A former humanities professor turned brand name fright-master, producer, writer, director Craven is clearly an intellectual artist trapped in a disreputable genre. He entered filmmaking as an editor and assistant producer to exploitation producer Sean Cunningham (who would later create Jason for the "Friday the 13th" movies) on several low-budget comedies and skin flicks before graduating to the position of writer-director with a modestly budgeted ($87,000), feature "Last House on the Left" (1972). Still a potent shocker, this grimly realistic tale of rape, murder, and revenge was loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's 1960 classic, "The Virgin Spring". The intensity of the film shocked many--Leonard Maltin's "Movie Guide" damns it as "repugnant" and "really sick"--including its creator.
Craven spent the next five years working as a film editor and unproduced screenwriter. He tried his hand at numerous genres including biopic, war, romance, and comedy but there were no takers. Finally as his savings ran out, a reluctant Craven accepted an offer to make another horror film. His infamy in polite filmgoing circles grew with the extraordinary thriller "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977). Brought in for an impressive $225,000, this profoundly troubling tale of an All-American family becalmed in the desert and beset by cannibalistic mutants became a genre classic of the 1970s. According to the British magazine TIME OUT, "exploitation themes are used to maximum effect.... A heady mix of ironic allegory and seat-edge tension." For better or worse, Craven was firmly typed as a horror filmmaker.
Four years passed before Craven was able to complete another feature, but he did manage to helm a TV-movie "Stranger in Our House" (NBC, 1978) starring B-queen Linda Blair in a tale of teenage witchcraft. He returned to features with "Deadly Blessing" (1981), an uneven but frightening tale of a woman terrorized by a rural religious sect. (This project may have had a personal dimension for the filmmaker. Craven himself was the product of a strict fundamentalist Baptist upbringing that taught that movies were a tool of the Devil. In fact he did not see his first film until college.)
Craven finally gained some measure of success and industry clout with "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984), in which the horrific Freddy Krueger haunts the dreamscapes of small-town American teens. The hard-edged and strikingly surreal original was followed by five popular and increasingly campy sequels. The franchise generated over a half a billion dollars but the creator received a paltry $400,000 after signing away his rights so as to secure the director's chair for the first film. Nonetheless, having his name associated with the successful series led to expanded career opportunities.
Craven began working regularly in TV in the mid-80s. His projects included helming first season episodes of the 1985 CBS revival of "The Twilight Zone" and the TV-movie "Chiller" (CBS, 1985), and creating and producing the short-lived anthology series "The Nightmare Cafe" (NBC, 1992), which reunited Craven with "Elm Street" star Robert Englund. His next feature, the oddball teen horror romance "Deadly Friend" (1986), was seriously marred by censorship and studio interference. "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (1988), an ambitious and atmospheric but ultimately half-baked period piece set in a pre-revolutionary Haiti, has its fair share of admirers.
Craven attempted (and failed) to create another Freddy Krueger in serial killer Horace Pinker, the persistent villain of the engagingly silly thriller "Shocker" (1989). He attempted to comment on the exploitation of the poor in "The People Under the Stairs" (1991), with uneven results. Craven finally returned to classic filmmaking form with "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" (1994). He crafted a complex and highly reflexive narrative about the nature and function of horror films that incorporated dreams he had while making the film. Set in the "real" world of filmmaking, he and his main stars played themselves in a project that felt like "The Player" with a bigger body count. Craven wisely eliminated the camp aspects that had overtaken the series, and it garnered some respectful notices. The same cannot be said for his follow-up feature, a relatively high-profile horror comedy vehicle for Eddie Murphy, then in the midst of a serious career slump.
Unlike his last Freddy opus, "Vampire in Brooklyn" (1996) was clearly a work-for-hire assignment for Craven. A horror fan himself, Murphy contacted the genre auteur with a script he had co-written with his brothers. Though marketed as "a comic tale of horror and seduction", the film played like an uneven vampire outing with moments of comic relief. Both press and public were unimpressed and the film found an early grave. Nonetheless, Craven emerged from the project not only unscathed but on something of a roll. The following year found him with half a dozen projects in various stages of development. Craven helmed, but did not script, "Scream" (1996), a mainstream comedy-thriller hit boasting a fashionable young cast that included Courteney Cox, Drew Barrymore and David Arquette. While such a project was clearly good for Craven's ascendant career as an industry player, longtime fans may feel that something vital had been lost. Nevertheless, he was on to a new franchise, helming the concluding installments "Scream 2" (1997) and "Scream 3" (2000). In between, Craven completed an unusual project, "Music of the Heart" (1999), a biopic of music teacher Roberta Guispari-Tzavaras who had been profiled in the 1995 Oscar-nominated documentary "Small Wonders" with Meryl Streep.
After a short hiatus from the big screen Craven re-teamed with the "Scream" screenwriter Kevin Williamson for the werewolf thriller "Cursed" (2005) starring Christina Ricci, but the film's fangs were not able to take much of a bite out of the box office. Much better--indeed, his best film since the first "Scream"--was his follow-up thriller "Red Eye" (2005), which featured a resourceful hotel employee (Rachel McAdams) secretly menaced on a red-eye flight by a mysterious stranger threatening her father's life. Craven again showed his extrodinary skill in building suspense and crafting scares while still respecting his audience's intelligence.