Image by iirliinnaa from Pixabay I’ve shared my unexpected love of many horror films from Steven Jay Schneider’s book “1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” From 60s and 70s classics like Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Carrie to modern iterations like Get Out and The Invisible Man, these are just some of the horror flicks that helped me gain an appreciation of this genre. Today, I will be examining the making of an 80s standard of the “slasher” subgenre: Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
[NOTE: This blog will contain spoilers for “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” You have been warned.] The History The core inspiration from the project came from several unrelated newspaper articles in the Los Angeles Times during the 1970s that director West Craven (The Hills Have Eyes, Scream) came across. The articles in question told stories of several Hmong refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam who suffered horrible nightmares and thus refused to sleep. Some of them died in their sleep, and medical officials coined the term “Asian Death Syndrome” as they diagnosed some of these men with a potential combination of Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS) and Brugada syndrome. In conceptualizing the film’s villain, Craven took inspiration from a strange encounter the director had in his childhood wherein an elderly man glared at him while walking past his home one night before walking off. Initially conceived as a child molester, Craven decided to make him a child murderer so as to avoid accusations of being exploitative of contemporary child sex crimes cases that occurred in California around the same time. Ultimately, Craven thought of the film’s villain as “the worst of parenthood” and “the worst fear of children.” He came up with the name Freddy Krueger based on his childhood bully and clothed him in a red-and-green sweater because, according to a 1982 article in Scientific American, they clash the most to the human retina. Due to the project coming a handful of years after other notable slasher flicks like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and John Carpenter’s Halloween, Craven knew he wanted Krueger to stand out alongside Leatherface, Michael Myers, and other notable slasher monsters. Instead of Krueger wearing a literal mask, he made him burned and scarred so that he would “be able to talk…taunt and threaten.” Furthermore, Craven found a knife as a slasher’s weapon to be too common and thus considered arming Krueger with a sickle before ultimately deciding on giving him “a glove with steak knives.” By 1981, once he completed production on the comic book horror movie Swamp Thing, Craven began writing the screenplay for this project. Funny enough, the first studio to express interest in the project was Wat Disney Productions but Craven ultimately rejected them because of their request that he tone down the content for children. After both Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios passed on the script, Craven’s dire straits were temporarily resolved when New Line Cinema (at that point only a distributor) agreed to finance and produce the project. However, the studio struggled throughout pre-production with financing the project and thus had to turn to external financiers (all of whom backed out and came back in at one point or another). Despite going on to finance far more profitable and noteworthy films (notably Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies), this project being the studio’s first commercial success cemented New Line Cinema as “The House That Freddy Built.” David Warner (Tom Jones, The Omen, Titanic) was originally cast to play Krueger, but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. While looking for his replacement, Craven met with Kane Hodder (who would go on to play Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise). However, Craven felt that all the actors he met with were “too quiet” and “compassionate towards children.” It was not until Robert Englund (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Stranger Things) that Craven found his Freddy because, according to the director, Englund was “comfortable with [the] idea” of getting “malicious and malevolent.” In reading for the role, Englund acted “rat-like” based on descriptions of real child abusers and molesters not as physically intimidating but as “weasels.” Principal photography lasted for just over a month, starting in mid-June of 1984, utilizing various locations in and around Los Angeles. To film the blood geyser sequence and Tina’s death scene, Craven and his cameraman were strapped into seats from a Datsun B-210 which were mounted on a custom frame that rotated. The set itself was inverted so that the room appeared right side up, and ended up using water dyed red rather than fake blood because the latter didn’t have the right look for the geyser effect. However, while filming the water’s flow went in an unexpected manner resulting in the rotating room to spin and both Craven and actress Heather Langenkamp (who played the “final girl” Nancy Thompson) being covered in the red water. Throughout production, over 500 gallons of fake blood were used in the special effects. For the film’s ending, Craven originally intended for Nancy to drive off with her friends through