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A Nightmare on Elm Street was the first film in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of slasher films. Released in November 1984 by New Line Cinema, the film was directed by Wes Craven and starred Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and, in his first motion picture role, Johnny Depp. The film was hugely popular and spawned a long-running series of films, a television series, and a comic book series currently being published by Wildstorm.
Written by Craven, a former English teacher, the film's premise is the question of where the line between dreams and reality lies. The villain, Freddy Krueger, thus exists in the "dream world" yet can kill in the "real world". Sequels to the original would continue to blur the distinction between dream and reality before finally challenging the line between film and reality by showing Heather Langenkamp, playing a fictionalized version of herself, haunted by the villain of a series of films she has starred in.
Also, in the U.K. and Ireland, there was a book released entitled: The Nightmares On Elm Street: The Continuing Story: Parts 1, 2, 3. This book was released to go along with the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The book was written by Jeffrey Cooper, and was also based on screenplays written by Wes Craven, David Chaskin and Bruce Wagner.
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Plot summary
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A teenage girl, Tina Grey (Amanda Wyss) has a disturbing nightmare in which she is stalked through a dark, neverending boiler room by a creepy, shadowy figure with a dirty red-and-green sweater, a battered hat, and a glove with razor-sharp knives for fingernails. Just as he catches her, however, she wakes up screaming, only to discover four razor cuts in her nightdress identical to the cuts in her dream. The next day, she finds out that her friend Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) had the same dream.
That night, Tina, Nancy and her boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) have a sleep-over to make a distraught Tina feel better. Tina's rebellious, on-and-off boyfriend Rod Lane (Nick Corri) crashes the party and goes to bed with Tina. However, Tina has another nightmare, and this time the killer catches her and brutally murders her. Rod wakes up to find Tina being cut open by invisible knives and then dragged across the ceiling. Rod is of course suspected of the killing and is arrested the next day.
Nancy then has three sadistically creepy, violent nightmares, in school, in the bath, and in her bed, where she is viciously stalked then attacked by the same terrifying figure who attacked Tina. These nightmares lead her to talk to Rod in prison, who tells her what he saw in Tina's bedroom. She becomes increasingly convinced that the figure appearing in her dreams is the person responsible for the killing of Tina, much to the dismay of her mother (Ronee Blakley). Nancy and a skeptical Glen rush to the police station late at night to talk to Rod, only to find that he's been strangled by his own bedsheets. It appears to everyone, except Nancy, to be a suicide.
Nancy's mother takes her to a Dream Therapy Clinic to ensure she gets some sleep. Once again, she has a horrendous nightmare. This time, her arm is badly cut, but she finds that she has brought something out from her dream: the killer's battered hat. It arouses concern, but also other feelings in Nancy's mother, who is clearly hiding a secret.
Eventually, Nancy's mother, increasingly drink-sodden, reveals to Nancy that the owner of the hat, and the killer, was a man called Fred Krueger, a child murderer who killed at least twenty children. Furious, vengeful parents burned him alive in his boiler room hideout when he was released from prison on a technicality. Now, it appears he is manipulating the dreams of their children to enact his revenge from beyond the grave. Nancy's mother, however, reassures Nancy that Krueger can't hurt anyone ("He's dead, honey, because Mommy killed him.")
Nancy devises a plan, with Glen, to catch Krueger, but Glen succumbs to sleep and is viciously killed by being sucked into his bed and shot back up in a fountain of blood and guts. Nancy faces Krueger on her own and succeeds in destroying him by turning her back on him and draining him of all energy... or so she thinks...
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Production
Wes Craven wrote the screenplay around 1981. He pitched it to several studios, but all of them passed. Finally, the fledgling New Line Cinema corporation - which had up to that point only distributed films, rather than making its own - gave the project the go-ahead.
During filming, New Line's distribution deal for the movie fell through and for two weeks it was unable to pay its cast and crew. They stayed with the project nevertheless, until New Line found another distributor. The film's success (US grosses $25 million for an estimated $1.8 million budget) and that of its sequels ended New Line's financial difficulties and set it on the way to becoming a major studio. While New Line films has since made much bigger and more profitable movies, Nightmare holds such an important place in the company's history that it is often referred to as 'The House That Freddy Built'.
