Horror Master Wes Craven Dies at 76

Horror movie director Wes Craven died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with cancer. He was 76 years old.

Craven's first feature film was 1972's Last House on the Left, a low-budget project that generated controversy for its gory violence and graphic scenes of rape and mayhem. In 1977, Craven delivered The Hills Have Eyes, another low-budget film, this one about a murderous band of cannibals. Craven wrote and directed both films, and together the movies helped to establish the tradition of exploitative, unapologetically violent horror films.

Craven was most famous, though, for his 1984 break-out hit, A Nightmare on Elm Street. The film about a supernatural killer who haunts the dreams of teenagers introduced the world to Freddie Krueger, a character that would go on to become a horror legend. Craven also gets credit for discovering Johnny Depp, who had his first major role in the first Elm Street movie.

In the 1990s, Craven hit horror gold again with Scream (1996), a self-referential horror film that both paid homage to and satirized the kinds of horror films that mainstream directors had made throughtout the 80s and early 90s. He followed up with two sequels, Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 3 (2000).