The man, who never watched horror films himself, knew what people wanted: “Blood! It's always blood. People scream,” he said a few years ago. As simple as the recipe sounds, Craven was very successful with it. The American was the most successful horror director of our time, revolutionizing the genre and creating several classics such as “The Last House On The Left”, “Scream” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. He died on Sunday at the age of 76, in the presence of his family at his home in Los Angeles. The filmmaker was suffering from a brain tumor.

Master of Horror Wes Craven has died

Craven grew up in a family of devout Baptists in Cleveland, Ohio: alcohol, tobacco, card games were banned - and so was the cinema. At 17, the future master of horror still had dreams and actually wanted to become a fighter pilot in the Navy. Someone who really takes off from the aircraft carrier. However, when he was 19, transverse myelitis, a form of spinal cord inflammation, got in his way and he was paralyzed from the chest down for a while. He could not move for three months, the rehab took a year and it took much longer to fully recover. The young Wesley studied literature and psychology at the renowned Johns Hopkins University and a little later worked as a teacher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. He came to Hollywood by accident. But he stayed, reinvented an entire film genre and thus became one of the most important directors of the last few decades.

Top 10 Wes Craven Movies (Part 1)
Top 10 Wes Craven Movies (Part 1)

He made his first film “Together” in 1971 with Sean S. Cunningham, who later created the cult slasher Jason Vorhees from “Friday the 13th”. Craven and Cunningham made their breakthrough with “Last House on the Left” in the early XNUMXs. The splatter film, which is still controversial today, revolutionized the way horror films were made and, through its critical reference to the Vietnam War, gave the genre an almost political message in terms of the depiction of violence and torture. He wrote and directed the book based on a film by Ingmar Bergman: A few young men rape and murder two girls and the parents take bloody revenge. That was and remained Wes Craven's recipe and was copied dozens of times: revenge! The revenge of victims or their relatives on perpetrators. And the perpetrators who become victims are mostly teenagers - just like the consumers of these films.

Freddy Krueger

He continued his straightforward and disturbing style in 1977's "The Hills Have Eyes." The story of a family hunted and killed in the wasteland by a pack of mutated cannibals became an even bigger success than “Last House On The Left”. Craven's final breakthrough came in the mid-1984s when he brought the nightmare murderer Freddy to the big screen in “Nightmare on Elm Street.” With the nightmare murderer Freddy, he brought a new dimension of horror to the screen. Wes Craven made millions of people shudder. The film cost just $1,8 million in 15 and grossed 1994 times as much. A total of nine films were made, a television series and various comics and the like. And main character Freddy Krueger, the man with bladed hands who went from perpetrator to victim to perpetrator, became a cult figure. In 2003, with “Freddy’s New Nightmare”, he tried to bring the story about the slasher Freddy, which had since been diluted by the sequels, to a worthy end – which was put into perspective again by “Freddy vs. Jason” in 1996. In 2, Craven achieved success with “Scream!” to fill the slasher film genre, which was believed to be dead, with new life. The murderer in the Munch mask (Ghost) quickly became a pop icon and the satirical story about a group of teenagers who, despite their knowledge of horror films, ultimately die in the same way as depicted in these films, became a box office hit was even surpassed financially by the successor “Scream XNUMX”.

Top 10 Wes Craven Movies (Part 2)
Top 10 Wes Craven Movies (Part 2)

“Scream” cost 15 million and grossed 17 times that amount. No wonder “Scream 2” came less than a year later and then “Scream 3” and “Scream 4”. Drew Barrymore, Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Liev Schreiber, Patrick Dempsey, Jenny McCarthy – no one was too good for the slaughter films. In addition to his work on “Scream,” Craven also directed “Music of the Heart,” the true story of a Brooklyn music teacher that took Craven out of familiar horror territory. Meryl Streep received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. After Craven ended the Scream trilogy with “Scream 2000” in 3, he first tried his hand at the werewolf genre, which marked both a financial and artistic failure with “Cursed” in 2005. In the same year, however, the King of the Butchers was able to return to form with “Red Eye”, a thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. With this film, the old master of horror focused on a less bloodthirsty and more psychological horror, thereby signaling a departure from the slasher genre.

Scream

“As a horror movie maker, I say: I'm going to show you the absolute truth, and it's bloody and horrible and dangerous,” Craven once said. And so he was dismembered, slashed and hanged, eaten and tortured, everything beautifully bloody. Craven probably slaughtered more people than any other director, but he did it with style. But he actually didn't like horror at all. He didn't watch his colleagues' films and he didn't even watch "Alien" or Mel Gibson's Bible adaptation "The Passion of the Christ" because he would get scared! His last work was the television series “Scream”, based on his films, but on which he only worked as a producer. Craven died of a brain tumor on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles surrounded by his family and love, according to the official statement. He leaves behind his wife Iya Labunka, to whom he was married for the third time since 2004.

Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 1
Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 1

Thank you Wes for your bloody and profound horror films! Thanks for your last house on the left, the hills of bloody eyes and the thing from the swamp! Thanks for all these years of Freddy Krueger razor blades! Thanks for the Snake in the Rainbow, Shocker and the House of the Forgotten! We will never forget you “Sultan of Slash”! Thank you for your films and the violence depicted in them, which shaped contemporary American horror cinema. Your visualization of violence was always realistic and you showed us violence and torture as the ugliest form of the human soul, without any stylization or glorification, in complete contrast to directors like Tarantino and Roberto Rodriguez. For you, violence and horror were never aesthetic or purely a means to an end; they served to clearly demarcate between good and evil. Thanks Wes Craven and to quote one of your characters: “Oh, I wasn’t made for heaven. No, I don't want to go to heaven. Hell is much better. “Think of all the interesting people you’re going to meet down there!” Thanks Wes, you were a good guy and I loved your work! See you no matter where...

Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 2
Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 2

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