Slasher flick master Wes Craven dies after battle with brain cancer
Celebrity
Slasher flick master Wes Craven dies after battle with brain cancer
Wes Craven, the prolific writer-director who startled audiences with iconic suburban slasher movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream,” has died. He was 76. In a statement, Craven’s family said that he died in his Los Angeles home Sunday, surrounded by family, after battling brain cancer. Craven helped reinvent the teen horror genre with 1984’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” The movie and its indelible, razor-fingered villain, Freddy Krueger, (played by Robert Englund) led to several sequels, as did his 1996 success, “Scream.”
He was a consummate filmmaker and his body of work will live on forever.
Weinstein Co. co-chairman Bob Weinstein, whose Dimension Films produced “Scream”
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” about teenage girls abducted and taken into the woods. Made for just $87,000, the film, though graphic enough to be censored in many countries, was a hit. Film critic Roger Ebert said it was “about four times as good as you’d expect.” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” however, catapulted Craven to far-greater renown in 1984. The Ohio-set film about teenagers (including a then-unknown Johnny Depp) who are stalked in their dreams, which Craven wrote and directed, spawned a never-ending franchise that has carried on until, most recently, a 2010 remake.
