To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come. —William Shakespeare
One, two, Freddy’s coming for you
Three, four, better lock your door
Five, six, grab your crucifix
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late
Nine, ten, never sleep again.
—Popular nursery rhyme
Freddy Krueger has scared the hell out of us for the past 40 years, and he knows why. It’s not his disfigured face. It’s not the glove he wears that’s outfitted with razor-sharp knives. And it’s not that he is, as one of the vengeful parents who burned him alive affectionately called him, “a filthy child murderer.”
What’s terrifying about Freddy is where we meet him: in our dreams. “You could be a victim in your own nightmare,” says Robert Englund, the man behind the bogeyman since 1984. “It’s a very personal thing, your subconscious being invaded by this predator.”
With A Nightmare on Elm Street, writer-director Wes Craven came for audiences at their most vulnerable. Ever since it hit multiplexes, falling asleep peacefully has been harder. “We’re told as kids when we’re scared, we hide under the covers,” says Thommy Hutson, author of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. “But under the covers, in a way, is where Freddy gets you. ... Sweet dreams? Those don’t exist in this world.”
At a time when slasher flicks were brainlessly spilling fake blood by the gallon, Craven took a more psychological approach—without sacrificing gore, of course. “Wes knew how to write such realism, and then he has this dream landscape that is just so crazy,” says Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy Thompson, the teenager with the brains to finally outwit Freddy. “It’s never been repeated in such a seamless and beautiful way.”
The film almost looks homemade at times, but that only adds to its lore and to its status as a VHS-era rite of passage. “Dad had the kids, and he let them rent it at a mom-and-dad video store. He let them bring it home, and then he put steak knives on his fingers and scratched the windows late at night to terrorize them,” Englund says. “Or they saw it on a video that was dog-eared and passed around in a dormitory. You’ve gotta see this movie, man.”
Elm Street didn’t just change horror. Since the ’80s, it’s had a place in the pop culture pantheon. “Johnny Carson was doing Freddy Krueger jokes,” Englund says. Kids started dressing up as Freddy for Halloween. Video stores couldn’t keep the movie in stock. And cable TV played it nonstop. It spawned six sequels, a crossover with Friday the 13th, a television series, and a blockbuster reboot. But before becoming America’s collective Nightmare, it was just a creepy-sounding idea that no one wanted. That is, until New Line Cinema—an independent studio best known at the time for producing John Waters films—stepped up to the plate, hoping to turn out a hit on the cheap. Making that happen, though, was, at times, nightmarish. “The real story of Nightmare on Elm Street is actually as scary as the movie,” New Line founder Robert Shaye says. “Almost.”
Part 1: “Wes Was a Very Kind of Diabolical Guy.”
By the early ’80s, Craven was known as a director who made horror movies that were both transgressively violent and shockingly smart, like The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). In the early ’80s, he wrote a script that drew from real life. He had read L.A. Times articles about Southeast Asian immigrants who reportedly died while having distressing dreams. Growing up in Cleveland, he had nightmares himself. His father, a Baptist fundamentalist, was “a scary person”; he was bullied by a kid named Fred. And one fateful night, he had an encounter with a frightening stranger that stuck with him forever.
Wes Craven (writer-director, in 2008): He was a drunk that came down the sidewalk and woke me up when I was sleeping. I went to the window wondering what the hell was there. He just did a mind-fuck on me. He just basically somehow knew I was up there, and he looked right into my eyes. I went back and hid for what I thought was hours. I finally crept back to the window, and he was still there.
Then he started walking almost half-backwards, so that he could keep looking at me, down to the corner and turned, and I suddenly realized, “My god, that’s the direction of the entrance to our apartment building.” I literally ran toward the front door and heard, two stories down, the front door open. I woke up my big brother; he went down with a baseball bat—and nobody was there. Probably the guy heard him coming and ran; he was drunk, having a good time. But the idea of an adult who was frightening and enjoyed terrifying a child was the origin of Freddy.
Robert Shaye (founder, New Line Cinema): Wes was a very kind of diabolical guy. He reacted to a very strict religious life in his peculiar way.
Mimi Craven (Wes Craven’s second wife and a nurse in Nightmare): When I moved in with Wes, he started writing Nightmare on Elm Street. He would go out into the studio, which was back behind our house in Venice, and he would write all day long in a blue bathrobe and a pith helmet. And then he would come in at night, and we would read it and act out the scenes and scare each other. Then he would go and rewrite. So I knew that script like the back of my hand.
Sara Risher (head of production, New Line Cinema): Nobody sent us scripts. We were too low on the totem pole.
Robert Shaye: We were still in a loft on 13th Street and University Place in Manhattan, and we had managed to get a couple of films together.
Risher: [Shaye] came across the Wes Craven script, which he didn’t pass by like everybody in Hollywood.