the fog without any clear indication of the truth behind Kruger surviving or not. However, after coming up with several alternative endings to replace it, Craven and his team were “so amused” by ending with Krueger pulling Nancy’s mother through the door that they ultimately went with that one. Ultimately made on a budget of 1.1 million dollars, A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in November of 1984 to critical and commercial success. Not only did it earn 57 million dollars at the worldwide box office, but many critics singled out Craven’s direction and screenplay, Krueger’s performance, the cinematography, and the special effects as the best aspects of the movie. The film has gone down as one of the best horror films of all time, and was one of last year’s twenty-five additions to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. The Pros To be perfectly honest, I’m not the biggest of Wes Craven’s movies. There are a select few that I enjoy, like the Meryl Streep-led biopic Music of the Heart and the mid-2000s thriller Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. However, I’ve found myself underwhelmed by some of his notable horror flicks like The Hills Have Eyes and Scream. But the one Craven horror movie that, more than thirty after being released, remains both scary and entertaining is A Nightmare on Elm Street. For starters, Craven’s premise for an original slasher flick is simply inspired. It feels unique within the historical context of other slashes of the time like John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. Whereas both those movies (uncoincidentally) have similar plots, A Nightmare on Elm Street has something to say about adolescence with its take on the slasher. Furthermore, Craven embraces a dark version of fantasy by utilizing the story to blur the lines of reality in an incredibly engaging manner for this kind of manner. But what’s perhaps most impressive about the film’s central idea is that few (if any) movies in the slasher genre in the years since have even come close to this level of conceptual creativity. Of course, you don’t have a good slasher movie without an iconic slasher villain. Without a doubt, A Nightmare on Elm Street is greatly enhanced by Robert Englund’s portrayal of the witty but deadly Freddy Krueger. Rather than a masked killer with a mysterious backstory that lacks any sense of personality, Krueger defies this archetype by being an expressive, emotional, and captivating person behind the facial scars and sharp leather gloves. While the film might suffice on the back of Craven’s direction and screenplay, it is the way that Englund terrorizes the teen characters and terrifies the audience that seared the movie into my memory. But the most underappreciated aspect of A Nightmare on Elm Street, in my humble opinion, is the special effects. From the bathtub scene to the creative kills, Craven’s crew wastes no ounce of ingenuity and talent making the dream world crossing over into the real world utterly believable. Furthermore, it adds to the immersive nature of the film’s horror vibes by making the situations that the characters find them in “feel real” despite the fact that they’re questionable even in the context of the movie’s fictional universe. While I’m not always impressed by the use of practical effects in movies from this time, I’ve found that when it works (in cases like this)—it really works. The Cons Surely, all those aforementioned strengths of A Nightmare on Elm Street outweigh any flaws, right? While (in my humble opinion) they do, the flaws on display here are still significant enough to mention. So, let’s get to it! 😊 I think the most evident flaw of the movie lies with its characters (aside from Freddy Krueger, of course). Whether it’s the largely forgettable teens or the cartoonishly idiotic/malevolent adults in the town, I just found them to be too evocative of the worst tendencies of Stephen King when he writes bullies and unrealistically flawed adults. In other words, the inclusion of these sensibilities keeps the movie from achieving a certain degree of timelessness that I hoped it would have. Specifically, I just never found Nancy Thompson’s (Heather Langenkamp) rivalry with Freddy Krueger to be nearly as compelling as the other iconic slasher pairings like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise or even Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and the Ghostface killers of the Scream series. So, what are my final impressions of A Nightmare on Elm Street? Despite some generally lackluster characters, Craven and his cast and crew brought into existence a very iconic slasher villain with smart writing, great direction, timeless special effects, and an overall vibe that embraces its primary objective while embracing the best of classic horror. If you haven’t checked it out before, give it a watch! I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. 😊 What are your thoughts on Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street? What other 80s horror movies do you recommend? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst
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Austin McManusI have no academic or professional background in film production or criticism; I simply love watching and talking about movies. Archives
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