Film director

Born: August 2, 1939;

Died: August 30, 2015

Wes Craven, who has died at the age of 76, has a claim to have reinvented the American horror genre three times in his career as a film director that stretched over more than 40 years.

Craven – always an erudite, articulate defender of the horror film – was responsible for two hugely successful horror film franchises, firstly with his 1984 film Nightmare on Elm Street, and then with his 1996 film Scream, which combined jokey self-referentiality with cleverly staged shock sequences.

But he first gained attention with his very first film Last House on the Left, in 1972, a brutal revenge movie that was in fact influenced by Craven's exposure to the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman.

Inspired by Bergman's Virgin Spring, Last House on the Left told the story of parents who take revenge on the murderers of their daughter. It came two years before Michael Winner's film Death Wish and helped spark a cycle of revenge movies.

"I wanted to make a scary film that felt really scary, and true," Craven once said, "and because I didn't know anything about directing I just staged it like real events."

Craven was born in Cleveland to blue-collar parents who were also strict Baptists. His father died when he was just five.

Craven was forbidden from going to the cinema by his church growing up. By his early thirties he reckoned he had been to the cinema only a handful of times in his life.

After earning a master's in philosophy he became a college professor. But when he moved to upstate New York to teach humanities he was exposed to European arthouse cinema. "It just knocked me off my chair, the imagination and everything … guys like Bergman and Fellini really appealed to me and the idea of filmmaking just somehow rang my bell."

He left his job as a college professor and teamed up with Sean Cunningham who would himself become a successful horror director with Friday the 13th. To make Last House on the Left he separated from his then wife and headed to New York where he lived in an apartment alongside "musicians, drug dealers, PH.D candidates and anthropologists".

Written against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Last House on the Left offered a brutal viewing experience that may have offered some catharsis for its creator. "I had so much rage as a result of years of being made to be a good boy," Craven later told author Jason Zinoman.

The film was critically dismissed and indeed would later be banned in the UK as a "video nasty", but it was a financial success for Craven.

In 1977 he returned with another horror film The Hills Have Eyes, before struggling with a low-budget version of the DC comic Swamp Thing and a religious horror film Deadly Blessing, which is notable for not much more than an early appearance for Sharon Stone and an early take on a bath time sequence which would be appropriated in his next success.

Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 revitalised his career. The film in which a child serial killer with a burned face and bladed gloves haunts and kills teenagers through their dreams gave an early role for Johnny Depp and combined shocks with an at times trancelike atmosphere and Craven's canny eye for pop surrealism. In the film's dark world of dreams, walls stretch like skin and blood pours upwards in torrents as the boundaries between reality and dream are transgressed.

The idea for the film came when Craven read a story in a newspaper about a boy who was frightened to go to sleep because he thought something bad was going to happen to him if he did. "The story shook me and that story planted the seed in my mind for what would become the character of Freddy Krueger."

Freddy was the name of a childhood bully who bothered Craven when he was a kid and the film allowed the director to explore some of his favourite themes – powerlessness, loss of control and the abuse of power. "Freddy stood for the savage side of male adulthood. He was the ultimate bad father," Craven reflected later.

"I find an effective method for horror is to take very real things and to take real fears and to put a face on them in the form of the movie villains".

The movie's heroine played by Helen Langenkamp is one of horror cinema's most capable "final girls" – the name given to the heroines in horror films who make it to the end credits by the academic Carol Clover.

Inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis's character in John Carpenter's Halloween (a film Craven admired), Langenkamp's character defeats Freddy by pulling him into the real world.

That did not stop the character from turning up in a number of sequels that became increasingly gimmicky and gorily comic. Craven rebooted the franchise with New Nightmare in 1994, a clever take on the original which starred Langenkamp as herself being haunted by Freddy Kreuger because she refuses to do another film. It was one of the less successful Nightmare films but it did plant seeds for Craven's next success.

Two years later Scream once again galvanised an ailing horror genre. The film, which featured Neve Campbell as its final girl, benefitted hugely from Kevin Williamson's smart, stiletto-sharp script, the work of someone who knew all of the genre's tropes and took huge delight in sending them up and having fun with them. Craven's direction, however, ensured that the film also had a "he's behind you" thrill to it and a surprising emotional punch.

Seeing the film on its opening weekend, the director Edgar Wright said, "That's the kind of movie I want to make." Years later Scream 4 would use a clip from Wright's debut Sean of the Dead.

Given the chance Craven would have liked to make films that broke out of the horror genre. He did manage once, with Music of the Heart, a not totally successful biopic of one of the founders of the Harlem School of Music, which at least earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination.

But for the most part he was content to make horror films for as long as he could make them. As he said in an interview last year, "If I have to do the rest of the films in the genre, no problem. If I'm going to be a caged bird, I'll sing the best song I can."

Craven is survived by his third wife, film producer Iya Labunka, whom he wed in 2004, his sister Carol, son Jonathan, daughter Jessica, grandchildren Miles, Max and Myra-Jean and stepdaughter Nina.

TEDDY JAMIESON