Wes Craven
Wesley Earl Craven was an American filmmaker. Amongst his prolific filmography, Craven worked primarily in the horror genre, particularly slasher films, where he mixed horror cliches with humor. Craven has been recognized as one of the masters of the horror genre.
Craven created the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, writing and directing the first film, co-writing and producing the third, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and writing and directing the seventh, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. He directed the first four films in the Scream franchise. He directed cult classics The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, the horror comedy The People Under the Stairs, and psychological thriller Red Eye. His other notable films include Swamp Thing, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, Vampire in Brooklyn, and Music of the Heart.
Craven received several accolades across his career, which includes a Scream Award, a Sitges Film Festival Award, a Fangoria Chainsaw Award, and nominations for a Saturn Award. In 1995, he was honored by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films with the Life Career Award, for his accomplishments in the horror genre. In 2012, the New York City Horror Film Festival awarded Craven the Lifetime Achievement Award.
On August 30, 2015, aged 76, Craven died of a brain tumor at his home in Los Angeles.
Early life
Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Caroline and Paul Eugene Craven. He was of English, Scottish, and German descent. He was raised in a strict Baptist family. From 1957 to 1963 Craven earned an undergraduate degree in English and psychology from Wheaton College in Illinois. During his senior year, he developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome which delayed his graduation by a few months. After his recovery, Craven went on to get his master's degree in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University.In 1964–65, Craven taught English at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and was a humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York. He also taught at Madrid–Waddington High School in Madrid, New York. During this time, he purchased a used 16 mm film camera and began making short movies. His friend Steve Chapin informed him of a messenger position at a New York City film production company, where his brother, future folk-rock star Harry Chapin worked. Craven moved into the building where his friend Steve Chapin lived at 136 Hicks St. in Brooklyn Heights. His first creative job in the film industry was as a sound editor.
Recalling his early training, Craven said in 1994, "Harry was a fantastic film editor and producer of industrials. He taught me the Chapin method : 'Nuts and bolts! Nuts and bolts! Get rid of the shit!'" Craven afterwards became the firm's assistant manager, and broke into film editing with You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat.
Career
Craven had a letter published in the July 19, 1968, edition of Life praising the periodical's coverage of contemporary rock music and offbeat performers such as Frank Zappa.For several years, Craven worked in the pornographic film industry, which was booming at the time. He has a crew credit on the porn classic Deep Throat, and served as assistant director and editor for a porn film directed by Peter Locke, It Happened in Hollywood. He would also edit Locke's 1975 sex comedy Kitty Can't Help It,.
After earning a master's degree in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University, Craven briefly taught English and humanities at Westminster College and Clarkson College of Technology before deciding to pursue filmmaking. In an interview, he recalled that the transition from academia to cinema came from "a deep need to express the darker side of the human experience through art" and his fascination with the power of film to provoke emotion and moral reflection. Craven stated that his early years were marked by both aesthetic experimentation and a search for "a personal vision based on the shocks and fears that define our modern lives."
Craven’s first feature film as director was The Last House on the Left, released in 1972. Craven expected the film to be shown at only a few theaters, which according to him "gave me a freedom to be outrageous." Ultimately the movie was screened much more widely than he assumed, leaving him temporarily ostracized due to the content. Craven returned briefly to pornography, directing the 1975 porn film The Fireworks Woman under the pseudonym "Abe Snake." However, as one book on Craven put it, "the film presented many of Craven's nascent trademarks, including 'rubber reality', the breakdown of the traditional family values via incest and the depiction of Christian religion as a force of oppression that asphyxiates the capacity of humans to be happy."
After the negative experience of Last House, Craven attempted to move out of horror with his partner Sean S. Cunningham, but they were unable to secure financial backing. On the advice of a friend, he wrote the desert-set horror The Hills Have Eyes, which cemented his reputation in the genre.
