Wes Craven

LOS ANGELES — It’s hard enough to redefine a genre once in a career, but horror virtuoso Wes Craven managed to do it twice.

The prolific writer-director, who died Sunday at age 76, ushered in two distinct eras of suburban slashers, first in the 1980s with his iconic “Nightmare on Elm Street” and its indelible, razor-fingered villain Freddy Krueger. He did it again in the 1990s with the self-referential “Scream.”

Both reintroduced the fringe genre to mainstream audiences and spawned successful franchises.

Perhaps it was his perfectly askew interpretation of the medium that resonated with his nail-biting audiences.

“Horror films don’t create fear,” Craven said. “They release it.”

Craven’s feature debut was 1972’s “The Last House on the Left” a horror film. Made for just $87,000, the film, though graphic enough to be censored in many countries, was a hit.

“Nightmare on Elm Street,” however, catapulted him to far greater renown in 1984. The Ohio-set film about teenagers (including a then unknown Johnny Depp) who are stalked in their dreams, which Craven wrote and directed, 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 — specifically an Elm Street cemetery and a homeless man that inspired Krueger’s raged look.

Along with John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” defined a horror tradition where helpless teenagers are preyed upon in cruel morality tales; usually promiscuous girls were the first to go.