Wes Craven

Born in Cleveland (Ohio), on August 2, 1939, Wesley Earl Craven belonged to a Baptist family. After the death of his father, who suffered a heart attack, he has a hard childhood, marked by constant moving, his mother’s search for work and financial difficulties. Contrary to most directors, who declare that they became fond of movies as children, Craven doesn’t have money to go, he doesn’t even have television, and he devours books that he checks out from public libraries.

Graduated in English and Psychology, from the University of Wheaton, in Illinois, he was a professor of literature and humanities. He leaves it because of the movie bug, and ends up working as a sound editor in a New York post-production company.

He started in horror movies by chance. “It was a coincidence. Someone I knew had to do a horror movie as a producer. He asked me to help him write something scary. If they liked it I could direct it and that’s how it came about. I discovered that I had a talent for the genre,” Craven recalls. .

In this way, he made his feature film debut with The Last House on the Left (1972) , an unconfessed remake in a gore key of The Maiden’s Spring , by Ingmar Bergman , as it revolves around a family that unknowingly welcomes the guys who have raped and murdered his daughter. The critics were primed with a film that they considered “disgusting and sadistic”. Since then he tries not to read the reviews. “I’ve learned to avoid them. I once read one of a guy who said he’d rather have needles stuck in his eyes than watch a movie of mine again, and it hurts, of course. You avoid them because they can destroy you,” explains the director.

Equally hard is his second work, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) , about a family trying to survive a group of dangerous mutants in the desert. She was also vilified for her violence. But Craven is convinced that his films have a therapeutic effect. “I don’t roll them to be scary, but to release it”, he repeats himself over and over again.

The witchcraft film The Two Faces of Julia starred Linda Blair , who had been the girl in The Exorcist . Deadly Blessing , about a dangerous cult, featured a young Sharon Stone and veteran Ernest Borgnine . It is followed by Swamp Thing , a disastrous film that adapted the adventures of a famous comic book character, and the telefilm Invitation to Hell .

A story in the newspaper about some young people who had died while they were sleeping would inspire the film that would consecrate him. His cat, who destroyed the sofa with her claws, gave him the idea to conceive the claws of the murderer Freddy Krueger, whom he decided to dress in a striped sweater very similar to the one he wore almost every day in his days as a teenager. student. Apparently, the name comes from a bully from his school, who made his life miserable.

Thus was born the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street , which oddly enough was about to be produced by Disney, in exchange for Craven renouncing part of the violence. He did not give in to Mickey Mouse’s pressure, and ended up getting him endorsed by the New Line project. The film was a great success, as it cost two million dollars and raised 25, which saved the company from bankruptcy.

The film marked the film debut of Johnny Depp himself , who died a brutal death in a devouring bed.

Since then, Craven has been known as the master of horror. “It bothers me less that they call me that than about the needles in my eyes,” jokes the filmmaker. His filmography has had its ups and downs, as it combines imaginative films, such as The Serpent and the Rainbow , with Bill Pullman discovering the world of voodoo in Haiti, with others clearly unsuccessful, such as Shocker: 100,000 volts of terror or The Basement of Fear. . The meta-cinematographic Wes Craven’s New Nightmare stands out , a fun twist on the Freddy saga, in which Heather Langenkamp , ​​the original actress of the film, finds herself harassed in real life by the monstrous murderer.

After the horrible comedy with Eddie Murphy A Vampire Loose in Brooklyn , he recovered that meta-cinematic line in the inspired Scream , a genre film that reflects on the rules and clichés of cinema cultivated by Craven. The director also allows himself to remember his good work in some masterful tension sequence like the one with the camera that supposedly shows the murderer, but which is outdated. He had a script by a young man who was passionate about the debuting genre, Kevin Williamson , and made teen horror fashionable. Again with Williamson, Craven shot a second part and a third, much inferior to the original. A decade later, in 2011, he brought the characters back in Scream 4 ., which included reflections on the evolution of terror in recent years, and argued that violence has been radicalized in films like Saw , to the detriment of the story and the characters.

In the meantime, Craven had time to treat himself to getting out of terror for once, and shooting nothing less than a drama with Meryl Streep , Music from the Heart , with the diva playing a woman who, in order to support her two little ones becomes a violin teacher at a Harlem institute. Craven was very excited about the project, because it was a tribute to teachers, a profession he practiced in his youth. The protagonist worked so hard on the role that she came to learn to play the violin and, of course, she got another Oscar nomination, as usual (she accumulates a whopping 16, and finally won twice).

In recent years, Craven has shot the unsuccessful The Curse and Damned Souls , and he has succeeded in his approach to the thriller genre with the successful Night Flight . He was also the author of the graveyard fragment, with Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer , in the group film Paris, je t’aime .

Divorced from Bonnie Brocker, with whom he had two children, he joined Millicent E. Meyer, a stewardess who after playing small roles in his films (she was a nurse in A Nightmare on Elm Street ) began a career as an actress. Craven had subsequently been paired with producer Iya Labunka. His latest film as a director belongs, of course, to a horror saga: Scream 4 .