Legendary horror director Wes Craven, known for the ?Scream? films and the ?Nightmare on Elm Street? series, died Sunday in his Los Angeles home of brain cancer. He was 76.
Known for creating the iconic Freddy Krueger character from ?Nightmare on Elm Street? and Ghostface in ?Scream,? the versatile filmmaker also wrote and produced features, directed for television and wrote novels.
Craven was a humanities professor before leaving academia to work in post production and on porn movies, using a pseudonym. His first credited feature was the controversial shocker ?The Last House on the Left,? which he wrote, directed and edited in 1972. He followed with the blackly comic ?The Hills Have Eyes? and ?Swamp Thing,? an early entry in the comic book genre.
He wrote and directed ?A Nightmare on Elm Street,? with Robert Englund as Krueger and an early Johnny Depp performance, in 1984. The surreal slasher pic is credited with having started the ?dream reality? style of 1980s horror filmmakers and helped launch independent film studio New Line Cinema, which is sometimes referred to as ?the house that Freddy built.?
