Wes Craven net worth is $40 Million. Also know about Wes Craven bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Wes Craven Wiki Biography

Wes Craven is known to his wide audience as a great American flm producer, director, screenwriter, TV producer, film editor, actor and even as a teacher who has estimated net worth as high as $40 million. He is also known as Wesley Earl Craven, “Wes” Craven and Abe Snake. He has directed many extremely popular movies, such as “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, and furthermore, he is a co-writer of many other movies, such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors”. Today he is one of the richest actors and TV producers not only in the United States, but also all around the world.

Wesley Earl Craven was born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. His parents were Paul Craven and Coraline Miller (Craven after marriage). As a young man Craven attended Wheaton College, where he majored in English,  and later graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a Psychology degree.

After finishing his studies, Wes Craven didn’t start increasing his net worth in the film industry immediately. At first he worked in Clarkson College of Technology in New York. Of course, there Craven’s net worth increased a little bit, but then no one could even think about how rich Wes Craven was going to be when he changed the direction of his work.

Craven appeared in the show business industry as a sound editor in New York, and later was even involved in filming pornography, however, in 1972 he directed a movie entitled “The Last House on the Left”. This horror movie was considered to be successful and increased Craven’s net worth, so he could continue working as a film director and take-on many other projects.

Wes Craven was also building up his net worth as an actor. He made many notable appearances in movies, such as “Shadow Zone: The Unded Expires”, “The Fear”, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”, “The American Nightmare”, “Scream” series, “Diary of the Dead” and others. Of course, nowadays he is mostly known as the director of the famous “Scream” – the first movie was released in 1996. It was definitely a successful film as it starred Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Neve Campbell and Drew Barrymore. Craven’s net worth increased even more after “Scream 2” appeared, and since then he is known as one of the greatest film directors thanks to his works, such as “Paris, je t’aime” released in 2006, “My Soul to Take” released in 2010, and many others.

The “Scream” movie brought Craven the highest popularity and increased his net worth much more than any other movie could, but his popularity increased with some of his other works, such as “Red Eye”, “The Hills Have Eyes” and “The Hills Have Eyes 2” or “The People Under the Stairs”. Nowadays W. Craven remains one of the greatest film directors in the world, and we can only expect many other great works from him in the future.

IMDB Wikipedia $40 million 1939 (age 75 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) Abe Snake Actor August 2 Bonnie Broecker Bonnie Broecker (m. 1964–1969) Cinema of the United States Cleveland Courteney Cox Craven-Maddalena Films David Arquette Directors Drew Barrymore Film Film director Film Editor Film producer Fountain Society Freddy’s Nightmares Heather Langenkamp Horror film Identity Iya Labunka Iya Labunka (m. 2004) Jessica Craven Johns Hopkins University Jonathan Craven Mimi Craven Mimi Craven (m. 1982–1987) My Soul to Take Neve Campbell Nightmare Cafe Nightmare On Elm Street Ohio Scream Screenwriter Shocker Slasher films Teacher Television Director Television Producer The Hills Have Eyes The People Next Door United States United States of America Wes Wes Craven Wes Craven Net Worth. A Nightmare on Elm Street Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Wesley Earl “Wes” Craven Wesley Earl Craven Wheaton College

Wes Craven Quick Info

Wes Craven Trademarks

1. Often featured actor Matthew Lillard in his films, even if uncredited
2. Children in his films are often deformed or brutally murdered, often by the main villain
3. His horror films often contain important social issues (e.g. The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes)
4. Villains are often deformed and monstrous looking
5. Brutal and graphic depiction of violence
6. His protagonists are often ordinary characters caught in extraordinary and Horrific circumstances
7. His unglamorous depictions of sadistic and realistically brutal killers
8. Often features strong female characters
9. His characters often use elaborate booby traps, to capture the villain
10. Family issues, specifically family breakdown
11. On-going in-joke feud with Sam Raimi

