Wes Craven Biography

Filmmaker Wes Craven was the creator of the horror film franchises A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.

A college teacher with a graduate degree in Philosophy, he changed careers in the late 1960s and became a production assistant in film.

Craven worked as a film editor on low-budget movies, and on his own made two classic horror movies of the era, The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Craven’s script for A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was a hard sell to major movie studios, but its success changed the Hollywood horror market, and Craven scored his first mainstream hit as a “master of horror.”

His “slasher” movies were derided by critics and loved by moviegoers. During the 1980s, he directed five episodes of a re-vamped The Twilight Zone, but did only a few films.

Then he did Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), whose self-aware irony paved the way for the huge success of Scream (1996, written by Kevin Williamson).

Besides the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream sequels, Craven’s films include The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), The People Under The Stairs (1991) and Red Eye (2005, starring Cillian Murphy) and the Meryl Streep feature, Music of the Heart (1999).