Story of movie A Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise :
A Nightmare on Elm Street is an American horror franchise that consists of nine slasher films, a television series, novels, and comic books. The films began with the film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) created by Wes Craven. The series revolves around the fictional character Freddy Krueger, a former child killer who after being burned alive by the vengeful parents of his victims, returns from the grave to terrorize and kill the teenage residents of Springwood, Ohio in their dreams. The original film was written and directed by Craven, who returned to co-script the second sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and to write and direct New Nightmare (1994). The films collectively grossed over $457 million at the box-office worldwide.
| A Nightmare on Elm Street | |
|---|---|
Cover art for 1999 DVD box set | |
| Created by | Wes Craven |
| Original work | A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) |
| Owner | Warner Bros. Pictures |
| Print publications | |
| Novel(s) | List of novels |
| Comics | List of comics |
| Films and television | |
| Film(s) | List of films |
| Television series | Freddy's Nightmares (1988–90) |
| Games | |
| Video game(s) | List of video games |
The original film was released in 1984. A series of sequels produced by the independent film company New Line Cinema followed. New Line often attributes the growth of their company to the success of the Nightmare series. The film series as a whole has received mixed reviews by critics, but has been a financial success at the box office. When comparing the United States box office grosses of other American horror film series, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the second highest grossing series in adjusted US dollars. In 1988, a television series was produced with Freddy as the host. The pilot episode focused on the night Freddy was burned alive by the angry parents of the children he had killed, though the rest of the series featured episodes with independent plots. Twelve novels, separate from the adaptations of the films, and multiple comic book series were published featuring Freddy Krueger, as well as a crossover film featuring fellow horror icon Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise. A remake of the 1984 film was released in 2010, and a second remake is currently being planned.
Screenplay
| Film | Director | Writer(s) | Producer(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) | Wes Craven | Robert Shaye | |
| A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) | Jack Sholder | David Chaskin | |
| A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) | Chuck Russell | Screenplay by: Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner and Chuck Russell & Frank Darabont Story by: Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner | |
| A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) | Renny Harlin | Screenplay by: Brian Helgeland and Jim Wheat & Ken Wheat Story by: William Kotzwinkle and Brian Helgeland |
Robert Shaye and Rachel Talalay |
| A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) | Stephen Hopkins | Screenplay by: Leslie Bohem Story by: John Skipp & Craig Spector and Leslie Bohem |
Robert Shaye and Rupert Harvey |
| Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) | Rachel Talalay | Screenplay by: Michael De Luca Story by: Rachel Talalay |
Robert Shaye and Aron Warner |
| Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) | Wes Craven | Marianne Maddalena | |
| Freddy vs. Jason (2003) | Ronny Yu | Damian Shannon & Mark Swift | Sean S. Cunningham |
| A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) | Samuel Bayer | Screenplay by: Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer Story by: Wesley Strick |
Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller |
Overview
The original film, written and directed by Wes Craven and titled A Nightmare on Elm Street, was released in 1984. The story focuses on Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) attacking Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends in their dreams, successfully killing all but Nancy, in fictional Springwood, Ohio. Krueger's back-story is revealed by Nancy's mother, Marge, who explains he was a child murderer. The parents of Springwood killed Krueger after he was acquitted on a technicality. Nancy defeats Freddy by pulling him from the dream world and stripping him of his powers when she stops being afraid of him. Freddy returns to attack the new family, the Walshes, living in Nancy Thompson's house in 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. Freddy possesses the body of Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton), using him to kill. Jesse is temporarily saved by his girlfriend Lisa (Kim Myers), who helps him exorcise Krueger's spirit.
Wes Craven returned to write A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, released in 1987. In the second sequel, Freddy is systematically killing the last of the Elm Street children. The few remaining children have been placed in Westin Hills Mental Institution, for allegedly attempting suicide. Nancy Thompson arrives at Westin Hills as a new intern, and realizes the children are being killed by Freddy. With the help of Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson), Nancy helps Kristen (Patricia Arquette), Joey (Rodney Eastman), Taryn (Jennifer Rubin), Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), and Will (Ira Heiden) find their dream powers, so they can kill Freddy once and for all. Neil, unknowingly until the end, meets the spirit of Freddy's mother, Amanda Krueger (Nan Martin), who instructs him to bury Freddy's remains in hallowed ground in order to stop him for good. Neil completes his task, but not before Freddy kills Nancy.
The story of Kristen Parker would continue with 1988's A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. This time, Kristen (Tuesday Knight) unwittingly releases Freddy, who immediately kills Kincaid and Joey. Before Freddy can kill Kristen, she transfers her dream powers to Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a friend from school. Alice begins inadvertently providing victims for Freddy when she begins pulling people into her dreams while she sleeps. Alice, who begins taking on traits of the friends who were murdered, confronts Freddy. She uses the power of the Dream Master to release all the souls Freddy has taken; they subsequently rip themselves from Freddy's body, killing him in the process.
Picking up shortly after the events of The Dream Master, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child involves Freddy using Alice's unborn child, Jacob (Whitby Hertford), to resurrect himself and find new victims. The spirit of Amanda Krueger (Beatrice Boepple) returns, revealing that Freddy was conceived when she, a nun working in a mental asylum, was accidentally locked in a room with "100 maniacs" and raped "hundreds of times". Amanda Krueger convinces Jacob to use the powers he was given by Freddy against him, which gives her the chance to subdue Freddy long enough for Alice and Jacob to escape the dream world.
