Wes Craven was a renowned American film director, writer and producer known for directing influential and iconic horror films. Some of his most famous works include Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street featuring Freddy Krueger, and Scream which revived the slasher film genre. Craven enjoyed a long and prolific career directing both TV and films spanning from the 1970s up until his death in 2015, crafting tales that often explored human cruelty and the battle between sanity and the unconscious mind.

1. Wes Craven

2. Born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio,
Wes Craven went on to direct horror films
like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have
Eyes and Swamp Thing before helming the
infamous Nightmare on Elm Street. He
scored another major hit with Scream,
which spawned three sequels as of 2011.
Craven also directed the school
drama Music of the Heart and thriller Red
Eye, along with a number of TV projects.

3. Master of Horror
Craven made an impressive film
debut in 1972's The Last House on
the Left, which he wrote and
directed. The movie mined human
cruelty to fuel the horrific tale of
teenage girls abducted by
deranged prisoners. The evil that
people can inflict on others
provided the central conflict for
another now-classic Craven
film The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

4. In 1984, Craven gave audiences thrills and chills with A
Nightmare on Elm Street. The movie featured Freddy
Krueger, a supernatural killer who attacked his victims in
their dreams and gave a young Johnny Depp one of his
first film roles. A Nightmare on Elm Street launched a
hugely successful film franchise, but Craven had little to
do with any of the sequels. He only wrote the
screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (1987). In
1994, Craven returned to the character of Freddy
Krueger with New Nightmare.

5. Craven tried his hand at directing a humor-horror
hybrid with 1995's Vampire in Brooklyn starring
Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett. But he enjoyed
one of his biggest hits the following year as the
director of Scream, a horror film that played with
and made fun of many of the genre's standard
tropes and tricks. Written by Kevin Williamson and
starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David
Arquette, the movie brought in more than $100
million and spawned several sequels.

6. He also directed Red Eye (2005), a suspense
thriller about a young woman (Rachel McAdams) who
gets caught up in an assassination plot, which proved to
be another departure from Craven's standard fare.
Craven returned to the genre that made him famous in
2010 with My Soul to Take, which he wrote and
directed. In an interview with Variety, he described the
movie as "a coming-of-age horror film." The following
year, Craven returned to the popular Scream franchise
to direct its fourth installment.

7. About the criticism of teen horror
movies, Craven says: "What
threatens them or enrages them or
what makes them feel like they must
protect youth is intensity. So the
more real something is, the more
intense it is, the more they want to
cut it out."

8. It seems that in a lot of his movies he likes to
present a battle of sanity and battles between
the conscious and unconscious mind. He liked
to focus on main life events.his scenes very
well demonstrate cinematic style which
featured the insanity style to realist situation.
It creates empathy for the character and
makes us jump at the end.