Robert Shaye: I came across the script through a guy named Mark Forstater. He produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One summer, he said, “You should go to Los Angeles.” I said, “Well, I don’t know anybody in Los Angeles. What should I do that for?” And he said, “Because this is what independent producers do. You have to go out and meet young directors. I know three or four really interesting young directors, and I can help you get an appointment with all of them.” Tobe Hooper was one of them. Another was Joe Dante. And then this other guy, Wes Craven. But I couldn’t get in touch with Wes Craven. And I finally got him on the phone just before I was leaving. He said, “Well, I’ve got one project that’s really pretty interesting.” I said, “What is it?” And he told me the story of Nightmare on Elm Street.
Risher: He went after it. He knew there was something great there.
Robert Shaye: He sent on the script, and I said, “Well, can we maybe make a deal?” And it’s a little blurry for me exactly what happened, but Wes finally said, “I’ll make a deal with this guy. There’s nobody else around.” So we made a deal. I think I paid him 5,000 bucks for an option, and that was the beginning.
Risher: It took a good four or five months of work on the script. There was character work [needed], in my opinion, particularly for the young girl and the women. There was also the fact that we didn’t have the money that particular script needed.
Robert Shaye: We were desperate for money. We had a lot of people thinking that we were going to go bankrupt. I said, “We’ll get a budget. We’ll start making the whole thing happen.”
Risher: Our budget was only like a million-four.
Robert Shaye: Things progressed, and we thought we had some hustlers trying to help me raise some money.
Thommy Hutson (author, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy): This truly almost fell apart at the 11th hour.
Robert Shaye: When I woke up every day, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach: This is out of hand.
Part 2: “Oh Boy, I Could Work With This.”
Meanwhile, A Nightmare on Elm Street needed a cast. There was barely any room in the budget to pay actors, let alone A-listers, who probably wouldn’t have wanted to be in an independent horror movie anyway. So Craven and the producers went with character actors and newcomers.
Annette Benson (casting director): We saw so, so many people. It was a way to start their careers.
Lin Shaye (a teacher in Nightmare): My brother said, “Put my sister in your movie.” That was that. And of course, it was really the beginning of my career.
It was really, really scary. And I realized at that point, “Oh hell, I’m in a horror movie.” —Heather Langenkamp
(Nancy Thompson): Back then, an agent would get a breakdown: “Girl, 16 years old, high school, wholesome.” And I’m sure a lot of agents sent in the women in their client list. I went into one audition, and it was so low-rent. There wasn’t even any furniture in the room. I thought, “Oh no, this is much worse than I thought.”
Benson: Wes loved her right away.
Risher: She was so vulnerable. She was the girl next door, and she was cunning and clever, and figuring out ways back at Freddy as a young girl could do, setting traps for him. It was so realistic, and you were always on her side.
Benson: Johnny Depp came to me through Ilene Feldman, who was his agent at the time. She said, “Annette, let’s make magic. I’m sending Johnny over to you right now. You’re going to love him.”
Mimi Craven: He comes in, he reads. He sucks. He wasn’t an actor. He was a musician. So he leaves. Annette and I are looking at Wes, and he scratches Johnny’s name off. He said, “Well, he was terrible.” That day, Wes’s daughter and her best friend were in from New York. They were preteen. They were squealing [over him]. They were that high-pitched. Only dogs can hear the thing that young girls do. And Annette looks at Wes.
Benson: Evidently, Wes’s daughter thought he was cute.
Mimi Craven: He hired him [to play Glen Lantz], but that was all Annette.
Benson: I mean, that was his very first acting job.
Amanda Wyss (Tina Gray): I auditioned for the role of Nancy, and I was called back for Tina. I was very disappointed. The funny thing was, my agents at the time did not want me to do it. They said, “It’ll ruin your career. Nobody does horror.”
Jsu Garcia (Rod Lane): The landscape was, Friday the 13th was the shit. Texas Chain Saw Massacre set the tone, Exorcist set the tone. But the next thing was Friday the 13th. They sold that film just on the title. But we were going to make a really quality horror film.
Editor’s note: In Nightmare, Garcia was credited as Nick Corri.
Wyss: The four of us went in and read together.
Langenkamp: Lo and behold, there’s Wes Craven. We totally didn’t expect that he would be there. And Annette Benson said, “OK, start from the top. We’re going to do this scene where we’re at Tina’s house.” When Johnny Depp is doing that funny little thing with the boom box.
Wyss: We all just meshed. And Wes told us in the room we had the part. Which never happens, or rarely.
Langenkamp: It was a dream audition. It never happened again. And it was just a simpler time in Hollywood. They didn’t have to pass it by a big room full of executives. Wes Craven had the sole job of casting his own movie.
At the time, Robert Englund was coming off a supporting role in V, a popular sci-fi miniseries that first aired on NBC in 1983 and quickly built a cult following. The L.A. native, then in his mid-30s, remembers thinking that the part would help him stop being typecast as a Southerner.
Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger): It must’ve had something to do with the way Hollywood thought I looked. I mean, I read several times to play John Schneider’s cousin in Dukes of Hazzard. I was just a Hollywood character actor. Nobody knew my name. I sort of thought, “Well, I’m going to be the kind of go-to nerdy science fiction guy.”
Benson: Robert Englund’s agent at the time, Joe Rice, called and said, “You’ve got to see Robert for this part.”
Englund: I’d read the script. It really led you along, and it was kind of hypnotic. And really, every element that was in Wes’s imagination sort of became consistent on the page. But I was anxious to work with Wes—not because of the script, but because I’d spent time hanging out in a bar in Hollywood on La Brea where they had these old black-and-white TV monitors on either side of the bar hanging from the ceiling. And on one side, it was clips from Eraserhead. And on the other side, it was clips from The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left. So I assigned a kind of David Lynchian quality to Wes. And I was curious to work for him.
Benson: I thought, “Oh my God, they’re looking for a David Warner type.” A really big monster type. And I knew Robert wasn’t the big monster type.
Robert Shaye: Usually the villain or the monster in monster films are stuntmen because they’re falling all around. It was Wes who said, “I don’t think I want to cast a stuntman. I’m going to cast a Shakespearean actor.”
Risher: In Robert Englund, he saw the talent that the guy had.
Benson: He was an excellent actor. And my casting was always pretty much a gut feeling. He could do it.
Englund: I expected a kind of goth guy. And I walk in, and, of course, Wes looks like a young Don Quixote in Ralph Lauren. I was tan from surfing, and I had a lot of blond curls. I looked like Billy Katt’s older, uglier brother. And I remember greasing my hair down and putting a little bit of cigarette ash—it’s an old theater trick—under my eyes.
Risher: He knew how to make his voice menacing. And he had a great sense of humor.
Mimi Craven: It was written, but Robert brought Freddy Krueger [to life]. I mean, he gave him dimensions.
Englund: I just tried to play that old game where you don’t blink or you just stare at somebody. You know, the first person that blinks gets socked in the arm. I tried to do that with Wes because I knew it would make my gaze more intense. I think that helped. But Wes, when he was telling me his ideas for the movie, I knew that something special was going on.
Risher: He knew what he wanted. And he visualized what he wanted.
Mimi Craven: The freaky moment was during wardrobe for Robert, and I was there for that. He came in with that fucking Christmas sweater on.
Risher: I remember saying, “It looks like Christmas.” And [Wes] said, “No, no, these are iconic colors. These will work.”
Mimi Craven: And you could see everybody had goosebumps. Because Christmas, it’s so happy.
Jim Doyle (mechanical special effects design): Wes and I were meeting every other day. He was rewriting based on what [production designer] Gregg Fonseca and [cinematographer] Jacques Haitkin could do within the budget. We were trying to pull this whole thing together. And he said, “OK, now what do we do about Freddy’s weapon? What is this thing?” I said, “Well, I don’t really know.” He said, “But it looks like it has to be made in a boiler room by a guy with that level of skill. The picture I have in my head is long knives, like fingernails.” What he didn’t want was a lump on the end of the guy’s hand. I was like, “I think I can probably articulate this. If we can get it to work, we can articulate it.” And a couple of days later, I came back in with a sketch, and the sketch was pretty fucking close to what we ended up doing.
Englund: I didn’t realize it was going to have the incredibly seductive, iconic status that it has now in the world of horror, like the bolts in Frankenstein’s neck or the teeth on a vampire.
Risher: He had a long, thin, flexible body, so he wore all those fingernail knives around very easily.
Englund: And Freddy’s a little junkyard dog that when he puts that glove on, it extends his grasp. It’s an extension of his evil.
Risher: I remember looking at the makeup the first time and thinking it was too severe. And Wes said, “Well, he died from a fire. This is what it would look like.”
Englund: I’m out there in [makeup effects artist] David Miller’s garage, and he’s got an old barber’s chair in there which I spent days in, with a garage door shut, the air-conditioning on. And the first day, the thing that I remember most is not that the glue itched or the fact that it was cold or that David had cheaped out on the makeup brushes and they were a little crusty and sharp. What I remember was he gave me these giant medical books that he checked out of UCLA or some hospital library. And they were all burn victims. And he’s showing me what he’s going to do with the molds and the texturing and the prosthetics. And I couldn’t even look at the book.
But I sat there and watched the makeup evolve over the various sessions. Bob Shaye would come and look at it, and Wes Craven. I could tell they were getting nervous because in David’s little house out in the San Fernando Valley, I think he didn’t have it lit properly. He knew how to blend colors and he knew what it would look like on film, but Bob Shaye and Wes, when they visited us, they didn’t know that. And I couldn’t really tell, either. It looked too white to me. It looked too pink to me, too red. But David knew what he was doing.
I went through that whole process. And the more I did it, the more I was going, “Oh boy, I could work with this.”
Part 3: “Oh Hell, I’m in a Horror Movie.”
Nightmare on Elm Street had its monster. But there still wasn’t enough funding to make the movie. For a while, the production was touch and go. But even when things got hairy, the eternally calm Wes Craven kept things on track.
