Director: Wes Craven

Wes Craven taught English before directing, and the self-awareness in his films is not accidental. A Nightmare on Elm Street located horror inside sleep, where the audience cannot apply the usual survival logic, and gave the genre one of its few genuinely original premises.

New Nightmare and then Scream turned that reflexivity outward, with characters who have seen horror films and reason from them. Scream revived a genre that had exhausted itself and did it by making the exhaustion the subject.

His early work, The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, is nastier and less playful, and the distance between those and Scream is the career in miniature.