Wes Craven originally planned for the film to have a happy ending: Nancy kills Freddy by ceasing to believe in him, then awakes to discover that everything that happened in the movie was an elongated nightmare. However, New Line leader Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending, in which Freddy disappears and the movie all appears to have been a dream, only for the audience to discover that they are watching a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream, where Freddy reappears as a car that "kidnaps" Nancy, followed by a demonic arm killing her mother. Both a happy ending and a twist ending were filmed, but the final film used the twist ending. As a result, Craven (who never wanted the film to be an ongoing franchise), dropped out of working on the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge.
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Writing
Wes Craven states that the film was inspired by several newspaper articles printed in the LA times on a group of Cambodian refugees and their children, who, after fleeing to America from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, were suffering horrific nightmares, after which they refused to sleep. Acting on medical advice, their parents encouraged them to do so. However, each of the children died in their sleep soon after, following the second dream. After Craven read the articles covering these events, he began writing the film.
By Craven's account, he had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger, and named his villain accordingly. (He had done the same in his earlier film The Last House on the Left, where the rapist's name was shortened to 'Krug'.) He based Krueger's appearance on another childhood experience in which he had been scared by a homeless man, with his distinctive red-and-green sweater chosen because Craven had read that those were the two hardest colours to visually process together.
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Casting
Fred Krueger (Robert Englund)
Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp)
Tina Grey (Amanda Wyss)
Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp)
Rod Lane (Nick Corri)
Donald Thompson (John Saxon)
Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakley)
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Cultural impact
The film was a phenomenal success. It spawned several sequels, as well as making a horror icon of the film's villain, Freddy Krueger. By the time of the film's second sequel, Freddy was a household name, appearing on t-shirts, masks, action figures, candy, magazines, trading cards, and much more. The character remains, along with Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees, Halloween's Michael Myers, Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman , Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, as one of the most popular and famous horror villains of all time.
In June 2003, Freddy Krueger was ranked 40 on The American Film Institute's list of the greatest 100 Heroes and Villains of all-time.
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Trivia
If you listen to the 1999 DVD commentary, you'll realize that it was actually recorded in 1996 for a LaserDisc release.
This is the only film in the series in which Freddy does not have stripes on the arms of his sweater.
Pancake mix was used for the "melting stairs" effect during Nancy's second dream.
During the scene where Freddy falls off a banister, the mattress that he lands on is visible in the corner of the screen.
Although he is much more commonly known as "Freddy", Krueger is credited as "Fred" in this film.
The house where Elm Street was filmed is located at 1428 North Genesee Avenue, Hollywood, California.
Originally, Tina's death involved a splash of blood when her body hit the bed after falling from the ceiling. This scene was included in the original UK and Australian cinema and video release on the CBS/Fox label, but cut from the US release and subsequent video versions.
Wes Craven's original concept for Freddy Krueger was considerably more gruesome, with teeth showing through the flesh over the jaw, pus running from the sores, and a part of the skull showing through the head. Make-up artist David B. Miller argued that an actor couldn't be convincingly made up that way and a puppet would be hard to film and wouldn't blend well with live actors, so these ideas were eventually abandoned.
After Nancy escapes Freddy in the bathtub, the trailer for the film The Evil Dead is visible on her television. Wes Craven did this as an inside joke after Sam Raimi had a poster of The Hills Have Eyes in the basement of the cabin in The Evil Dead.
There are three alternate endings to this film. The first is a happy ending. The second shows Nancy's mother watching them drive away, then getting pulled through the window by Freddy. The third one has the car Glen is driving taken over by Freddy, as Nancy watches her mother get taken away by him, then shows Freddy is now driving the car.
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"Infinifilm" DVD Release
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On September 26th, 2006, New Line Cinema re-released the movie as a Region 1 Infinifilm special edition DVD. Included on the disc are these features:
Brand new, feature-length audio commentary with Wes Craven and actor Robert Englund
Never Sleep Again: Making of documentary
House That Freddy Built: Documentary that looks at the legacy of New Line horror
Night Terrors: Documentary that looks at the origins of Wes Cravens nightmares
Freddy’s Coming For You: Trivia challenge
Exclusive 'Infinifilm' interactive video clips
Alternate endings to the film
You can view the special edition limited box art here
A Region 2 disc, identical to the Infinifilm release, followed the month after.
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