By all accounts, Wes Craven was a lovely human being: a mild professorial type who made the people around him comfortable. In interviews, he came off as an excellent teller of dad jokes, and did not have an intimidating or particularly unsettling presence. But in three successive decades, the writer/director/auteur discovered new ways to creep into people’s heads and play around with their nerves, pointedly changing the entire horror-movie game thrice: first with the sheer brutality of 1972’s The Last House on the Left, then with the iconic villain of 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, and finally by creating a new meta-horror cult with 1996’s Scream.