Risher: We were in preproduction, and I was out in L.A. pregnant with my son. And Bob called and said, “We’ve lost some of the money. The guy who had the home video [rights] backed out, and that’s like a third of our budget.” So he said, “I’m going to stay in New York and try to raise the money.” You can imagine the stress he was under. We had two weeks that we couldn’t pay the crew. He said, “Keep going,” so we kept going.
Robert Shaye: At the end of the day, nobody was coming up with the money. And I got a phone call from the production manager in Los Angeles saying, “I’ve got to warn you that the DP is quitting and the electricians are quitting and we don’t have any crew and they’re leaving in a week.”
Hutson: John Burrows was the production manager. He didn’t get paid for weeks. He actually helped pay the crew so they could keep going.
Risher: Believe it or not, they all stayed. They didn’t leave. I think they trusted that a pregnant woman wouldn’t lie to them.
Hutson: It was a very big deal. It was not like that Hollywood lore of every other movie that almost fell apart before it didn’t.
At the 11th hour, Shaye made a deal with Media Home Entertainment, a home video distribution company founded by producer Joseph Wolf. It wasn’t exactly favorable to New Line.
Robert Shaye (in Never Sleep Again): The tipping point was the devil’s agreement. I made an agreement with Joe, and he agreed to buy the video rights for a certain amount of money. But he made us guarantee that if we didn’t do certain things like buy additional prints and open in a certain number of theaters, that he had the right to take the film away from us and give us nothing for it. And that was the only deal I could make. That finished the financing for us.
Hutson: Everyone in the crew was like, “Listen, we can do this together. We can make this happen.” The crew not only believed in [Shaye], but believed in Wes and believed in themselves and what they were doing.
Mimi Craven: Wes would just show up. He would be like the thing that was standing still while everything revolved around him.
Joseph Whipp (Sergeant Parker): Nice guy. Never angry, never throwing things around. A little self-deprecating. When we were working on Scream, when I got there the first day, he said, “Yeah, I’m finally learning how to do this stuff.”
Lin Shaye: My first impressions of him were rosy cheeks and a guy standing in the corner watching very carefully, covering his mouth with his hand. There was a certain aura about him.
Langenkamp: Because he was so normal looking, I thought there must be something to this guy that he’s not showing. Because he would wear a necktie, he would wear khakis, and then he would often wear a checkered shirt. He just looked so much like a professor, and people made fun of him. I mean, this is Hollywood. Nobody wears a tie.
We would do pranks on him—we would all come to work wearing ties, just to pull his leg. He had such a wholesome sense of humor, as well as a very quick wit. I’m sure he had a dirty sense of humor as well, but his jokes were silly sometimes. He put everyone in such a good mood.
Wyss: He had children our age, so he was very facile with communicating to us in a way we understood. And he made us feel comfortable communicating back to him. He was a very preppy, professorial, avuncular kind of guy. Yet he could think of a million ways to kill you.
Langenkamp: I lived in Silver Lake, off of Griffith Park Boulevard, when I was making Nightmare on Elm Street. I couldn’t believe we were shooting so close to home. That’s the only thing I cared about: My commute was five minutes. I’m like, “Yay!” The first scene that we shot was that drive-up scene at John Marshall High. And it’s just so cute to watch it because we’re playing these teenagers that have been great friends forever. And the first day of work, basically, we all have jitters. We were all nervous, just watching Johnny jump over the side of the Cadillac and get out of the car.
Wyss: Heather and I clicked right away. We’d sit on the trailer steps every day and do the crossword puzzle.
Langenkamp: We went to Dodger games after the shoot. People wondered why we’re sitting in the nosebleed section because everyone thinks, “Oh, you must’ve made $1 billion,” but we were paid just SAG scale for that, for five weeks.
Garcia: Mimi Craven was our mother, essentially. She took us in. I loved her. We’re all at her house, they’re taking care of us. I was a starving actor. I was fed.
Mimi Craven: Fifteen years later when I ran into him at the Cannes Film Festival, Johnny still called me “Mom.”
Garcia: I would go over to Johnny’s house with Heather and Amanda and watch movies. Not Blockbuster rentals, but niche kind of film places. You’d pretty much get The Hills Have Eyes. They wouldn’t be in mainstream video rentals. We would sit there and just watch Wes’s old films and go, “Oh, wow, cool.”
Englund: They were being pampered by the glamour makeup crew while I was sitting next to them with a turkey baster full of K-Y Jelly on me.
Wyss: All four of us would be in the makeup trailer every morning, kind of watching Robert get his makeup done. I never had, “Oh, there’s Freddy.” It was always “Oh, there’s Robert becoming Freddy.”
