Wes Craven, the prolific writer-director who thrilled audiences with iconic and bloody suburban slashers like Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream that made his name synonymous with horror, has died. He was 76.
In a statement, Craven’s family said that he died in his Los Angeles home on Sunday, surrounded by family, after battling brain cancer.
A prolific writer, director and editor, Craven is credited with reinventing the teen horror genre with the 1984 release of A Nightmare on Elm Street starring a then-unknown Johnny Depp. The movie and its indelible, razor-fingered villain Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund) led to several sequels, as did his 1996 success, Scream .
Besides his work in horror films, Craven also directed the drama Music of the Heart , which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination.
Wesley Earl “Wes” Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1939. Though he earned a Master’s Degree in philosophy and writing from John Hopkins University and briefly taught as a college professor in Pennsylvania and New York, his start in movies was in pornography, where he worked under a pseudonym.
Craven’s feature debut under his own name was 1972’s The Last House on the Left , a horror film about teenage girls abducted by thugs and taken into the woods. Made for just $87,000, the film, though graphic enough to be censored in many countries, was a hit. Roger Ebert said it was “about four times as good as you’d expect.”
Nightmare on Elm Street , however, catapulted him to far greater renown in 1984. The Ohio-set film about teenagers who are stalked in their dreams, which Craven wrote and directed, spawned a never-ending franchise that has carried on until, most recently, a 2010 remake.
The concept, Craven said, came from his own youth in Cleveland, where he lived next to a cemetery on an Elm Street.
Along with John Carpenter’s Halloween , Nightmare on Elm Street defined a teen horror tradition where helpless teens were preyed upon by supernatural villains in morality tales; usually promiscuous girls were the first to go.
The formula would work again for Craven with Scream .
Craven is survived by his wife, producer Iya Labunka, a son, a daughter and a stepdaughter.