1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare followed the exploits of "John Doe" (Shon Greenblatt), an amnesiac teenager from Springwood, who was sent out to find Freddy's daughter Maggie (Lisa Zane), who he needs to leave Springwood. Freddy's goal is to create new "Elm Streets", and begin a new killing spree after having killed all of the children in Springwood. Maggie, utilizing new dream techniques, uncovers Krueger's past, which include: being taunted by schoolmates for being the "son of 100 maniacs", being cruel to animals, beaten by his stepfather, the murder of his own wife when she discovers he has been killing children, and the moment when the Dream Demons arrive in his boiler room to make him the offer of eternal life. Eventually, Maggie pulls Freddy out of the dream world, and uses a pipe bomb to blow him up.
Wes Craven returned to the Nightmare series a third time with New Nightmare in 1994. This film focuses on a fictional "reality", where Craven, Langenkamp, and Englund all play themselves, and where the character of Freddy Krueger is really an evil entity that has been trapped in the realm of fiction by all the movies that have been made. Since the movies have stopped, the entity, which likes being Freddy Krueger, is trying to escape into the real world. The only person in its way is Heather Langenkamp, who the entity sees as "Nancy" – the first person who defeated him. Craven explains to Langenkamp the only way to keep the entity contained is for her to "play Nancy one last time". Langenkamp pursues "Krueger", who has kidnapped her son, into the dream world as "Nancy". There, she and her son trap Krueger in a furnace until he is finally destroyed. In 2003, New Line pitted Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees against Freddy Krueger. The film, Freddy vs. Jason, explains that Freddy Krueger has grown weak as people in Springwood, his home, have suppressed their fear of him. Freddy, who is impersonating Pamela Voorhees, the mother of Jason Voorhees, sends Jason (Ken Kirzinger) to Springwood to cause panic and fear. Jason accomplishes this, but refuses to stop killing. A battle ensues in both the dream world and Crystal Lake between the two villains. The winner is left ambiguous, as Jason surfaces from the lake holding Freddy's severed head, which winks and laughs.
In 2010, a remake of the original Nightmare on Elm Street was released. Here, Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley) stalks the dreams of Nancy Holbrook (Rooney Mara) and her friends as they discover that they all share a common link from their childhood; they were all physically and sexually abused by Freddy before he was murdered by their vengeful parents. Now a supernatural force in their dreams, Freddy kills off the children that alerted the parents about his transgressions. Freddy slowly works his way to Nancy, his favorite of the children, and manipulates her into going without sleep long enough that her body falls into a coma, resulting in permanent sleep and life with Freddy forever. Nancy is awakened when her friend Quentin (Kyle Gallner) injects adrenaline into her and pulls Freddy out of the dreamworld, where she and Quentin kill him and burn the remains of his body.
Development
The basis for the original Nightmare on Elm Street has been said to have been inspired by several newspaper articles printed in the LA Times in the 1970s on a group of Khmer refugees, who, after fleeing to America from the Khmer Rouge Genocide in Cambodia, were suffering disturbing nightmares after which they refused to sleep. Some of the men died in their sleep soon after. Medical authorities called the phenomenon "Asian Death Syndrome". The condition itself afflicted only men between the ages of 19-57 and is believed to be sudden unexplained death syndrome and/or Brugada syndrome. The 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright sealed the story for Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to "jump off" from, but a synthesizer riff from the Elm Street soundtrack as well. It has also been stated that he drew some inspiration after studying eastern religions.
Initially, Fred Krueger was intended to be a child molester, but Craven eventually decided to characterize him as a child murderer to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestation cases that occurred in California around the time of production of the film. By Craven's account, his own adolescent experiences led to the naming of Fred Krueger. He had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger, and named his villain accordingly. The colored sweater he chose for his villain was based on the DC Comics character Plastic Man, and Craven chose to make Krueger's sweater colors that of red and green, after reading an article in Scientific American in 1982 that said the two most clashing colors to the human retina were this particular combination.
On January 29, 2008, Variety reported that Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes production company would be rebooting the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with a remake of the original 1984 film. To provide a freshness to the character, producer Brad Fuller explained that they were abandoning the things that made the character less scary—Freddy would not be "cracking jokes" as had become a staple of his character in later sequels—and focus more on trying to craft a "horrifying movie". There was not agreement among the original crew as to whether it would be a good idea to remake the film. Craven expressed his displeasure, primarily because the filmmakers chose not to have him as a consultant to the film, unlike with the 2009 remake The Last House on the Left where he "shepherd it towards production". In contrast, Robert Englund felt it was time for A Nightmare on Elm Street to be remade. Englund liked the idea of being able to "exploit the dreamscape" with CGI and other technologies that did not exist when Craven was making the original Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984.
Box office
When comparing A Nightmare on Elm Street with the other top-grossing horror series—Child's Play, Friday the 13th, Halloween, the Hannibal Lecter series, Psycho, Saw, Scream, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—and adjusting for the 2010 inflation, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the third highest grossing horror series, in the United States, at approximately $583.4 million. The series is topped by Friday the 13th at $671.5 million. Closely following A Nightmare on Elm Street is the Hannibal Lecter series with $579.4 million, then Halloween with $547.8 million, Saw with $404.5 million, Scream with $398.3 million, Psycho with $370.3 million, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with $314.6 million, and the Child's Play film series rounding out the list with approximately $199.7 million.
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