Langenkamp: Robert is an entertainer in, literally, the best sense of the word. He wakes up every morning hoping he can entertain people, not only with his stories but with his experience and all the people that he’s met and all the movies that he’s done. That’s part of who he is. And I don’t think he would have been able to just sit over in the corner and be quiet. I mean, he really thrives off of attention and just helping people feel at ease in this weird world of Hollywood in 1984. He would say, “Oh my God, Heather, Heather, Heather, you have to go see the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
Englund: The more I could be Robert around them, or the character of Robert telling you the dirty jokes around coffee and doughnuts, the easier it was to say, “Now, Heather, listen to me. I’m going to pretend to pull your hair here. Here’s the trick.” And “Heather, don’t be afraid to really pound on my chest hard.”
Langenkamp: We had so many intense scenes together. I really trusted him. He had knives for fingernails, of course, that he could’ve stabbed me a million times if he wanted to. Even though they were dull blades, they still could’ve done a lot of damage. So I had to trust him a lot.
Englund: At the last second, they tried to change my hat. I had to fight with Wes and Bob about keeping the fedora, which is Wes’s way of seeing Freddy. I had to prove to them how good the fedora looked in silhouette and how I could take it off and reveal my deformed bald head. Even though it’s not my idea, I just knew it was right.
Langenkamp: I didn’t think that was a big deal. I’m like, “Oh, he’s wearing a sweater, he’s wearing a hat,” but I never really had the visual. And I don’t think anybody did until we saw him on the set in his wardrobe and his hat and his makeup, which was really the first day we worked on the school set. When I go down the stairs in the school, that’s my first scene that I have with Robert. And it was terrifying to see him the first time. The smoke, the dungeon-y pipes. It was really, really scary. And I realized at that point, “Oh hell, I’m in a horror movie.”
Part 4: “Later in Life You Look Back and Go, ‘You Know What? I Could Have Died.’”
For a movie with such a low budget, A Nightmare on Elm Street had extremely intricate visual effects. Doyle and his team had their work cut out for them. To stage Freddy’s murder of Tina, the film’s first big set piece, they had to build a rotating set.
Doyle: Wes talked about the structure of the script being like a Shakespeare play, and I could relate to that because I was a theater guy to begin with. Shakespeare would have a tendency to introduce in the first act something that then builds the story for you, but then he drops that and goes into the story. He said, “Because we’ve got to do two things. We’ve got to introduce a character that everybody falls in love with. Then we’re going to kill her, and we’re going to remove her from the story.” And someone else in the story then has to become the lead character, and that would be Nancy.
Wyss: This is how I read the script: Tina dies. I literally skipped right over it, 100 percent. I think I read, “Tina is dragged up on the ceiling,” and I thought, “Oh, that’ll be interesting how they’re going to make somebody else do that.” It’s like the famous quote about shooting Gone With the Wind, and it said, “Atlanta burns.” And everyone was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fine.” But it took like 30 days to shoot.
Doyle: Wes said, “How about at the end of the first reel, you scared the fuck out of people and you hooked them so badly they can’t leave?” And I said, “What if she was in her bedroom, and the whole bedroom goes Looney Tunes and it goes upside down?” He says, “You could do that?” And I say, “I can do it. I don’t know whether we can afford it.” And so I ended up making a deal with production that I would build the room, and then, at the end of the film, I’d keep it. And that’s what I did. I hired a crew, I built the room, we did all the production work on it, and basically everything up to installing the set was my risk. I was paying people out of my pocket just to get this thing up and running. Hopefully then I would be able to use it for other projects and make some money on it. And it turned out to be a pretty good decision because Tina’s death is one of the all-time top deaths in a film ever.
Wyss: Every single thing in this room was nailed down, shellacked, glued. Nothing moved, whether it was upside down or on the walls. It was just hardened into the room, and the room was manually cranked.
Doyle: I saw the Poltergeist room, and it was this gigantic thing, and it had all these hydraulics and stuff, and I’m going, “If you just balanced that fucking thing, you could just turn it by hand.” Because the people are always going to be in the bottom, you don’t have to worry about their weight. So you just balance the room, and you should be able to turn something even of that scale by hand. And so I got big bearings, surplus, and one of my guys and I sat down and we built a model of it. We did basic calculations on the stiffness and all that. We got it all put together. And because the load capacity of the bearings was so high, once we got the thing put together, I mean, you could turn it with one finger.
Wyss: I was always on the floor, and at each turn of the room, I would go to the next floor. Sometimes it was the side wall, sometimes it was the ceiling. And Jacques Haitkin and Wes, I think they were in airplane seats affixed to the wall. So the camera always had the same point of view. We started out and I get pulled out of bed and I get dragged up the wall, and then the room spun, and then I’m on the ceiling. We had to rehearse that many times. I lost my sense of up and down and was very dizzy.
