Wes Craven reinvented or at least rejuvenated the horror film not just once or twice or even three times, but on four separate occasions. (The first two came with his crude but vital 1970s grindhouse hits, “Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” which I’m not otherwise going to discuss here.) That might be the ultimate tribute we can offer to the sincerity and ambition of a filmmaker who spent almost his entire career in the disreputable, low-budget world of horror cinema but never understood that as a limitation. He believed in the possibilities of horror – as cultural commentary, as psychological insight and as Freudian humor of the most unsettling kind – while also embracing its primary commercial function, which was to scare teenagers into one another’s arms on Friday night. One could say that Craven chose not to feel intellectually imprisoned by the horror ghetto or that he had no choice; I’m not sure which is more accurate, and it comes to the same thing in the end.

Craven died unexpectedly in Los Angeles on Sunday, at age 76, not long after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer. For anyone who grew up amid the movies he made and the legions of imitators and knockoffs he inspired – which is to say anyone who saw any horror films made between the mid-1970s and at least the mid-2000s – it’s a sobering passage. I think we believed, or at least I did, that Craven would always be there to surprise us with a new twist, another off-kilter, inside-out take on the scary movie that would once again vindicate his peculiar Zen blend of craftsmanship and carelessness. It should have been clear long before now that the era that made Craven’s career possible was over, but his sudden death slams that volume of history shut with a bang.

Craven invented Freddie Krueger, the single most important creation of his career and in my book the most potent pop-culture signifier of the Reagan years — and then got bored with him immediately, allowing the undead child-murdering janitor to drift into Halloween-costume meaninglessness across an endless series of jokey, rococo sequels. Craven’s 1984 “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is only a medium-effective shocker now, because its central cinematic and psychological devices have been so widely imitated. It’s impossible to reproduce the shattering effect it had on so many of us at the time, when ideas about the permeable boundary between dreams and reality, or between the conscious and unconscious mind, had never been so cleverly explored in mass culture. Smack-dab in the middle of a right-wing counterrevolution that transformed American cultural and political life, Craven suggested that the stuff we had repressed was not quite dead and still prowling the cellar, and that it might literally rise up and rip us apart at any moment, right there in our comfortable house on Elm Street.

As Craven would cheerfully have assured us, he had almost no control over Freddie’s destiny. Like most of his films, the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” was effectively work for hire, bought and paid for by New Line Cinema and producer Robert Shaye. Craven received a “based on characters created by” screen credit throughout the ensuing series, but only worked on one of those movies (as a co-writer of “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” in 1987) and didn’t direct any of them. When Craven and writer Kevin Williamson launched the “Scream” franchise in 1996 – the first horror-movie series whose characters are steeped in horror-movie tropes – they were often credited with introducing postmodernism to the genre, which isn’t true at all. In terms of Craven’s career, it might be more fruitful to understand the “Scream” movies as commentaries on the world Freddie Krueger had made, on the way Freddie and all his acolytes and copycats had reshaped the realm of pop culture and the internal consciousness of horror movies.