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 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.

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)

He made his first film, Together, in 1971 with Sean S. Cunningham, who later created cult slasher Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th. Craven and Cunningham broke through with Last House on the Left in the early XNUMXs. Still controversial to this day, the splatter film revolutionized the way horror films were shot and, through its critical reference to the Vietnam War, gave the genre an almost political message in terms of depicting violence and torture. He wrote the book loosely based on a film by Ingmar Bergman and directed it: a couple of 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 perpetrator-victims are mostly teenagers - just like the consumers of these films.

He continued his no-nonsense and disturbing style in 1977's The Hills Have Eyes. The story of a family hunted and killed in the wilderness by a pack of mutant cannibals became an even bigger hit than Last House On The Left. In the mid-1984s, Craven finally had his breakthrough when he brought Freddy to the screen with the nightmare killer in «Nightmare on Elm Street». With the nightmare killer Freddy he brought a new dimension of horror to the big screen. Wes Craven made millions shudder. The film cost just $1,8 million in 15 and grossed 1994 times that. Nine films were made in total, a television series and various comics and the like. And main character Freddy Krueger, the man with the 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 meanwhile been watered down by the sequels, to a dignified end - which was put into perspective by "Freddy vs. Jason" in 1996. In 2, Craven succeeded with "Scream - Schrei!" to breathe new life into the slasher film genre that was believed to be dead. The killer in the Munch mask (Ghost) quickly became a pop icon and the satirical tale about a group of teenagers who, despite their knowledge of horror films, end up dying the way the horror films depict them, became a box-office hit was even surpassed financially by the successor «Scream XNUMX».

Top 10 Wes Craven Movies (Part 2)

"Scream" cost 15 million, and he earned 17 times that. 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 - nobody was above the butcher films. In addition to his work on "Scream," Craven also directed "Music of the Heart," the true story of a Brooklyn music teacher who ventured out of familiar horror territory. Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. After Craven finished the Scream trilogy with «Scream 2000» in 3, he first tried the werewolf genre, which marked a both financial and artistic failure with «Cursed» (cursed) in 2005. In the same year, however, the butcher king was able to find his way back to his old form with "Red Eye", a thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. With this film, the doyen of horror went for a less bloodthirsty, but more psychological horror, signaling a departure from the slasher genre.

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

Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 1

Thank you Wes for your gory and deep horror movies! Thank you for your last house on the left, the mounds of bloody eyes, and the swamp thing! Thanks for all the years with Freddy Krueger razor blades! Thank you for Rainbow Serpent, Shocker and the House of the Forgotten! We will never forget you «Sultan of Slash»! Thank you for your films and the violence they portray that 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 and glorification, in contrast to directors like Tarantino and Roberto Rodriguez. For you, violence and horror were never aesthetic or just a means to an end, they served you to clearly distinguish between good and evil. Thank you Wes Craven and to quote one of your characters: «Oh, I was not 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! We'll see each other no matter where...

Wes Craven Masters of Horror part 2