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Wes Craven: Master slasher

LOS ANGELES — “Horror movies have to show us something that hasn’t been shown before so that the audience is completely taken aback,” Wes Craven once said. “It’s not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.”

Writer Wes Craven arrives at the The Hollywood Reporter Academy Awards nominee party in Los Angeles in this February 24, 2011 file photo.  Craven, known for the “Scream” films and “Nightmare on Elm Street” died August 30,2015 in his Los Angeles home of brain cancer.  He was 76.   REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/Files

Writer Wes Craven arrives at the The Hollywood Reporter Academy Awards nominee party in Los Angeles in this February 24, 2011 file photo. Craven, known for the “Scream” films and “Nightmare on Elm Street” died August 30,2015 in his Los Angeles home of brain cancer. He was 76. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/Files

LOS ANGELES — “Horror movies have to show us something that hasn’t been shown before so that the audience is completely taken aback,” Wes Craven once said. “It’s not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.”

And he certainly fed that fear.

Craven, the master of horror cinema and a proponent of the slasher genre best known for creating iconic suburban slashers such as the Nightmare On Elm Street and Scream franchises, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 76. The cause was brain cancer, a statement from his family said.

Craven helped reinvent the teen horror genre with 1984’s A Nightmare On Elm Street with its indelible, razor-fingered villain Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund). It led to several sequels, as did his 1996 success, Scream.

“He was a consummate film-maker and his body of work will live on forever,” said Weinstein Company co-chairman Bob Weinstein, whose Dimension Films produced Scream. “My brother (Harvey Weinstein) and I are eternally grateful for all his collaborations with us.”

Besides his work in horror films, Craven also directed the 1999 drama Music Of The Heart, which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination. But Craven’s name will always be synonymous with horror.

“Horror films don’t create fear,” Craven had said. “They release it.”

FROM PORN TO HORROR

Born Wesley Earl Craven in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug 2, 1939, to a strictly Baptist family, he had earned a master’s degree in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University, and briefly taught as a college professor in Pennsylvania and New York before starting his movie career in pornography, where he worked under pseudonyms.

Craven’s feature debut under his own name was 1972’s The Last House On The Left, a horror film inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, which was about teenage girls being abducted and taken into the woods. A protest against the atrocities of the Vietnam War, it was made for only US$87,000 (S$123,000) but turned into a hit. Celebrated film critic Roger Ebert said it was “about four times as good as you’d expect” and it was graphic enough to be censored in many countries.

Five years later, he came up with The Hills Have Eyes, which centred on a group of deranged people trying to kill a family in the desert. A nightmare sequence in the film would eventually inspire what would be his biggest break, A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Craven wrote and directed the Ohio-set film about teenagers (including a then unknown Johnny Depp) who are stalked in their dreams. And it spawned a never-ending franchise that has carried on until a 2010 remake. The concept, Craven said, came from his own youth in Cleveland — specifically an Elm Street cemetery and a homeless man that inspired Krueger’s raged look.

The iconic Kreuger 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.

Craven’s series would be at the helm of a horror tradition where helpless teenagers are preyed upon by knife-wielding, deformed killers in cruel morality tales — usually promiscuous girls were the first to go.

“There is something about the American dream, the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mum and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can,” Craven once said. “And the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that’s not the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways, kind of an additional rage.”

LET ME HEAR YOUR SCREAM

The formula would work again for Craven with Scream, albeit with an added layer of self-aware spoof. By 1996, the Craven-style slasher was a well-known type, even if it wasn’t always made by him. (He had no involvement with many of the Elm Street sequels.)

Written by Kevin Williamson and starring a cast including Drew Barrymore and Neve Campbell, Scream played off of the horror cliches Craven helped create — and it was a rebirth for him as a director. Inspired by Craven’s love for the Halloween movie, it went on to spawn several sequels, with only Scream 2 becoming a major box office success.

He would also increasingly oversee a cottage industry of horror branded with his name, including remakes of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The House On The Left (2009). But he would also break from the genre with 2005’s Red Eye, a well-received airline thriller that starred Rachel McAdams.

Craven was also a published author (the 2000 novel The Fountain Society) and an ardent bird conservationist. He recently penned a monthly column, Wes Craven’s The Birds, for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

Active until his death, Craven had numerous television projects in development, including a new Scream series for MTV. He was also an executive producer of the upcoming film The Girl In The Photographs, which was set to premiere in this month’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Tributes poured in over social media as news of his death spread. Courteney Cox, who starred in the Scream movies, posted on Twitter: “Today the world lost a great man, my friend and mentor, Wes Craven. My heart goes out to his family.” Fellow Scream actress Rose McGowan also tweeted: “Shedding tears now. A giant has left us.”

Craven is survived by his wife, producer Iya Labunka, a son, a daughter and a stepdaughter.

In 2010, he told The Los Angeles Times: “My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, ‘That’s a wrap,’ after the last shot, fall over dead and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me.” AGENCIES

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