Wes Craven's films have always dealt with a whole manner of pioneering themes; blurred realities, nightmarish villains, and grotesque fears, yet his cinematic influence on dream worlds, maniacal killers, and media, or generational trauma and death, indicate how this was a director with a unique perspective. This chapter's analysis of Shocker (1989) will focus upon the return of the dead as something atypical. Often the dead come back in films as zombies; Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968), Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979), Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009), and so on. Craven's writings transcend the familiar dead-return-as-zombies trope, and he accomplishes something else in Shocker—vengeance and a (literally) electrifying villain as an embodiment of societal fears.

Shocker had to be developed from another idea. Craven originally wanted to make a television series about the experience of serial killers—in fact he gained further inspiration reading a book “which said that when people watch television, they have brainwaves almost identical to those when dreaming.” Craven decided that the television and the dream world run parallel with one another, because both allow characters and spectators to enter another universe. The studio, however, rejected Craven's idea of what was dubbed “Dream Stalker” because it was deemed too controversial and according to the director, “Fox had problems with it. They thought it would have been too violent, too negative, too difficult for the audience to know and identify with the killer.” The original concept of a protagonist working with their abilities in order to catch a murderer through a dream or psychic skill has since become a popular basis for television series, such as the CBS hits Ghost Whisperer (2005–10) or Medium (2005–11). Craven's own childhood was itself restricted within his strict fundamentalist community. Even watching films was considered sinful and this fear of betraying his Christian upbringing was used to breed guilt, and according to Craven it caused him to finally sneak into the cinema to see To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962).