Biography for
Wes Craven More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

2 August 1939, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Birth Name

Wesley Earl Craven

Height

6' 2" (1.88 m)

Mini Biography

Wes was born in Cleveland in 1939 and raised in a Baptist family. After an unhappy childhood, he left Cleveland to study for a degree in English Literature, at Wheaton College, Illinois. But after illness, he left the school for one year before returning to study psychology. In 1963, he took a degree in writing and psychology and in 1964 he took a Masters from J. Hopkins University. While he was a humanities college teacher, Wes married Bonnie Broecker, mother of both his children, Jonathan and Jessica. But after few years, they separated, and the children stayed with Bonnie.

Wes left his job as a teacher, and after employment as taxi driver, he became a sound editor for a post-production company in New York. And after the co-direction of Together (1971) with Sean S. Cunningham, Wes made the horror movie The Last House on the Left (1972). The movie, released in August 1972, was a big success as was his second movie, The Hills Have Eyes (1977), winning the critic's prize at the Sitges Film Festival.

Wes has gone onto win many more awards, including one for the best movie at the Avoriaz Film Festival for A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). In 1999 he directed Music of the Heart (1999), a change of direction from the horror genre for which he is known.

IMDb Mini Biography By: FR ***@freedomland.it and Michal Tecza lahim@tenbit.pl

Spouse

Iya Labunka	(27 November 2004 - present)
Mimi Craven	(25 July 1982 - 1987) (divorced)
Bonnie Broecker	(1964 - 1969) (divorced) 2 children

Trade Mark

On-going in-joke feud with Sam Raimi.

Family issues, specifically family breakdown.

His characters often use elaborate booby traps, to capture the villain.

Often features strong female characters.

Trivia

Father of Jonathan Craven and Jessica Craven.

Lives in Los Angeles. Has a production company with his professional partner Marianne Maddalena, called Craven/Maddalena Films.

"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 (1996/I) 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 4-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 (1996/I) because the first scene with Drew Barrymore reminded him too vividly the climax sequence of The Last House on the Left (1972), 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 Miramax's Dimension Films. The production for this film should have started on October 1, 2002, in Los Angeles. In July 2003, Dimension's chairman Bob Weinstein announced that Pulse (2006/I) would never be produced because it was too similar to The Ring (2002/I).

Developed the "evil house" premise for the computer game "Wes Craven's Principles of Fear." Although the game won About Game's 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 game's publisher.

Was set to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) 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 Director's Chair: Six Filmmakers in the Franchise of Fear" by Simon Wilkinson (McFarland, 2008).

Personal Quotes

"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 horror movies: "It's like boot camp for the psyche. In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears."

"Horror films don't create fear. They release it."

"I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it's good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear."

"I think 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, 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."

"In retrospect, it's usually pretty easy to look at horror movies and see the influences of the time. And I think right now, with the post-9-11 world and Iraq, creative people are almost being goaded to look at things in the strongest way possible. If you look at the Academy Awards [movies], those are films about real issues. I think everybody is saying, 'We have to talk about the nitty-gritty stuff here.' It's not the time for confections." [March 2006]

"Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I'm concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others."

"If we don't get out of Iraq soon, it'll be like A Nightmare on Elm Street" (April 2007)

Browse biographies section by name

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z