I remember saying, ‘It looks like Christmas.’ And [Wes] said, ‘No, no, these are iconic colors. These will work.’Sara Risher
Englund: They had me there, and they thought they might need a point of view shot between Tina’s legs of what she was seeing that they would intercut with what her boyfriend was seeing, which is just her alone being dragged across the ceiling. Amanda Wyss couldn’t operate the camera, though, because she’s not union. But it just so happened that the first assistant camera was Jacques Haitkin’s wife, Anne. So Anne took her jeans off, got down there in her underwear and got the handheld camera, and we put blood on her legs. And I dragged her around, and they shot between her legs. That shot was so hardcore and so scary and so disorienting that they didn’t use it in the movie. But Wes used that sequence to get the censors to let him use other shots. It was sort of his trade because they didn’t know that he really didn’t care. He pretended like, “This is my favorite shot. If you’re not going to let me have it, you’ve got to let me have these two.”
Wyss: I was literally dragged with high-tension fishing line. I thought, “I can’t do this.” I felt my body heaving even though I was on the floor. And so Wes stopped and stuck his head through a window and was trying to explain to me that I was on the ground, and I just said, “I don’t think so.” I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. You could have told me I was on Mars.
Langenkamp: That’s so gruesome. In fact, the new Ultra-4K HD DVD actually has eight more seconds to that scene, as if it’s not long enough as it is. That scene, to me, is the grossest horror movie scene of all time.
Doyle: We were trying to figure out how to kill Glen. And I was like, “Well, we’ve got this rotating room sitting here.” Wes was like, “Would it be possible to do something like The Shining?” And I knew, of course, he was talking about the elevator scene. I said, “Yeah, probably.” What we didn’t count on was there was going to be around 500 pounds of blood in the room.
Risher: It was so much blood you wouldn’t have believed it. It was like a river of blood. We could have drowned in it.
Doyle: The room is now sitting there with 500 pounds of blood on the ceiling. It was supposed to run down the wall and across the floor. Well, to unlock the room, we had to tilt it really slightly to pull a pin. And when we did that, we tilted it a bit too far, and the blood got away from us.
Langenkamp: None of the blood went down the walls like Wes had planned. Instead, it all went out the open door. They just put a wind effect to make it seem like there was some churning blood from hell.
Doyle: Now that blood was on the floor. And we’ve got hot electrical on the floor. I remember unplugging everything. We lucked out. It could’ve been really bad.
Mimi Craven: Somebody called. And I answered the phone, and they said, “Hey, just want to let you know he’s OK.” And I went, “All right, start at the beginning, please.” They strapped him in. But then the room kept spinning, and the grips lost the ropes. And Wes is inside this room spinning. They got the shot, thank God.
Doyle: It’s one of those things where later in life you look back and go, “You know what? I could have died.”
Part 5: “We Got Away With Murder.”
Not all of the scares in A Nightmare on Elm Street are so over the top. The film is built on smaller moments of terror, like when Nancy’s taking a bath and Freddy’s glove slowly rises out of the water.
Doyle: We had a second-story set. And one of the reasons it was a second-story set was because I had to have something under the bathtub.
Langenkamp: They built a bathtub on top of an 8-foot tank, basically. It was very, very rudimentary.
Doyle: The water was actually in the tank. And you get in and out of it by going into the bathtub.
Langenkamp: Jim Doyle was in scuba gear all day long in that, just putting his hand up and down, up and down.
Doyle: My assistant Peter Kelly was going to do that. Peter was 6-foot-4 and had really long arms. He had a degree in film, he knew about acting. But it turns out that he was claustrophobic underwater. So he popped in there and he popped right back out again and said, “I can’t do this.” And I was like, “OK, well, I guess I can.”
Langenkamp: It was freezing.
Doyle: We kept the warm water running, and then we were able to keep it at a comfortable temperature. It just took longer than we hoped.
Langenkamp: We’d get it to be probably like 89 degrees, and then I’d be like, “OK, you’ve got to add some hot water.” Then they’d boil water down and pour in some teapots full of water.
Doyle: We spent six or seven hours on it.
Langenkamp: Wes would bang on the tub three times, and then the hand would go up. Then he’d bang on it twice, and the hand would go down. So all day long, just banging on the tub.
Robert Shaye: One of the ideas that I had for the film that Wes deigned to let me include was the sticky stairs. Sometimes, I’d have a dream where I’d be going somewhere and I was caught in cement and I couldn’t move. You feel totally helpless. You’re in the bloody dream, and you’re going to die.
Langenkamp: I think it was oatmeal and maybe cream of mushroom soup. I just remember it being really sticky. That was the one he made us put in there at the last minute. We were just throwing things against the wall. But that was his nightmare.
Charles Bernstein (composer): On my work print on my VHS, I was watching the scene where the phone rings and Heather picks up the phone and [Freddy] says, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” And then a plastic tongue darts out of the phone. I hit the pause button right here exactly where I’m sitting, and I sat down and I thought, “Charles, what are you doing? Has it come to this?”
Doyle: I called David [Miller] and said, “I’ve got this idea. Could you do this overnight? Because we need to shoot it tomorrow.” So he came up, and he made the phone overnight. I got a reputation for being a little twisted with some of these ideas, just spitballing this stuff. We got away with murder.
