Horror movie master Wes Craven dead at 76

LOS ANGELES — Wes Craven, the prolific writer-director who startled audiences with iconic suburban slashers like “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream,” has died. He was 76.

Craven’s family said he died Sunday at his Los Angeles home, surrounded by family, after battling brain cancer.

Craven helped reinvent the teen horror genre with 1984’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” The movie and its indelible, razor-fingered villain Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund, led to several sequels, as did his 1996 success, “Scream.”

“He was a consummate filmmaker and his body of work will live on forever,” said Weinstein Co. co-chairman Bob Weinstein, whose Dimension Films produced “Scream.” ”My brother [Harvey Weinstein] and I are eternally grateful for all his collaborations with us.”

Besides his work in horror films, Craven also directed the 1999 drama “Music of the Heart,” which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination. But Craven’s name will always be synonymous with horror.

“Horror films don’t create fear,” Craven said. “They release it.”

Wesley Earl “Wes” Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1939, to a strictly Baptist family. Though he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and writing from John Hopkins University and briefly taught as a college professor in Pennsylvania and New York, his start in movies was in pornography, where he worked under pseudonyms.

Craven’s feature debut under his own name was “The Last House on the Left,” a 1972 horror film inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” about teenage girls abducted and taken into the woods. Made for just $87,000, the film — graphic enough to be censored in many countries — was a hit. Roger Ebert said it was “about four times as good as you’d expect.”

“Nightmare on Elm Street” catapulted him to far greater renown in 1984. The film, set in Ohio, was about teenagers, including a then-unknown Johnny Depp, who are stalked in their dreams. Craven wrote and directed it and it spawned a never-ending franchise that has carried on until, most recently, a 2010 remake.

The concept, Craven said, came from his own youth in Cleveland — specifically an Elm Street cemetery and a homeless man that inspired Krueger’s look.

Along with John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” defined a teen horror tradition where helpless teens were preyed upon by supernatural villains in morality tales. Usually, promiscuous girls were the first to go.

“There is something about the American dream, the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can,” Craven once said. “And the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that’s not the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways, kind of an additional rage.”

The formula would work again for Craven with “Scream,” albeit with an added layer of self-aware spoof. By 1996, the Craven-style slasher was a well-known type, even if it wasn’t always made by him. He had no involvement with many of the “Elm Street” sequels.

“Scream,” written by Kevin Williamson and starring a cast including Drew Barrymore and Neve Campbell, played off the horror clichés Craven helped create. It spawned three sequels, all of which Craven directed.

Craven increasingly oversaw a cottage industry of horror branded with his name, including remakes of his 1977 film “The Hills Have Eyes” (2006) and “The House on the Left” (2009).

Craven also was a published author — the 2000 novel “The Fountain Society” — and an ardent bird conservationist, serving as a longtime member of the Audubon California board of directors. He recently penned a monthly column “Wes Craven’s The Birds” for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

He was active up until his death. Craven had numerous television projects in development, including a new “Scream” series for MTV. He’s an executive producer of the upcoming film “The Girl in the Photographs,” which is to premiere in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Craven is survived by his wife, producer Iya Labunka; a son; a daughter; and a stepdaughter.

In 2010, he told The Los Angeles Times: “My goal is to die in my 90s on the set, say, ‘That’s a wrap,’ after the last shot, fall over dead and have the grips go out and raise a beer to me.”

DAISY NGUYEN AND JAKE COYLE, Associated Press Writers

Coyle reported from New York.