Wheaton College is a small, Christian liberal arts college located in a tree-lined Chicago suburb. It was established in 1860 and was, for a time, a stop on the Underground Railroad. In the 20th century, its graduates included such Christian luminaries as Billy Graham, John Piper, Rob Bell, and Wes Craven.

Freddy Krueger | Photo by Boogeyman13 via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1Vsxh2D)

Yes, that Wes Craven. Neither he nor Wheaton seemed to want to trumpet their relationship, especially once Craven moved on from teaching English to directing pornographic films. Craven, who died yesterday at the age of 76 from brain cancer, made the transition from dirty movies to horror films, the job for which he was best known. He wrote and directed A Nightmare on Elm Street, a a film that redefined the horror genre with its exploration of the line between reality and imagination. Craven got the idea for Nightmare after reading a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times about Southeast Asian refugees who died in their sleep after staying awake for days on end to avoid nightmares. This was Craven’s speciality, this sense of teetering dangerously closely to the outrageous but very real killers lurking all around us.

In some ways, Craven’s career was a direct criticism of bad Christian art. Those who hate horror films, or object to blood or violence or gore, will surely disagree, but the truth is that Craven came of age in a time when very few Christians were creating interesting art at all. A Chicago Tribune article recalls the time Craven was removed as editor of Wheaton’s literary magazine for publishing risqué short stories about an unwed mother and an interracial couple.

Richard Warburton, a former professor of literature at Wheaton, said that he “was sympathetic to Craven and his friends because they were asking nothing more than the presence and dynamics of Christians in the modern arts. They wanted to know, ‘Where are Christians in the arts? What is our role in film, theater, music and dance?'”

Craven grew up in a strict Baptist family, who thought that Wheaton–where alcohol, tobacco, and dancing were banned at the time–might be too liberal. It was a traumatic upbringing; Craven told the New York Times that he remembered going “to a funeral at a very fundamentalist church, and I just had to get out of there. I went out in the parking lot and just sobbed. I think there was a sense of loss of that little boy not knowing if he was right or wrong. Everything I grew up with I had to walk away from.”

On the other hand, some good things came out of his time at Wheaton. During Craven’s senior year in college, he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome and spent much of the year

Wes Craven and his wife, Iya Labunka | Photo by Josh Greenstein via Twitter (http://bit.ly/1KXAsI8)

unable to attend classes, paralyzed from the neck down. “[T]he support I received from students and faculty members through that period was so moving to me,” Craven said in a 1997 interview. “People I didn’t know came to visit, to pray for my recovery. To me, their thoughts and prayers represented the best side of Christianity. I’ll never forget that side of Wheaton College. Never.”

It would be facile to reduce Christianity to a battle between good and evil, but to miss the truth in that concept is also to miss what is at it’s core. In the same way, Wes Craven spent his life hearing–and then telling–stories of good versus evil; stories where evil won and we, the audience, had to ask ourselves, “what now?” Wes Craven’s career is what happens when facile Christianity doesn’t work and a person has to dig deeper to find the answers they weren’t getting. I hope he found some answers. His movies helped me.