Wes Craven Quotes

• I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn’t matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.
• The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.
• Horror movies have to show us something that hasn’t been shown before so that the audience is completely taken aback. You see, it’s not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.
• It seems like all the powerful people on earth just want to build condos and knock down all the trees… As somebody once said with wonderful succinctness, the golf course is man’s boot on the neck of nature.
• What you want to do is you want to put your audience off-balance. You have to be aware of what the audience’s expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren’t looking.
• Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I’m concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others.
• You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative. Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.
• ‘Happy wife, happy life’ is a mantra it seems unwise to ignore.
• The horrors of retirement. These are scarier than any horror movie I can dream up.
• For me with all this stuff, both the horror films and thrillers like this, the most interesting thing is what goes on inside people’s heads.
• You have a responsibility to really help the [horror] genre grow, ’cause there’s no limit to how profound it can become. If you go back to those guys like [Federico] Fellini and [Luis] Buñuel, talking about really profound things. Now, I don’t know whether you can get a big audience with films that abstruse, but you can in horror if you scare the shit out of them about every eight minutes. So you do a fun deal with the devil: I’ve got to put a lot of interesting ideas, but I’ll hide them and I’ll also scare people and make them laugh.
• I’ve always felt like [Scream’s] Sidney or [A Nightmare on Elm Street’s] Nancy could never go back to that state of mind that they were in before, but that’s the life of a warrior, and in a sense, there are no more civilians anymore. You’re a warrior. You’re in combat. Because the whole world’s in combat.
• It was a great pleasure to make [Music of the Heart], and to see Meryl [Streep] nominated [for a best actress Oscar] for it. But most of the people I run into who loved it are surprised that I made it. When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.
• When you have an idea that really fascinates you and you can honestly say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ what you get is, you get that first audience goes out and tells everybody. And the reason they do that is they’ve never seen anything like it. You’re trying to be the avant-garde of horror. That’s where you want to be.
• [on horror films in general] I think they can work two ways. They can distort the reality of violence in a way that makes it seem very attractive; they can show the Dionysian side, which is a whole orgiastic, cruel thing, getting off on the suffering of other people. I think that’s a very dangerous kind of horror film. I try to make the kind that shows the end result of violence is something quite appalling. But in the long view, I’m not so sure anymore what the hell it all means.
• [on the film business] It’s a strange business, because once you finish a film, there’s this deafening silence and you say, “I’m not working,” and the phone doesn’t ring. You utterly panic. It’s harrowing. Everything is so short-term, so dependent on the whim of public taste and business things you have no control over, like how the economy is going, and how well your film is distributed, or what ad campaign they come up with, or even what the title is.
• [on how he got Drew Barrymore to look scared and crying in Scream] Drew Barrymore told me a story of a boy who tortured his…I think it was his dog, with a lighter and it set it on fire and she burst into tears. And being the exploitative bastard that I am as a director, I said “do you mind if we use that?” So every time on the set if I wanted her to cry, I’d say “the boy has the lighter” or something like that, and she’d burst into tears and be just frantic.
• [on his 1995 movie Vampire in Brooklyn] That was kind of a screwed-up thing, because I wanted to work with a big star. I suppose it could have been better if it were a horror movie, but it wasn’t. Eddie (Murphy) didn’t want to be funny. He wanted to be serious and he was very difficult.
• [on his 1996 movie Scream] It’s almost on a comic book level as far as the danger. And also kind of soap opera-ish.
• [on his 1999 movie Music of the Heart] 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.
• [on A nightmare on Elm Street having sequels] I thought they’ll never be a sequel. Boy was I stupid.
• I think sometimes you might expect or want greater recognition. But to me it’s a little like how French Impressionists felt about formal recognition. You know, once you’re a member of the academy you never pose any danger or threat. I don’t know if I’d like that.
• A producer said, ‘Make a horror movie’. I said ‘I’ve never seen one.’ He said, ‘You’re a fundamentalist, you must have demons rattling around.
• There is rage in my films, but it’s a complete matrix. Sone could be directed at my father, a scary figure.
• If I were interested in reality, I’d be making documentaries.
• “If we don’t get out of Iraq soon, it’ll be like A Nightmare on Elm Street” (April 2007)
• Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I’m concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others.
• 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]
• 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.
• I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it’s good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.
• Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.
• 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.”
• 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.

Wes Craven Important Facts

• He was one of the very few directors mostly famous for the horror genre, who never directed or wrote a Stephen King movie.
• He had English and German ancestry.
• His ex-wife went on to marry Tom Chapin who is a Grammy winning singer songwriter as well as the brother of Harry Chapin who was also a Grammy winner (for the single “Cat’s In The Cradle”, 1974). His daughter, Jessica Craven is part of the singing trio, The Chapin Sisters, along with Tom Chapin’s other two daughters.
• He is the only person to direct more than one film in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and New Nightmare (1994).
• Freddy Krueger’s appearance (especially the dirty clothes and hat) was inspired by a hobo who Craven saw staring at him through his window one day when he was age 10.
• Based the story of ”A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)” on a news report about a group of young men who died in their sleep during horrific nightmares despite having no history of health problems and showing no specific cause of death.
• Authored newspaper article about his current, off-the-set downtime entitled “Retirement: Scarier Than Freddy Krueger” in NYTimes. [February 2013]
• He had a highly dysfunctional relationship with his parents, mainly having been raised by his severe, hyper-religious mother, whom he never allowed to watch his films, and never having a close relationship with his distant, violent-tempered father. His mother’s judgmental influence caused him to be too terrified to talk to a girl until he was at college and lead him to marry, in his opinion, too young, and arguably contributed to the angry, bleak themes of his early films.
• Directed one Oscar nominated performance: ‘Meryl Streep’ in Music of the Heart (1999).
• Profiled in “Hollywood Horror from the Director’s Chair: Six Filmmakers in the Franchise of Fear” by Simon Wilkinson (McFarland, 2008).
• 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.
• Was set to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) but was replaced after creative differences with star Christopher Reeve.
• 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.
• Co-wrote the screenplay for Pulse (2006) 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) would never be produced because it was too similar to The Ring (2002).
• 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.”
• Former son-in-law, composer Michael Maccini.
• 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)
• He nearly turned down the option to direct the hit Scream (1996) because the first scene with Drew Barrymore reminded him too vividly of the climax sequence of The Last House on the Left (1972), his first film.
• He was the disc jockey for the campus radio station at Clarkson College, where he was a humanities professor.
• His father died when he was 4-years-old.
• He is an avid birdwatcher.
• 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). He has also donated the original mask from his movie Scream (1996) along with other original props. The auction started June 19, 2002, and the props auction started June 29, 2002.
• 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.
• Rumoured to have named his onscreen horror creation Freddy Kruger for a boy who used to bully him in high school.
• “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.
• Father of Jonathan Craven and Jessica Craven.

Wes Craven Filmography

Wes Craven Awards