Langenkamp: Wes was a reader. He read everything. He read newspapers from around the world. He read books. He had been an English teacher. He knew the Bible front and back. He was the most educated man I knew. He’d read that you can have these powers in your sleep to turn away from the nightmare and take it away and give it no power. And then he’d also read about the kid who tries to stay up to prevent his nightmares. It’s all plucked from newspaper headlines. It’s just nobody else has the ability to imagine it that way.
In the climax, Nancy indeed beats Freddy by taking away his power. But that’s not how the movie ends. The coda starts idyllically, with Nancy leaving her house the next morning. Her mother, Marge (Ronee Blakley), says goodbye as Nancy’s friends, who are all alive again, pick her up in a convertible. The car’s top then pops into place, and it’s striped like Freddy’s sweater. Nancy’s trapped. All of a sudden, Freddy grabs her mother and yanks her through the door window as nearby children jumping rope start singing, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.”
Mimi Craven: They fought about that.
Robert Shaye: There was a big disagreement.
Risher: Bob wanted a real kooky, crazy, wild ending that could lead to a sequel. And Wes wanted a really beautiful poetic ending of the girls jumping rope, singing, with the kids going away in the car.
Robert Shaye: I said, “Listen, you can’t do this in a horror film. There’s got to be some kind of thing that really kind of grabs them at the end.” So at one point, he said, “I can’t argue with you anymore. I’m exhausted.” I said, “Well, let’s shoot both things.”
Englund: We shot it several ways. One I remember: driving the car up and Heather comes out and it’s like a Disney movie. It’s a little brighter than reality. She gets in the car, and I’m there and the convertible top slams shut on the car. And the grips, the little things that lock on a convertible, they look like little Freddy claws.
Robert Shaye: We had these little test screenings, not the fancy ones that they had in the real Hollywood, but in our amateur Hollywood. We tested all of the different endings, including the one that Wes wanted. None was particularly outstanding. We said, “Well, what are we going to do?” He said, “Well, let’s use them all. Let’s just finish this.”
Mimi Craven: Wes fought and fought and fought and fought and finally just had to acquiesce.
Langenkamp: The way I’ve always interpreted the ending is that Nancy’s had this dream. She went into it with a very intense intent, to grab Freddy, bring him out. And so it seems like that’s really successful. She pulls him out of the dream, she sets all the booby traps, she turns her back. He seems to go away, and then she comes out into this beautiful day. And it looks like everything is normal again, but then it is not normal, and the car comes up.
It’s that same dream that’s just still continuing. And we don’t know how it ends. We don’t know how it ends for Nancy. The only thing we know is that she appears in Nightmare on Elm Street 3, so she didn’t die in it. She does continue to live.
Part 6: “A Kind of American Experience.”
Nightmare was released on November 9, 1984. In those days, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Paul Attanasio was a film critic. “For such a low-budget movie,” he wrote in The Washington Post, “Nightmare on Elm Street is extraordinarily polished.” It went on to gross almost $26 million at the domestic box office and, according to Variety, $57 million worldwide. Before long, New Line earned a new nickname: “The House That Freddy Built.”
Risher: We had, I think, five or six theaters in New York. It did very nicely, and we were very happy, but it wasn’t a huge smash.
Bernstein: I was pretty convinced when I was working on it that it was not a hit. I honestly felt that. The zeitgeist thing did not kick in right away, but something did. There was a two-page ad in Variety, which I still have, which said, “Sleeper: Nightmare on Elm Street.” And it said how much it had made on its first weekend. That was a clue.
Risher: It was our head of distribution who came to us on Monday and said, “Let’s start writing the sequel.”
Robert Shaye: As it happens often with really good movies, they become part of the zeitgeist, then they just continue.
Englund: Shortly after that, because I was big on V, I went to New York to sign autographs at a science-fiction convention. It was William Shatner and me. And Bob Shaye came to take me out to lunch, and he said, “Oh, man, I told you it’s big. I told you, Bobby.” He goes, “Look at this line.” And I said, “Bob, no, you’re wrong. These are my fans from V.” He goes, “No, no, no, no. It’s Freddy. They’re here for Freddy.” So we go out to lunch. I’m taking a break, and I have to come back and sign autographs. I walk out the front door of the Roosevelt Hotel, and there, standing in the rain for half a block, are hardcore punk rockers and heavy metal kids in black leather. They’re all there for Freddy.
Wyss: I was filming something. I never got to see it in the theater. The first time I saw it was on VHS. I personally don’t like being scared. I had to fast-forward through some of the scary parts, and I thought, “Wow, this movie came out really scary.”
Bernstein: The homemade intensity of it all, it just felt so like you could do it with papier-mâché and paper clips. But it did make it even more scary.
Risher: Everybody pitched in and gave ideas and helped figure out ways to do the stunts and the effects that were all in camera.
Doyle: Everything was physical. There was one optical effect in the whole film, when Freddy walks through the bars in the jail room.
