Wes Craven

American movie director, writer, actor, producer

• Born: August 2, 1939
• Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio
• Died: August 30, 2015
• Place of Death: Los Angeles, California

Education: Wheaton College; Johns Hopkins University

Significance: Wes Craven was a movie writer, director, and producer who reinvented the horror genre.

Background

Wesley Earl Craven was born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents, Paul and Caroline Craven, were devout Baptists, and Craven grew up in a strictly religious home. Consistent with his upbringing, he attended a religious college, earning his undergraduate degree in English and psychology from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He then earned a master’s degree in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Craven began his career as a teacher, first as an instructor of English at Westminster College, then as a humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology (since renamed Clarkson University). While teaching at Madrid-Waddington High School in Madrid, New York, Craven bought a 16-millimdeter camera and began shooting short films.

His first job in film was as a sound editor in New York City. In 1971, he got a job as a film editor, and his movie career was underway. He also earned money directing pornographic films under a pseudonym.

Life’s Work

Craven’s breakout work was a 1972 horror movie, The Last House on the Left, which he wrote and directed. Craven used real-world friends to play a gang of monsters who kidnap, torture, rape, and murder teenage girls before suffering an equally horrific fate of their own. The film was gruesomely violent. It was also a huge financial success, and it launched a whole genre of so-called slasher movies. Relentlessly grim, the movie boasted one of filmdom’s most memorable loglines: "Just keep telling yourself it’s only a movie."

The success of Last House on the Left was followed in 1977 by The Hills Have Eyes, another violent, stomach-churning, smash success. The new movie followed a similar ordinary-people-exact-ferocious-revenge formula. In this case, an ordinary suburban family was pursued through the desert by a pack of cannibals. Craven’s success as a writer and director got him jobs directing nonslasher—but still violent—movies, like the 1982 hit Swamp Thing.

He then invented an entirely new type of surreal horror movie in his best-known film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. This 1984 film launched an incredibly lucrative and long-running franchise featuring Freddy Krueger, a fiend with rusty knives attached to his fingers. In the films, Krueger murders people in their dreams. The character has appeared in a long line of movies and on TV, and he has even inspired a video game. He is an iconic movie villain. The future megastar Johnny Depp had his first major role in the original film.

Craven created another horror franchise with the 1996 movie Scream, which also generated sequels and television treatments. In addition, he wrote and directed a wide range of TV programs and movies. And near the end of his life, in 2014, he created a five-part digital comic-book series called Coming of Rage with writer Steve Niles.

Craven also made a few nonhorror films. The most significant of them was Music of the Heart, a 1999 movie starring Meryl Streep, for which she received one of her nineteen Oscar nominations. Craven joined twenty-one other directors in filming a segment for Paris, je t’aime in 2006.

His creative energy was almost limitless. Even though he longed to break away from the genre with which he was most identified, his work in this area generally produced highly profitable projects, making it hard to walk away. When his movies hit the right nerves with their young audiences, they were almost certain to spawn numerous sequels. Sometimes, Craven wrote and/or directed additional films in a series, but more often he did not.

Impact

It is probably safe to say that the decade of slasher movies in the 1980s would not have occurred without Wes Craven. However, Craven’s films were not simple exploitation vehicles. His initial objective was to force the audience to confront the reality of violence and the evil of which people are capable. When Craven examined the vicious, sadistic nature of killers, he was exposing the truth beneath frightening headlines. In so doing, he changed the sensibility of a generation of filmmakers, most of whom were technically much better than he was. In addition, Craven’s talent for developing suspense and building terror was widely influential.

Craven even presented an entirely new concept in horror movies when he returned to Freddy Krueger after ten years and helmed the 1994 release, New Nightmare. A Nightmare on Elm Street had already explored the power of dreams in daily life, and New Nightmare is almost an experiment in a metafilm: Craven is a character in the movie he’s directing, a character struggling to come up with a new plot for his villain. Heather Langenkamp, the actress who is pursued in her dreams in the movie, plays herself being haunted by Krueger in her fictionalized real life. A character in Scream notes that life is just a big movie—and that sort of self-awareness in the horror genre is part of Craven’s legacy. Refocus: The Films of Wes Craven, the first academic study on Craven's work, was published in July 2023.

Personal Life

Craven was married three times. His first marriage to Bonnie Broecker gave him two children. Their son Jonathon was born in 1965, and their daughter Jessica was born in 1968. The marriage, however, ended in 1970. Craven’s children are also in the arts. Jonathon is a movie writer and director, and Jessica is a singer/songwriter.

In 1982, Craven married the actress Mimi Craven, but they divorced in 1987. His third spouse was Iva Labunka, whom he married in 2004. She was a frequent producer of his films. They were still married when Craven died of brain cancer in 2015. The tenth episode in the Scream series was dedicated to him.

Bibliography

Moyer, Justin Wm. "Wes Craven, Horror Genius and Inventor of Freddy Krueger, Is Dead at 76." The Washington Post, The Washington Post, Inc., 31 Aug. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2016. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/31/wes-craven-genius-horror-director-and-inventor-of-freddy-krueger-is-dead-at-76/>.

Muir, John Kenneth. Wes Craven: The Art of Horror.Jefferson: McFarland, 1998. Print.

ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven. ReFocus: The American Directors Series, July 2023.

Robb, Brian. Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven.New York: Overlook, 2000. Print.

"Wes Craven." Internet Movie Database, 2024. www.imdb.com/name/nm0000127. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024.

Wooley, John. Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares.Hoboken: Wiley, 2011. Print.

Zinoman, Jason. "A Filmmaker Who Invaded Your Dreams." New York Times1 Sept. 2015: C5. Print.