by writing books about peculiar, often unstudied neurological disorders and thus made millions of people acquainted with them.   He was not merely a popularizer of difficult subjects—he was a story teller of case studies who became so widely read that his books hit the best seller lists, became movies (“Awakenings” with Robin Williams, for one). Scientists and  some his peers sometimes sneered at this, but his readers were rewarded by gaining access to people and themes and subjects that had never occurred to them as objects of exploration.  He was, in some ways, like a travel writer exploring byways, sanctuaries for creatures and people lost to the world.

He called his books “neurological novels” about unusual people with unusual burdens to bear—“The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,” about a man who could not understand what his eyes saw, for instance, or the aforementioned “Awakenings”.  He wrote about everything and in the best of literary writing, made the extraordinary available to ordinary people and the ordinary extraordinary. He wrote “Seeing Voices” about the uses of language and perceptions of it by the deaf. He wrote about himself, too, including the dying of the light that was his journey to death.  Would that there could be a book from where he might have gone.

WES CRAVEN

Wes Craven, who died at the age of 76 of brain cancer, was one of the early practitioners of what can be called contemporary horror films,  those explicit, scary and films with teens in peril, haunted, chased and often eviscerated by big men with sharp objects.

Craven scared us to begin with with “The House on the Left in 1972 and then with “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” his most famous and acclaimed film. He often worked with Sean S. Cunningham, the creator of the “Friday the 13th Series,” and they worked together on the inevitable film “Freddy vs Jason,” which brought together the bloody protagonists of their two best films.  Hard to remember now who won.

He also directed what was probably his most lucrative film, “Scream,” which seemed almost a sendup of horror films while delivering the shocks.

The New York Horror Film Festival awarded Craven a lifetime achievement award.

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