US horror director Wes Craven dies aged 76

Wes Craven, a master of horror cinema and a proponent of the slasher genre best known for creating the Freddy Krueger and Scream franchises, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.

The cause was brain cancer, according to a statement from his family. Perhaps his most famous villain was Freddy Krueger, who haunted the nightmares of high school students in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and who went on to become one of horror movies' top killers, alongside Michael Myers of the Halloween franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th films.

The first Nightmare on Elm Street cost $1.8 million to make.

Craven's signature concept of dreams and fantasies overlapping with reality echoed throughout his career, including in The Hills Have Eyes (1977), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and The People Under the Stairs (1991).

Craven began his film career after briefly teaching English at Westminster College in Pennsylvania, taking on a directing role in pornographic films.

In 1972 he directed his first feature film, Last House on the Left, a sexually violent film that was a protest against the atrocities of the Vietnam War (and was inspired by Bergman's The Virgin Spring). The Hills Have Eyes was another violent film, this one centered on a group of deranged people trying to kill a family in the desert. A nightmare sequence in the film inspired A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In 1996 the first Scream film was released, and was a rebirth for him as a director. The movie was inspired by Craven's love for Halloween, and went on to spawn several sequels, with only Scream 2 becoming a major box office success.

Wesley Earl Craven was born on August 2nd, 1939, in Cleveland to Paul and Caroline Craven.

He earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University and was a professor in Pennsylvania and New York for a short time.

In David Konow's book Reel Terror, Craven said that horror movies had to get under people's skin in ways they wouldn't expect.

He added: “Horror movies have to show us something that hasn’t been shown before so that the audience is completely taken aback. You see, it’s not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.”

He is survived by his wife, Iya Labunka; a sister, Carol Buhrow; a son, Jonathan; a daughter, Jessica; and a stepdaughter.

NYT