Wes Craven has become synonymous with genre bending and innovative horror, challenging audiences with his bold vision. Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Caroline reunites the director with Dimension Films and Kevin Williamson, as well as with stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, to re-boot the beloved franchise. Craven again exhibits his knack for spotting important talent, with a cast of young actors bringing us a totally new breed of Woodsboro high schoolers, including Emma Robert and Hayden Pannetierre.
Father of Jonathan Craven and Jessica Craven.
"The" Elm Street is located in Potsdam, NY (a small town just south of the Canadian border). Craven was a Humanities Professor at Clarkson College, also in Potsdam.
Rumoured to have named his onscreen horror creation Freddy Kruger for a boy who used to bully him in high school.
In 1976 he acted in "Tales That Will Tear Your Heart Out," a project being made under the supervision of friend Roy Frumkes , who was teaching at a state university at that time. Shortly after the filming, the raw stock was mistakingly re-exposed by another student, so both days shooting were lost.
Donated to the Planned Parenthood/Dream Catchers Foundation charity a auction ten-minute personal phone call and two premiere tickets to his next motion picture, Pulse (2006/I) . He has also donated the original mask from his movie Scream along with other original props. The auction started June 19, 2002, and the props auction started June 29, 2002.
He is an avid birdwatcher.
His father died when he was four years old.
He was the disc jockey for the campus radio station at Clarkson College, where he was a humanities professor.
He nearly turned down the option to direct the hit Scream because the first scene with Drew Barrymore reminded him too vividly of the climax sequence of The Last House on the Left , his first film.
Directed a documentary about former president Bill Clinton. Craven and the film crew followed Clinton for three hours into the White House a few days before his departure. (January 2001)
Former son-in-law, composer Michael Maccini.
When actor-producer Robert Evans suffered a stroke May 6, 1998, Craven was having a drink with him in Evans screening room when he collapsed in front of him. Evans later quipped, "I really scared the shit out of the king of horror."
Co-wrote the screenplay for Pulse (2006/I) with Vince Gilligan. The script was based on Kiyoshi Kurosawa s original Japanese horror film. Craven and Gilligan scripted the final draft in the fall of 2002 for Miramaxs Dimension Films. The production for this film should have started on October 1, 2002, in Los Angeles. In July 2003, Dimensions chairman Bob Weinstein announced that Pulse (2006/I) would never be produced because it was too similar to The Ring .
Developed the "evil house" premise for the computer game "Wes Cravens Principles of Fear." Although the game won About Games Bronze Medal award for Interactive Fiction when the prototype was demonstrated at the 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, the game was never completed, due to the financial failure of the games publisher.
Was set to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace but was replaced after creative differences with star Christopher Reeve.
His vision of Freddy Kruger came from a childhood memory. When he was 10 years old, he looked out the window of the apartment he lived in and a drunk man dressed similar to Freddy was looking directly at him and continued to stay there looking at the window for several minutes. This scared him, so, later on, he decided this will be the look for Freddy.
Profiled in "Hollywood Horror from the Directors Chair: Six Filmmakers in the Franchise of Fear" by Simon Wilkinson (McFarland, 2008).
Directed one Oscar-nominated performance: Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart .
He had a highly dysfunctional relationship with his parents, mainly having been raised by his severe, hyper-religious mother, whom he never allowed to watch his films, and never having a close relationship with his distant, violent-tempered father. His mothers judgmental influence caused him to be too terrified to talk to a girl until he was at college and lead him to marry, in his opinion, too young, and arguably contributed to the angry, bleak themes of his early films.
(February 2013) Authored newspaper article about his current, off-the-set downtime entitled "Retirement: Scarier Than Freddy Krueger" in NYTimes.
Based the story of A Nightmare On Elm Street on a news report about a group of young men who died in their sleep during horrific nightmares despite having no history of health problems and showing no specific cause of death.
Freddy Kruegers appearance (especially the dirty clothes and hat) was inspired by a hobo who Craven saw staring at him through his window one day when he was age 10.
He is the only person to direct more than one film in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise: A Nightmare on Elm Street and New Nightmare .
His ex-wife went on to marry Tom Chapin, who is a Grammy winning singer songwriter as well as the brother of Harry Chapin, who was also a Grammy winner (for the single "Cats In The Cradle", 1974). His daughter, Jessica Craven, is part of the singing trio The Chapin Sisters, along with Tom Chapins other two daughters.
He had English and German ancestry.
He was one of the very few directors mostly famous for the horror genre who never directed or wrote a Stephen King movie.
I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an,incredibly powerful way to tell uplifitng stories that can move people,to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.
[on how he got Drew Barrymore to look scared and crying in Scream] Drew,Barrymore told me a story of a boy who tortured his. . . I think it was,his dog, with a lighter and it set it on fire and she burst into tears.
Everything is so short-term, so dependent on the whim of public taste,and business things you have no control over, like how the economy is,going, and how well your film is distributed, or what ad campaign they,come up with, or even what the title is.
It was a great pleasure to make [Music of the Heart], and to see Meryl,[Streep] nominated [for a best actress Oscar] for it. But most of the,people I run into who loved it are surprised that I made it. When you,have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.
The horrors of retirement. These are scarier than any horror movie I can,dream up.
Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity.
The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.
Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.
I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology.
I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected. .
