A Nightmare on Elm Street

This is part one of a ten part series looking back at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Clues for potential trivia questions to the Toronto Underground Cinema's Scavenger Hunt can be found in these entries. The actual trivia questions will be posted at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog.

A note from the author at 1:51am: If you are here just for the contest, you can skip right to the section of this entry where you see the video for the trailer. The answers to Freddy's trivia questions are in that section. I might have helped you. Don't tell Freddy. I'm already not sleeping because of him. Also, the whole first part is me explaining the rules, ticketing info for the event, and just how much I love the Nightmare series in general. I honestly don't think you will read all of this. This is a contest and an event for the fans like myself whom without Freddy, I wouldn't be here. And if you did read all of this admittedly less than tight rambling that I rushed to have out in time, consider yourselves my new best friends.




It was the first R-rated film I saw growing up. I remember it vividly mostly because of the pain involved. It wasn't pain from fear, but from a fever that was keeping me up at night. It was in the middle of the night during the week. Not on a weekend. I remember that little tidbit, as well. I simply couldn't sleep and I was feeling miserable.

I walked to the living room where my father, a notorious night owl, was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on HBO. It was about 2 in the morning and the movie had started about five minutes before I walked into the room. I was practically in tears telling my dad that I couldn't sleep and I asked him what he was watching. He told me, and not being one to censor anything I ever watched (except for Videodrome and Amazon Women on the Moon) he asked if I really wanted to watch it with him. He said it might give me nightmares. I told him I already couldn't sleep. Honestly, how much more miserable was I going to feel?

It might have been bad parenting to some, but the first time I saw Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece I was hooked on movies. I wasn't really all that scared, but I remembered a genuine rush of excitement while watching the film. There was something decidedly naughty about watching a film of that nature in the middle of the night on what should have been a school night. I was relatively sure none of my friends were watching what I was. It was a blast of the fantastical and Gothic that my young mind couldn't entirely grasp, but just the experience of seeing it made me want to seek out more films like it.

From that night on I would prowl video store shelves looking for the next film I would love that I probably shouldn't be seeing. I would hang out in the horror section just to look at the box art. I didn't know at the time that A Nightmare on Elm Street was quite the box office success that it was, or that it already had a sequel by the time I had seen the original. To me it was this awesome little movie with a really scary bad ass at the heart of it that wanted to hurt children.

I actually didn't find it all that scary until I watched the film again when I was 13 in the basement of a friend's house. I had previously only watched such film on my own at home. I had never really watched a scary movie with other kids in the room. It was a battered VHS copy taped from TV, complete with commercial breaks, but the two girls and three guys in the room were genuinely scared by it. The film actually started to work its powers on me and I began to question every bump or noise in the basement. There was a girl I had a crush on who just about lost her shit when the boiler kicked in shortly after the scene where Johnny Depp's Glen dies. It was the first time a girl ever actively latched on to me for comfort, and I have Freddy Krueger and Robert Englund to thank for that. (Although, I should also thank the heating and air conditioning guy who was supposed to fix the boiler that week but never did.)

As I got older and my taste in film developed, my love for the original A Nightmare on Elm Street never flagged. If anything, my appreciation for the film strengthened. While my favourite films in other genres kept changing depending on my taste at the time, my favourite horror film has and probably always will be A Nightmare on Elm Street. I have studied the original endlessly and I have closely watched all of the sequels that came after (some of which I definitely like more than others, as you will all see in the coming weeks). I wrote not one, but two papers in University about the original film. One was on Regan era fears in American typified by the boogeyman character of Freddy and the other was a comparison of the works of Wes Craven and John Hughes (specifically comparing Elm Street's characters to those in The Breakfast Club).

Being able to help the Toronto Underground Cinema with their upcoming screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with Englund in attendance is better than Christmas for me and I know I am not alone. The event is very nearly sold out (you can purchase your tickets online at Brown Paper Tickets or in person at the Underground box office, Eyesore Cinema, Silver Snail, or Suspect Video. It warms my heart to see so many fans of the series coming out to have a great time.

Over the next few weeks leading up to the event, I will be taking a look at the entire franchise from the original to the reboot (with a special entry devoted to non-film related Freddy ephemera) and giving those who might not be as familiar with the franchise a bit of a history lesson on the films while sharing my own personal thoughts.

