Mark Kermode on… director Wes Craven, who made horror ‘a positive force in a world filled with fear’

As A Nightmare on Elm Street turns 40, here’s to the softly spoken American creator of some of cinema’s most memorable scares, from razor-clawed serial killer Freddy Krueger to the sequel-spawning Scream

“Scary movies don’t create fear,” the American writer-director Wes Craven told me on more than one occasion. “They release fear.” This was a mantra for the horror maven, along with his equally forthright declaration that scary movies were a “bootcamp for the soul”, teaching psychological survival skills within the safety of the cinema.

Over the course of his career, Craven, who died in 2015 aged 76, made some of the most memorably influential scary movies of the 20th century, from gruelling grindhouse classic The Last House on the Left (1972; Plex) to the sequel-spawning, genre-defining popular hit Scream (1996). Yet in person, the softly spoken auteur seemed more like an avuncular academic than a Hollywood frightmonger.