October 29, 1995 By BRUCE KIRKLAND --

HOLLYWOOD - Giggle and scream, laugh and die of fright, warped Wes Craven is back in our nightmares with Vampire In Brooklyn.

The new movie, which opened this weekend, stars Eddie Murphy as the eternal fang-toothed blood-sucker with the cool capes and the comfie coffin. The 56-year-old Craven, a filmmaker best known for giving life to Freddy Krueger in the original Nightmare On Elm Street, plays his Dracula story out as a horror comedy.

A sense of humor, says Craven, can humanize anything, even a vampire. "I think that humor is a very, very human quality," the soft-spoken, well-educated, former college professor reflects. "It's certainly not to deride or make fun of suffering. But to make humor out of fear is completely appropriate. Most of humor, actually, is some form of that. It's a paradox."

Gross elements, on the other hand, are another matter. "Box office grosses are good," Craven teases. "But, in this film, I guess the grossest thing we have is plucking the heart out, which we do pretty quickly and with sort of a comic feel." Murphy rips the heart out of a man who annoys him in a violent confrontation, holding the still beating organ in his hand for a camera close-up and a smart-ass quip.

"It beat three times and it died," Craven continues. "Gush? That was a judgment call (there is a minimum of blood). We tried to keep it kind of comic. I wanted to make a film here that made you scared but didn't give you horrible nightmares. (I wanted to work) within a certain genre that was slightly tongue-in-cheek."

Craven, the Cleveland-born son of working-class, fundamentalist Baptists, is extremely careful when it comes to the tone of his film. He has never again scared people with the ferocity and humorlessness of his first film, the cult slasher classic Last House On The Left. The extraordinarily virulent reaction to that 1972 film - the story of a trio of brutal rapist-murderers who are, in turn, killed by the parents of their victims - has left him wary and vigilant about how much is enough.

In the case of Vampire In Brooklyn, with Murphy playing the vampire with a comic blend of hot romance and cool rage, Craven figures he has found a potent combination. "I want people to have a good time and not be profoundly unsettled. This film, at its best, is talking about love and making yourself vulnerable and getting past being Mr. Slick and getting past being in total control of things; it's about acknowledging the mystical and mysterious side of life."

If that sounds strangely metaphysical for a horrormeister whose credits include Wes Craven's New Nightmare, The People Under The Stairs, Shocker, The Serpent And The Rainbow, Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes, remember his religious and academic background.

Craven never even saw a movie until he was in college. Watching them was strictly forbidden in his household. He read books instead. "With the exception of a few things I saw on television," Craven remembers, "because I didn't see films growing up, I was much more scared by literary things: Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, the Brontes. I sort of had a literary background. "Then I taught college for a while - the humanities." That was after graduating with a B.A. in English from Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College in Illinois, and earning a master degree at Johns Hopkins. Craven taught at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and then Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. One of his students was Harry Chapin.

In Potsdam, Craven bought a 16mm movie camera and fell into experimental filmmaking. In nine months, he abandoned teaching, and security, to pursue writing and directing. He found his first job in films in 1969, as a messenger. It cost him his marriage to his college sweetheart, Bonnie Broecker, mother of his two children.

By 1972, Craven's career took a horror twist into success with Last House On The Left. Despite - or perhaps because of - its ultraviolent scenes of torture, rape and murder, Last House was a box office phenomenon. It cost a meagre $90,000 but grossed more than $20 million, launching Craven and his collaborator, Sean Cunningham, who went on to create the Friday The 13th series.

Today, Craven is restless, yearning for growth, seeking out a higher ground without leaving the horror genre behind. "I just would like to do different kinds of projects and I never want to leave, entirely, horror. But I want to approach it on a higher and higher level, that's all. I've always thought that the horror genre was as capable of high art as anything else. Look at paintings of Goya. He did paintings that were really quite nightmarish and they're in the best museums in the world. It's just what you bring to it."

You can hear the shifting of Craven's gears, and fears, in his reactions to the work of others.

"Since I've been watching films, and that's the past 20 years, on the highest level I've loved films by (Roman) Polanski. He can be very scary and profoundly mysterious at the same time. On the popular level, it's films like Alien or Wait Until Dark.

"But I have a good time still with something that's just a good action scare. Species, I thought that was a bit of fun. People assume that, if you make scary films, you're not often scared. But I find it quite the opposite. You know what scares people because you know what scares you. You're perfectly in control in your own film but, when you're in someone else's film, you're scared like everyone else."

Wes Craven File

BORN: In Cleveland, 56 years ago, to a factory worker and a secretary, both strict fundamentalist Baptists.

RAISED: With childhood nightmares after his parents split when he was four; his father died of a heart attack a year later. The nightmares fueled his Elm Street saga.

FIRST FILM: Last House On The Left, 1972.

NIGHTMARE AT NEW LINE: The five Nightmare On Elm Street flicks grossed $171 million; but Craven, who worked only on number one, earned just $500,000, having surrendered sequel and marketing rights to New Line Cinema.


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