Wes Craven: Biography

One of the horror genre's best-known and most celebrated directors, Wes Craven has been widely credited with reinventing the teen horror movie. Initially gaining fame and notoriety for his Nightmare on Elm Street series in the 1980s, Craven enjoyed a second wave of popularity in the 1990s with his phenomenally successful Scream series, which spoofed the teen horror genre even as they revived it. The films kicked off a trend in teen horror films, inspiring any number of imitators that, for the most part, failed to live up to Craven's own work.

A product of a strict Baptist upbringing in Cleveland, OH, Craven received a B.A. in Psychology and Education from Wheaton College and earned an M.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. After teaching humanities for awhile, Craven plunged into filmmaking as a production assistant and editor for several "B" companies. He made his directorial debut with Last House on the Left (1972), a gruesome little effort that, to put it mildly, affected different people in different ways. Some viewers found this repellently staged "revenge for rape" story profound, citing the fact that Craven based the movie on Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring; others, including such mainstream commentators as Leonard Maltin, have condemned Last House on the Left as utter excrement. No matter how one felt about Craven, however, one could not deny his power to manipulate his audience. This power was further evidenced with The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which again met with radically divided opinions -- and made a fortune.

With Swamp Thing (1982), Craven graduated to big budgets, and also revealed a gift for comedy. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was an equally effective blend of gore and grim humor which spawned several sequels and served to introduce the world to Freddy Krueger, vengeful specter par excellence. The popularity of the film and its sequels established Craven as a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood, although he was only directly involved with two of the six sequels. In 1994, he directed Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a Pirandellian affair in which he and Nightmare cast regulars Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, and John Saxon played "themselves" -- as did Freddy Kruger!

Two years later, Craven experienced another milestone in his career with Scream. The success of the film and its numerous imitators effectively established Craven as a hot mainstream commodity, and he followed the film with the equally successful (though not as critically praised) Scream 2 the following year. In 1999, he effected a radical departure from the genre with The Music of the Heart, a sentimental drama that starred Meryl Streep as violin teacher who brings music to the lives of children in Spanish Harlem. The film was quickly dismissed by audiences and critics alike, and, in 2000, Craven returned to more familiar territory with Scream 3, the latest in his in saga of hip, ironic terror.

Craven has occasionally curbed his stomach-churning tendencies (though not his willingness to run viewers through an emotional wringer) with his television work, including selected episodes of the Twilight Zone revival of the mid-'80s. In 1989, Craven produced a sitcom, The People Next Door, about a cartoonist who had the ability to imagine his drawings into existence. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide