Wes Craven once said that his conservative upbringing fueled his creativity in the horror genre
“A conservative upbringing weighs on you so heavily that you turn to your imagination for an outlet,” said the director.
Wes Craven is frequently considered a master of horror, a connoisseur of the macabre. The creative director features include A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Last House on the Left (1972), and Swamp Thing (1982). It would be safe to say that if you didn’t have nightmares after watching a Wes Craven film, you hadn’t watched it properly.
It may surprise horror fans to know that Craven, by his own account, was raised in a fairly strict, conservative family.
However, his claustrophobic childhood didn’t necessarily hinder Craven’s creativity, nor did it dampen his interest in the dark and twisted.
Craven believed that his severe childhood fueled his innovation, as he explained to Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
“A conservative upbringing weighs on you so heavily that you turn to your imagination for an outlet,” said the director. “So it provides a kind of kick-start to your imagination. Then, when maturity lifts the restraints, and you finally are allowed to cut loose, you have the philosophical framework for asking the big, big questions about being alive.”
Craven also argued that his upbringing gave him an inclination for storytelling. “A strict religious background not only gives you the inclination to ask big questions about life and death, but it also gives you the mechanisms for dealing with these questions. Parables, for instance, are simple but profound tales about big questions.”
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