Legendary horror director Wes Craven, known for the Scream films and the Nightmare on Elm Street series and much more, died last Sunday in his Los Angeles home of brain cancer. He was 76.
Wes Craven has become synonymous with genre bending and innovative horror, challenging audiences with his bold visions since the release of his first feature film, The Last House of the Left, which he wrote, directed, and edited in 1972. In the years since that controversial film’s arrival, Craven has demonstrated that he was a filmmaker with heart, guts, humor – and an unbridled imagination expanding into films, television, and literature.
In 1984, Craven reinvented the youth horror genre again with the classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film he wrote and directed. He conceived and co-wrote Elm Street III as well, and then after an absence of three more sequels, deconstructed the genre a decade after the original, writing and directing the audacious Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Over the years he was responsable for finding huge and talented actors, we can name a few, but we’re going to stick with these three, Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone.
Known for creating the iconic Freddy Krueger character from Nightmare on Elm Street, later he goes global and reached a new level of sucess with the release of Scream, showing the world a new and now classic horror character, Ghostface.
Wes Craven again pushed his genre boundaries with the 2005 psychological thriller, Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy and Brian Cox. And in 2006 he wrote and directed a romantic comedy homage to Oscar Wilde featuring Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell as a segment in the French ensemble production, Paris Je T’aime.
He created classic characters and change the film industry, bringing the mainstream to the horror cinema. We all learned how to control our own fear of the one and only Freddy Krueger, Craven had the power to bring nightmares into teens and even grow-ups, he will for sure be missed. Rest in peace Mr.Craven.