Posted by Goodbye Wes Craven
On 30 August 2015 Wes Craven passed away, the famous horror director who created A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not everyone knows that his first job was teaching. After a degree in English and psychology and a master’s in philosophy and writing at Johns Hopkins University, he taught English at Westminster College in Pennsylvania and then humanities at Clarkson College in Potsdam, New York: a steady job that he decided to leave to follow his true passion, cinema. In those very years he bought a used 16 mm camera and began shooting his first short films with his students.
At first he did odd jobs and learned by watching, working as an editor and messenger in New York, then put his knowledge into practice, as often happens in this field, in porn films shot under a pseudonym. Even after his first success he briefly returned to the genre, with a 1975 film signed “Abe Snake”.
In 1972 he shot his first real film, “The Last House on the Left”, so raw that it was banned or cut in several countries, remade in 2009, produced by Craven but directed by Dennis Iliadis.
In 1977 he made “The Hills Have Eyes”, which became a cult film and was remade in 2006.
But success came in the ’80s with “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984), inspired by a series of news stories he had read in the Los Angeles Times about young Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia who died in their sleep in the middle of terrible nightmares. Its protagonist, Freddy Krueger, already echoed in his name the villain of “The Last House on the Left”, Krug Stillo, and the name Fred reportedly came from a boy who bullied him as a child.
The success was huge and launched one of the best horror sagas, with several sequels and a 2010 remake. The film also marked the screen debut of a very young Johnny Depp and was one of the first hits of New Line Cinema, which for years was called “the house that Freddy built”. In this period he also worked on films for American television.
In the ’90s he struck gold again with “Scream” (1996), which first became a tetralogy all directed by him, the last chapter in 2011. After his death the saga carried on without him, with Scream (2022), Scream VI (2023) and Scream 7 (2026), a sign of how alive Ghostface still is in the imagination of horror lovers.
In his last years he worked mostly as a producer and collaborated on the remakes of his films. Sadly, he had long been ill with brain cancer, which took him on 30 August 2015 at his home in Los Angeles, at the age of 76.
I owe a lot to Wes Craven, he created two icons that shaped my childhood and teenage years. I remember always watching the Nightmare and Scream films on VHS, and how they fed my already strong interest in horror and the macabre.
Thank you for creating Freddy, my favourite villain.
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