Wes Craven, master of the horror film, dies at 76

Prolific horror filmmaker Wes Craven, who directed the slasher classic "A Nightmare on Elm Street," died on Sunday afternoon, his family said in a statement. He was 76.

Craven, who was also behind the 1990s horror hit "Scream," died surrounded by his loved ones at his Los Angeles home after suffering from brain cancer, the statement said.

"It is with deep sadness we inform you that Wes Craven passed away," the family said. "Our hearts are broken."

Craven suffered from ailing health over the past three years, but continued to work on projects including several television shows, a graphic novel and a new film, "The Girl in the Photographs," which is set to premiere at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival next month.

Although Craven wrote novels and made movies outside the horror genre — most notably “Music of the Heart” in 1999 for which Meryl Streep received an Oscar nomination for best actress — he is most closely associated with horror movies.

His first horror feature was “The Last House on the Left,” which he wrote, directed and edited, according to Variety.com.

Next came “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Swamp Thing” but it was the 1984 release of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” with the iconic the iconic Freddy Krueger character and starring the then-unknown Johnny Depp that set Craven apart from scream masters.

"Nightmare on Elm Street," set in Ohio is about teenagers who are stalked in their dreams.  Craven wrote and directed the movie, which 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, where he lived next to a cemetery on an Elm Street.

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.

“The surreal slasher pic is credited with having started the “rubber reality” style of 1980s horror filmmakers,” said Variety.

"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 the "Scream" series. "Scream" came out in 1996, sparked three more installments and grossed more than $100 million domestically, according to Variety.

Craven, an avid birdwatcher, said that horror movies did not define him. Speaking of “Music of the Heart” he is quoted on Imdb.com as saying, “That's my mom's favorite movie of mine, because it was the only one she saw. It was something that I was really drawn to. Horror films are not me, or they're not all of me. They're a very thin slice of me.”

He was awarded lifetime achievement awards by the New York City Horror Film Festival and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Born August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, Craven’s parents were strict Baptists who didn’t let him see movies, according to the Los Angeles Times. He attended Wheaton College, “a Christian college,” he told The Times in 2010. “You would be expelled if you were caught in a movie theater. It was ridiculous.”

He didn’t come into his love of film until after he had earned a master’s degree in philosophy and writing at Johns Hopkins University, and then began teaching at Clarkson College in Potsdam, New York, which had an art house theater, according to the Times.

He got his start in movies in pornography, where he worked under a pseudonym. Craven's feature debut under his own name was 1972's "The Last House on the Left," a horror film about teenage girls abducted by thugs and taken into the woods. Made for just $87,000, the film, though 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."

A longtime member of the Audubon California Board of Directors, Craven is survived by survived by his wife, Iya Labunka, a producer and former Disney Studios vice president, a sister, two children, a stepdaughter and three grandchildren.

Craven 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."

Al Jazeera with wire services