In 1984, Craven achieved mainstream success with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which launched the career of Johnny Depp. While directing Deadly Friend in 1986, Craven was introduced by producer Bob Sherman to Marianne Maddalena, who began working as his assistant. Their professional partnership solidified during the grueling and dangerous shoot of The Serpent and the Rainbow in Haiti. Craven gave Maddalena her first producer credit on Shocker, later stating that the film marked a milestone for his creative independence and the birth of a lifelong bond:
Throughout the early 1990s, the two collaborated on The People Under the Stairs and the meta-horror Wes Craven's New Nightmare. For New Nightmare, Craven credited Maddalena as a stabilizing presence during a production that earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Feature. In 1996, following the massive success of Scream—during which Maddalena famously discovered the iconic Ghostface mask while location scouting—the pair formalized their collaboration by founding Craven/Maddalena Films.
The company allowed Craven to pursue projects across genres while maintaining a focus on character-driven stories and complex female protagonists. This expansion led to the drama Music of the Heart, which earned two Academy Award nominations. Under their banner, they produced hits including Scream 2, Scream 3, Red Eye, and the remakes of his early works, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left. Their personal friendship and mutual trust remained the cornerstone of the company until Craven's death in 2015, with their final collaboration being Scream 4.
In 2010, Craven took an unusual step by branching out from his longtime creative circle—including producer Marianne Maddalena, assistant director Nick Mastandrea, production designer Bruce Miller, editor Patrick Lussier, post-production supervisor Tina Anderson, script supervisor Sheila Waldron, and director of photography Peter Deming—to work with his new wife, Iya Labunka, who produced My Soul to Take. Craven and Labunka reportedly felt it was important to do something creatively new with a fresh team, free from the opinions and habits carried over from his past collaborations. The project, which Craven wrote and directed, was intended as a return to psychological horror but was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews and disappointing box office results—grossing only $21 million worldwide against a reported $25 million budget. Critics noted that the film lacked the sharpness and creative cohesion that had characterized Craven’s previous team, with some suggesting that the shift to a new production environment under Labunka contributed to the film’s poor reception.
Beyond film, Craven designed the Halloween 2008 logo for Google and directed episodes of the 1985 reboot of The Twilight Zone. He also created Coming of Rage, a five-issue comic book series, with Steve Niles in 2014.
Filmmaking
Influences
Craven has cited filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Jean Cocteau, and Francois Truffaut as among his major influences. Craven's first film, The Last House on the Left, was conceived as a remake of Bergman's The Virgin Spring. The goat in the dream sequence at the beginning of A Nightmare on Elm Street was included by Craven as a homage to Buñuel.Style and themes
Craven's works tend to explore the breakdown of family structures, the nature of dreams and reality, and often feature black humor and satirical elements. Ostensibly civilized families succumb to and exercise violence in The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Shocker, and the Scream films address the process of addressing family trauma.Several of Craven's films are characterized by abusive familial relationships such as The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs, and others. Families in denial are a common thread throughout his movies, an idea Craven openly discussed:
The blurring of the barrier between dreams and reality, sometimes called "rubber-reality", is a staple of Craven's style. A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, dealt with the consequences of dreams in real life. The Serpent and the Rainbow and Shocker portray protagonists who cannot distinguish between nightmarish visions and reality. Following New Nightmare, Craven increasingly explored metafictional elements in his films. New Nightmare has actress Heather Langenkamp play herself as she's haunted by the villain of the film in which she once starred. At one point in the film, the audience sees on Craven's word processor a script he's written, which includes the conversation he just had with Langenkamp—as if the script were being written as the action unfolds.
In Scream, the characters frequently reference horror films similar to their situations and at one point Billy Loomis tells his girlfriend that life is just a big movie. This concept was emphasized in the sequels as copycat stalkers re-enact the events of a new film about the Woodsboro killings occurring in Scream.
The first scholarly collection of work dedicated to Craven was published by Edinburgh University Press in July 2023.