This all coincides with the upcoming contest and scavenger hunt designed by Mr. Kruger himself to help you guys win your way in to the screening on Friday, August 25th at 8pm (doors at 7pm). Mr. Kruger will be Tweeting clues from his handle FKUnderground and will be posting several trivia questions over at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog. The answers to many of these trivia questions can be found in my entries (but not all of them).

Then on the day that one of these blogs is posted, Freddy will send me out into the world with a pair of passes for one lucky winner. If you find me at the location Freddy alludes to, I will ask you three of the eight posted trivia questions (you will have a few hours to do research and get all the answers before having to find me). Find me and answer the three questions correctly, and you are going to see Robert Englund himself talk about what may be the most entertaining horror movie sequel of all time.

But before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about the original film, shall we?



Wes Craven might seem like the most unlikely of people to be a horror movie icon. In fact, the famed master of horror never really saw many films until he was a college professor in the late 1960s. Craven's father was a preacher and he was raised as a fundamentalist baptist. Craven lost his father at the age of 6 in 1945, but Craven managed to only remember just how angry and scary his father could be at his angriest.

Craven's Baptist upbringing continued after the death of his father, and with the exception of classical books, he was never introduced to any real sort of popular culture. After graduating college Craven became an English professor who became enamoured with the European films being screened on campus. The first films Craven really remembered connecting to were Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Fellini's 8 1/2.

Only two years after taking the job as a professor, Craven quit his job in the early 1970s and moved to New York where he would become an assistant to film producer Sean S. Cunningham, better known as the man who would create the Friday the 13th franchise. Cunningham, impressed by Craven's work ethic as an electrician, cameraman, and editor, offered Craven a chance to direct his own film.

Using Cunningham's suggestion that horror was the best and most profitable genre to launch a career with, Craven sat down and wrote The Last House on the Left. The film was written by Craven in six days as a no nonsense, take no prisoners revenge film inspired by Bergman's film The Virgin Spring. The film was a grindhouse success that sparked fits of outrage from some members of the mainstream moviegoing public who were deeply offended by the film's graphic depiction of rape and murder. The film was constantly being recut and banned in certain markets, but this only enhanced the film's reputation.



Following Last House, Craven took five years off from filmmaking with hopes of making something other than a horror film. When nothing else was panning out, he made the slightly less controversial, but no less intense film The Hills Have Eyes, which essentially solidified Craven's reputation as a master of the macabre. Craven would then move on to working on several television films, the Amish country set Deadly Blessing (with Ernest Borgnine and Sharon Stone), the comic adaptation Swamp Thing, and a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that Craven never had any real interest in doing and essentially he has disowned (It also wasn't released until 1985 despite completing shooting before A Nightmare on Elm Street even started production).





After filming Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes II back to back, Craven, who was unsatisfied with both films, decided to take six months off to work on something that he could be proud of. The film was to be inspired by a series of Los Angeles Times articles from 1981 that had caught his attention.

There was a series of three articles printed all centring on Hmong men formerly from Cambodia that were dying in their sleep. The common thread between all three men is that they were all survivors of relocation camps during the deadly Pol Pot regime who had told their families that they had been experiencing terrible nightmares before eventually dying of heartattacks in their sleep. The first two stories struck Craven as creepy coincidences, but the third story stuck out.

In the third article the young man had attempted to stay awake for four days. He had explicitly told his parents that there was something that was trying to get to him in his sleep and that if he fell asleep he was afraid he would die. He had been hoarding sleeping pills that his father was trying to get him to take. He had also rigged an extension cord to run from the hallway to his closet where he constantly had a pot of black coffee brewing. One night, the young man drifted off to sleep as the family was watching a movie. The parents brought the teenager upstairs to bed and several hours later were awakened by screaming. By the time the parents had reached the bedroom, it was too late. Their son was dead.

