Wes Craven, born Wesley Earl Craven (Cleveland, August 2, 1939 – Los Angeles, August 30, 2015), was an American director, screenwriter, film producer, and actor.
He is renowned for directing cult films such as The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Scream saga (up until the fourth film).
After a brief period playing guitar in a local rock band, the future director graduated in literature and philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and gradually fell in love with cinema.
Although he found a stable job as a teacher at Johns Hopkins, he soon decided to leave teaching to pursue a career in filmmaking, working as a jack-of-all-trades at a small production company.
He learned the essential techniques of editing and took on a few small jobs on his own, such as commercials and pornographic films.
It was during this time that he met future director Sean S. Cunningham, with whom he produced his first feature film, the softcore movie Together.
The Early Years
With the goal of shocking audiences and inspired by Ingmar Bergman, his favorite director, Craven made his first real film titled *The Last House on the Left*.
An exploitation film inspired by the Swedish director’s classic The Virgin Spring.
Though made on a shoestring budget, the film had a certain impact on audiences at the time, particularly for its realistic, gory, extreme, and cynical style.
However, negative reactions were not lacking, especially from critics who labeled the film as “cinematically inept.”
Later, Wes Craven refused to rewatch this work, of which he almost regretted, but over time, The Last House on the Left would acquire cult status.
The success of the film was repeated five years later with The Hills Have Eyes, another movie that became a cult classic.
Craven’s horror, much like Hitchcock’s, strikes the viewer in an unexpected way.
Wes Craven believed that horror lurks within our everyday surroundings, waiting only for the right moment to reveal itself and unleash its destructive desire.
Craven states: “I’m interested in scaring people on a deep level, not just making them jump out of their seats. My first two films shattered all the conventions regarding how violence should be treated in cinema.
Previously, film violence was polite and clean.
I made it painful, prolonged, shocking, and very human. And I’m the one who made killers human.”
Craven himself had an unusual cultural background for a director of action and horror films.
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