Horror Film Master Wes Craven Passes Away At 76

Wes Craven, the director of Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and The Hills Have Eyes, passed away from brain cancer at the age of 76.

Wes was renowned as a master of the horror genre. While he originally planned to become a humanities professor, Craven turned towards producing pornographic, and then horror, films.

In 1972, Wes Craven released his first feature film, The Last House on the Left. The film, a rape-revenge story, was banned in the United Kingdom until 2003. However, it became a box office success in the United States, and Roger Ebert called it “about as four times as good as you’d expect.”

In 1984, Wes Craven’s big success would come with writing and directing Nightmare on Elm Street and the classic horror villain, Freddy Krueger.

But by the 1990s, the horror genre had grown stale, with numerous sequels and direct-to-video slashers. It was then that Wes Craven revitalized the genre by directing Scream. The film, which grossed $173 million worldwide at the box office, has been widely credited with changing the horror genre and breaking the conventions of slasher movies. While Scream was genuinely scary, it managed to bring in elements of comedy by poking fun and retaining self-awareness of slasher movies.

Courteney Cox, who starred in Scream, said on Twitter that Wes was a “great man” and that her heart went out to his family.

Craven directed three more Scream sequels, as well as the 2005 thriller film, Red Eye. In 1999, he also directed Music of the Heart, a drama starring Meryl Streep, for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

He kept busy right up until his death, and had recently signed deals to develop television programs, including the new Scream series, for MTV.

Craven observed that he had to take a low profile for Music of the Heart to prevent non-horror audiences from being turned off of the film. But while he wanted to be known for being more than a horror director, he told ABC News in 2010 that “people really seem to enjoy what I do, and I’ve definitely left a mark on American cinema of some sort or another.”

Outside of films, Wes Craven was a committed bird conservationist. He was particularly fascinated with the California condor and served as a member of the Audubon California Board of Directors.

He is survived by his wife, Iya Labunka, who worked as a producer on Craven’s films, and two children.

[Photo by Frazer Harrison / Getty Images]