The idea that something could kill you in your sleep from sheer terror was something that Craven knew he wanted to work with for his next film. The idea of terror personified came in the form of Freddy Krueger, a deceased child molester out for revenge against the vigilante parents that burned him alive. Krueger would go into the very personal world of their children's dreams to use their own psyches against them and kill them without leaving any evidence and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

The idea for Krueger came from Craven's own psyche. Fred was the name of the schoolyard bully that used to beat him up everyday. Krueger was the chosen surname because it sounded vaguely German and was a variation on the name Krug, which was the name of the main villain in Last House on the Left. Freddy's sweater was compromised of two colours that Craven remembered from a Scientific American article as being the two harshest colours for the human retina to identify at the same time. The idea of Freddy being a burn victim was a nod to the masked slasher movie killers at the time (Jason, Michael Meyers) as being a natural, but still marketable mask; something that could let the humanity of the actor wearing it show through. Freddy's signature fedora was based on a drunk that Craven had seen growing up that looked into his room and "scared the shit out of" him.

With the script in place, Craven began to shop his work around. By this point, his earnings had dried up. Craven lost his house, his first marriage had ended, he maxed out his savings, and he even had to ask to borrow money from Sean Cunningham just to pay his back taxes and stay out of prison. None of this made Craven think he had anything less than a sure thing in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Major studios declined almost across the board. Paramount, where his friend Cunningham had his Friday the 13th series based, turned Craven down on the basis that it was too close to another film they had in development called Dreamscape, starring Dennis Quaid. In a strange turn of events, Dreamscape was written by Nightmare 3's eventual director Chuck Russell and would be released four months prior to the original Nightmare, but would ultimately be released by 20th Century Fox.



The one major studio that showed any interest in the film was actually Disney. The house that Mickey built thought that the film could be drastically toned down and given a minor theatrical release before being something they could show every year on their newly launched Disney Channel at Halloween. For the better of humanity and the worse of Craven's wallet, that deal never materialized.

The only film company that showed a real interest and a real grasp of the material wasn't even really a studio. New Line Cinema was only a distribution company at the time of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, specializing mostly in owning the 16mm screening rights to classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and Reefer Madness. New Line president Robert Shaye knew that Wes' film could make a decent return on investment, but he didn't have the money to finance the film on his own.

Shaye approached and secured one million dollars of a $1.3 million budget (which was three times less of a budget than Craven had been working with on all his films after Last House on the Left) from the Smart Egg Pictures company. Then at almost the last second (about two months before shooting), Smart Egg pulled out. Shaye and the film's crew were on standby and began to put up a lot of their own money to get the film started. Shaye reached an agreement with Media Home Entertainment for almost a full million dollars with a huge catch. Media had it written into their contract that they could take full control of the production away from Shaye if it went over schedule or over budget. Shaye scraped up the remaining few hundred thousand from private investors and from going back to Smart Egg who gave $200,000 but demanded that their name be on the production credits for this film and any possible sequels. It killed Shaye to acquiesce to this, but he was just glad to have the movie at all by this point.

With the film now a go, a crew was firmly assembled. Craven hired cinematographer Jaques Haitkin to work behind the camera on what was sure to be an ambitious and effects heavy project. Haitkin vowed to Craven that he would make sure every dollar of the film's budget made it to the screen and he would often be the person most critical of his work when dailes of the film were screened. He was also the only cameraman that Craven approached that didn't balk at his desire to film two sequences in the film with a rotating room.

For Freddy's make-up effects, Craven hired effects wizard David Miller, who had just finished work (ironically enough) on Dreamscape and was ostensibly the main make-up consultant for the band KISS. Miller created what would be a somewhat enduring template for the make-up for years to come: an 11 piece mask that would take about four hours to apply that would allow for the actor playing Freddy to have a full range of facial motion. Unfortunately, the make-up would prove one of the most costly day to day items of the film costing almost $20,000 by the end of the shoot.

For Freddy's iconic glove and almost all of the film's practical effects (which we will get into later), Craven turned to mechanical effects wizard Jim Doyle (who had also worked on Dreamscape, but also on Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart and WarGames). Freddy's glove was something that Doyle sketched out numerous times before perfecting. The only real instruction given to him by Craven and the script was that the glove had to be made from items one would find in a boiler room: the place where Krueger would have most likely had his office.

If finding money and a crew was hard, casting the film proved to be comparatively easier. For the lead role of heroine Nancy Thompson, Craven decided upon Heather Langenkamp, a Stanford student whose biggest claim to fame up to that point was that she was an extra in Coppola's The Outsiders and had been cut from the follow-up Rumble Fish. Craven wanted Nancy to be someone who was pretty, but could also be seen as extremely intelligent.