Mimi Craven: Every dollar is up there. Every single dollar.
Doyle: I was just like, “Wow, this is doing really well. And wow, I didn’t keep any of the merchandising.” Nobody was making masks of Michael Myers, so we’re like, “Yeah, big fucking deal.” The first year after Nightmare came out, it was the most popular Halloween costume.
Wyss: That Halloween, I was at my mom’s house in Manhattan Beach, and there were little kids dressed up as Freddy, and I was handing out candy. True story. I would say to the parents of the kids, “I play Tina in the movie.” And every single one of them was like, “Yeah, right.” Nobody believed me.
Mimi Craven: I mean, can you imagine? It’s Wes’s creation. When he first saw Freddy costumes, he was just grinning from ear to ear.
These days, the cast and crew are happy to relive the original Nightmare. Now in their 60s, the four teenage stars are still acting. Englund played Freddy in eight films and continues to work regularly. Doyle is now the director of a company that designs high-tech water installations. Risher is an active producer. Turner Broadcasting bought New Line in 1994, and Shaye stepped down from the company in 2008. Craven went on to direct an Elm Street sequel and several more horror classics. In 2015, he died of brain cancer. His work, especially Nightmare, has influenced countless filmmakers, including Jordan Peele and the Duffer brothers. And 40 years later, the genre he ruled is finally ruling Hollywood.
Doyle: People in general are not confident about their connection with the dreamworld because dreams come out of nowhere. And I think Wes found something that was pretty universal. People don’t trust themselves to be cognizant when they’re asleep.
That idea is so good. It’s just so clean. What if your dreams became reality?Leigh Janiak
Leigh Janiak (writer-director, Fear Street trilogy): That idea is so good. It’s just so clean. What if your dreams became reality? And more specifically, what if they were your nightmares? There was no delineation between waking and sleep.
Robert Shaye: You don’t have any defense in your dreams. And if a scary guy says, “I’m going to kill you,” there’s nothing you can do. You can’t run away.
Janiak: There was just something about Freddy Krueger and his deformities. The fact that it felt vaguely sexual to me in a way I didn’t quite understand. Then there was the whole subtext that—I don’t even know how I knew this—maybe he had done something bad to kids. All of that just made me say, “What is inside this movie for me?”
Hutson: What Wes did so well was keep Freddy in the shadows. He barely speaks. He has an insanely little amount of screen time when you actually add it up, but he’s so omnipresent in that movie. The specter of evil.
Langenkamp: I hear so many great stories about people who just got over their own Freddy Kruegers in their life. I love it. I always ask what their story is, and there’s always one.
Janiak: I grew up in the ’80s, and that was the heyday of slasher films. I would watch them at sleepovers. But Nightmare, I was so scared of. I was so scared to watch it for a very long time, and I didn’t watch it until I was fully in my teens.
Englund: I think that there’s something about that experience in the ’80s, sitting on a couch at home on the weekend with that pizza getting cold and the beer getting warm, with Mom and Dad, or an older brother who was trying to scare you. I think that it became almost a surrogate family memory for an awful lot of the fans, a horror movie that you shared with your family. That really made it a kind of American experience.
Wyss: If you actually took the horror out of it, it’s really sort of a sad thriller. And it’s a movie about latchkey kids, the first generation from divorced parents. And I think there were a lot of real emotional connections to the film at the time. It’s not a traditional chop ’em up kind of thing. His glove slashes, but it’s not naked girls running in the woods. It’s this beautiful story of these kids creating their own family.
Langenkamp: There weren’t that many horror movies that were actually getting big audiences back then.
Englund: For a long time, we were sort of the movies that got the shitty table at the commissary.
Langenkamp: Now, I think every month there’s a pretty decent horror movie that’s making good money.
Wyss: I think that it’s almost a rite of passage now to star in a horror film. And it would’ve been great if that had been our experience, but it wasn’t. Our experience was its own thing.
Mimi Craven: There’s an autograph show in Indianapolis. Everybody was there. They all said, “Mimi, you say something about Wes.” And I said, “OK, here’s the story. I know what scared Wes Craven.” And you could hear a pin drop. I said, “What scared him was if when he died, he was only remembered as the schlockmeister.”
Englund: I remember “slasher movie” was forbidden on our set. We hated that. And they also used to call him a horrormeister. Wes Craven, he hated that. But A Nightmare on Elm Street is not a slasher movie. It takes place in the subconscious.
Langenkamp: He just always loved being smart. He loved being funny. And sometimes you feel like you have to hide your fire under a bushel basket, but he never did. He always was just who he was.
Hutson: After my book was done, I went to Wes’s house and I took him copies, and he sat there and was just paging through it. Then he looks at me, he goes, “Can I just sit here and read this? Are you OK if I read a little?” Then he turns to me and he says, “Will you autograph my copy?” It was a really powerful moment for me as someone who wanted to be in the movie business. What I didn’t do was have him sign my copy. What a dolt, right?
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