Veteran actor John Saxon was brought in to play the role of Nancy's estranged police officer father. Saxon was the name New Line so desperately needed to sell the movie overseas. A former television teen heartthrob, Saxon would go on to make his name in the US mostly in B-grade horror and crime thrillers like Black Christmas and The Glove. Overseas, Saxon wouldn't be doing films that were all that different, but he had been working with iconic European directors like Umberto Lenzi and Dario Argento and it brought him more respectability with foreign distributors.

For the role of Nancy's boyfriend Glen, Craven had three actors that he had tested in mind, but his daughter made his mind up for him. The man that caught the eye of Craven's daughter was a then unknown who had never acted before named Johnny Depp. The man who would go on to become one of the most bankable and most interesting actors in Hollywood today was talked into being an actor by a good friend of his. That good friend was the equally bankable and enigmatic Nicolas Cage, who set up a meeting between Depp and his agent when he suggested that Johnny try acting. The first reading Depp ever did was for A Nightmare on Elm Street and he got the part on his first attempt. The rest of that story is pretty much history.

If casting for a role like Glen was easy, the casting of Freddy would prove to be much harder. Craven had originally wanted to go with an older man and was keen on hiring British actor David Warner for the role. Warner, who had previously played the villain in Time After Time and Time Bandits, wasn't keen on playing another villain so soon and was even less happy that on a film with a budget as low as this one that he wouldn't have adequate time off to rest.

Robert Englund, a classically trained actor and television veteran, was brought in for a reading with Wes Craven as a favour from an agent who failed to get Englund a part in the John Hughes scripted dud National Lampoon's Class Reunion. Englund nailed the reading, but Craven had to be convinced by Englund and the make-up department that casting someone as young as Englund would make sense in the role. It didn't hurt that Englund was on a break from production on the successful television miniseries V. Englund would also add another (admittedly minor) name to the film.

Production on the film went as smoothly as any seat of the pants venture could go. The main obstacle to Craven and his crew wasn't so much an issue of money anymore, but an issue of time. The shoot could go no longer than 32 days or else Shaye and New Line would have lost everything they had invested to Media and all of his own personally sleepless nights of trying to bankroll the film would have been for naught. In the end, it all came together and the process itself isn't as exciting to talk about as one would believe.

The effects were what ended up making the biggest impact on the production, as well as the audience who would eventually see the film. For the death scenes of the film's Janet Leigh-in-Psycho style character Tina (played by Amanda Wyss) and for Johnny Depp's Glen, Jim Doyle created a rotating room that would give the illusion of Freddy mysteriously dragging Tina across the ceiling and to show 110 gallons of blood shooting up from the bed Freddy dragged young Glen down into. The most iconic shots of the film were obtained by way of Craven and Jaques Haitkin being literally buckled into two car seats from an old Datsun that were bolted to the set as crew members rotated the room slowly.

To recoup some of the production costs, Doyle and Shaye agreed to sell the rotating room set to Cannon Films for them to use in their upcoming sequel to Breakin', Electric Boogaloo. In Breakin' 2, one can see the picture of Freddy's glove on the wall as one of the leads dances around the vastly redecorated room and on the ceiling. All of this is actually quite fitting since Craven and Doyle got the idea to use a rotating room from old Fred Astaire films.





For the nightmarish effect of Freddy's arms stretching across an alleyway to a great length, Doyle positioned two men with fishing poles on the roofs of garages across the alley from one another and simply had them walk with Englund's stunt double (who had just gotten done playing the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters) chased Tina down the alleyway. For an equally stretchy scene where Freddy almost bursts through the wall over Nancy's bed, Doyle replaced the wall with an incredible new material known as spandex. The face that actually appears over the bed in the film is not that of Englund or his stunt double, but of Doyle himself.

The final battle sequence between Nancy and Freddy included a scenes that actually came from the nightmares of producer Bob Shaye. It comes when Nancy attempts to run up the stairs of her house to safety only to be sinking into them as if they were made of quicksand (an effect achieved by mixing chopped up bits of carpeting and Bisquick pancake mix). The scene was almost cut due to time restrictions, but Shaye fought to keep it in the film. Shaye fought so strenuously that an increasingly burnt out Craven let Shaye direct the entire sequence.

The only real controversy of the actual production was the battle between Craven and Shaye over how the film should have ended. Craven always wanted the film to be a stand alone entity, with Nancy finally turning her back on the evil man who she unconsciously gave power to and walking ambiguously away from him. Shaye asked only for one thing specific from the production, and that was a hook to hang a sequel onto. Six different ending for the film were shot with varying degrees of ambiguity, but Wes somewhat grudgingly agreed since Shaye had honestly been really great to him and because without his attempts at financing the film, he would be out of a job.

Once the film was completed and released, New Line started on the road to being known as "The House That Freddy Built." Theatrically in the US alone, A Nightmare on Elm Street opened to generally favourable reviews that lauded it as being a step above the slasher films that were flooding the genre marketplace at the time. It would make almost $30 million and the first sequel was bankrolled by investors one week into the run of the first film. It would also ride the crest of the VHS wave and would position Media as a major player in the video market. On home video, the film would spend 50 weeks on the Billboard rental charts and would bring in another $22 million. It would be the VHS market that would largely make the sequels increasingly more popular in theatres as they rolled out.

The success of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is one of legend, but it isn't very had to see why. Horror films are by themselves extremely profitable, but they are also largely products of their time and a reflection of societal fears. Craven himself said that nightmares are the horror movies of the psyche and that horror movies are essentially nightmares of the society. In his positive review of the film, Paul Attansio of The Washington Post remarked that horror movies are essentially nothing more than organized nightmares.

In a 1988 poll conducted by CBS to ask who the most notable figure of the decade was, Freddy finished second only to then president Ronald Regan. Freddy was a perfect personification of the Ronald Regan era and the largely youthful rebellion against the "silent majority" and their fears of not having a future. Freddy was a spectre that thrived on collecting his pound of flesh from the parents of those who wronged him by killing their children. In the 1980s, with deficit spending out of control, the cold war, a compromised environment, and an industrial war complex out of control, there really might not have been much of a future to have. In film as in real life, the sins of the parents would have doomed the children no matter what they did wrong.

Englund's performance is undoubtedly key to the success of the first film and the ensuing franchise. No one else could have played this role in the same way that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were inseparable from the characters they made famous. We will get more into Englund as this series goes on, I promise. I would simply be remiss by not giving the man his due here.

It is quite telling that in an scene around the halfway point of the film, a teacher in Nancy's class (played by the always lovely to see Lin Shaye) is teaching Hamlet. Much like Hamlet, Nancy has to stamp out the lies told to her by her mother (a raging alcoholic) and she isn't respected by her absentee father. Nancy has had her eyes opened to the truth of the suburban, bucolic nightmare, and this search for the truth is ultimately both a blessing and a curse. Such a touch from a former English professor like Craven is surely intentional, but gives a real literary grounding to a fantastical story.

In fact, Craven's original film serves as a curiously leftist counterpoint to the typically right wing politics of the slasher films it so wrongfully gets lumped in with. Films in the Halloween and the Friday the 13th series mostly award outwardly virtuous behaviour and condemn such sinful behaviour as taking drugs and having premarital sex. Craven doesn't really care about the personal lives of the kids on screen. They are all well rounded characters, but none of them are treated differently from the rest. To Freddy they are all guilty and in need of punishment. It is a very level field of judgment instead of subscribing to the usual "final girl" school of filmmaking that dictates that the most virginal character survives to the end of the film. The audience in this film doesn't know if Nancy is a pure soul or not, nor does it matter.

A Nightmare on Elm Street would give rise to a new type of horror experience known as "rubber reality." While the idea of a film taking place within a dream world is nothing new (and was admittedly done first and possibly best by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), few films took making distinctions between the dream world and the real world as intensely as this one did. The film is at its best when it makes the audience afraid to trust their own perception. Craven plunges the audience into 8 separate dream sequences that grow progressively disorienting as the film goes on and as the characters get less and less sleep. This idea of waking nightmares has been done to death and lampooned at great length today, but in 1984 this concept was still fresh. If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, Craven and company were the belles of the 1980s horror ball.

Tune in next time for a look at the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge, where the idea of waking nightmares gets a bit muddled, but the film is no less subversive or daring.