A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven, and produced by Robert Shaye. It stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, Robert Englund and Johnny Depp in his film debut. The plot focuses on four teenagers who are invaded and killed in their dreams, thus killed in reality, by a burnt killer with a bladed glove. The teenagers are unaware of the cause of this strange phenomenon, but their parents hold a dark secret from long ago.
A Nightmare on Elm Street | |
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Theatrical release poster by Matthew Peak | |
Directed by | Wes Craven |
Produced by | Robert Shaye |
Written by | Wes Craven |
Starring |
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Music by | Charles Bernstein |
Cinematography | Jacques Haitkin |
Edited by |
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Production companies |
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Distributed by | New Line Cinema |
Release date |
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Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $1.8 million |
Box office | $25.5 million (US) |
Craven filmed A Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of $1.8 million, a sum the film earned back during its first week. The film was released on November 9, 1984 where it went on to gross over $25 million at the United States box office. A Nightmare on Elm Street was met with rave critical reviews and is considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, spawning a franchise consisting of a line of sequels, a television series, a crossover with Friday the 13th, beyond various other works of imitation; a remake of the same name was released in 2010.
The film is credited with carrying on many tropes found in low-budget horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, originating in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), including the morality play that revolves around sexual promiscuity in teenagers resulting in their eventual death, leading to the term "slasher film". Critics and film historians state that the film's premise is the struggle to define the distinction between dreams and reality, manifested by the lives and dreams of the teens in the film. Critics today praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real", toying with audience perceptions.
Screenplay
Tina Gray awakens from a nightmare wherein she is attacked by a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove, and her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. The following morning, she is consoled by her best friend, Nancy Thompson, and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz. The two stay at Tina's house following her mother going out of town, but their sleepover is interrupted by Tina's boyfriend, Rod Lane. When Tina falls asleep, she is chased by the man. Rod awakens to Tina's thrashing, and witnesses her being dragged and fatally slashed by an unseen force. He flees as Nancy and Glen awaken to find a bloodied Tina dead.
The next day, Rod is arrested by Nancy's father, Lieutenant Don Thompson, despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and the man, calling himself Freddy Krueger, chases her to the boiler room. When cornered, she burns her arm on a pipe and awakens, where she notices the burn mark on her arm. At home, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and is nearly drowned by Freddy. She goes to Rod at the police station, who tells her about what happened to Tina, and Nancy believes that Freddy is responsible for Tina's death.
Nancy invites Glen to watch over her as she falls asleep. She sees Freddy preparing to kill Rod in his cell, but then turns his attention towards her. She runs away and wakes up when her alarm clock goes off. Freddy kills Rod when he wraps the bed sheets around his neck as a noose, and Nancy and Glen go to the cell to find his body hanging. At Rod's funeral, Nancy's parents become more worried when she describes Freddy in her dreams. Her mother, Marge, takes her to a dream clinic, where she manages to grab Freddy's hat and pull it from the dream into her possession.
Marge begins to drink heavily and bars the windows at home. She tells Nancy that Freddy was a child murderer released on a technicality, and the parents burned him alive in a form of vigilante justice. Nancy realizes that Freddy desires revenge and she tries to call Glen to warn him, but his parents prevent her from speaking to him. Glen falls asleep and is killed by Freddy, and a large fountain of blood is released in his room. Now alone, Nancy puts Marge to sleep and asks Don, who is across the street investigating Glen's death, to break into the house in 20 minutes. She rigs booby traps around the house, and grabs Freddy out of the dream and into the real world. After Freddy suffers from the traps, she lights him on fire and locks him in the basement, before rushing to the door for help. As the police arrive to find Freddy has escaped from the basement, Nancy and Don go upstairs to see a burning Freddy smothering Marge in her bedroom. After Don puts out the fire, Freddy and Marge vanish into the bed.
When Don leaves the room, Freddy rises from the bed behind Nancy. When she realizes that he is powered by his victim's fear, Nancy calmly turns her back on him and he evaporates when he attempts to lunge at her, defeating him. Nancy steps outside into a bright morning where all of her friends and mother are still alive. She gets into Glen's car to go to school where the top comes down and suddenly locks them in, and the car begins to drive uncontrollably down the street. As two girls playing jump rope are seen chanting Freddy's nursery rhyme, Marge is grabbed by Freddy through the front door window.
The cast of A Nightmare on Elm Street included a crew of veteran actors such as Robert Englund and John Saxon, as well as several aspiring young actors including Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp.
- Robert Englund as Fred Krueger
- John Saxon as Lt. Donald Thompson
- Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson
- Johnny Depp as Glen Lantz
- Ronee Blakley as Marge Thompson
- Amanda Wyss as Christina “Tina” Gray
- Nick Corri as Rod Lane
- Leslie Hoffman as Hall Guard
- Joe Unger as Sgt. Garcia
- Charles Fleischer as Dr. King
- Joseph Whipp as Sgt. Parker
- Lin Shaye as Teacher
- Mimi Craven as Nurse
- Jack Shea as Minister
- Ed Call as Mr. Lantz
- Sandy Lipton as Mrs. Lantz
- David Andrews as Foreman
- Jeff Levine as Coroner
- Donna Woodrum as Mrs. Gray
- Paul Grenier as Mrs. Gray's Boyfriend
- Ash Adams and Don Hannah as Surfers
- Shashawnee Hall, Brian Reise and Carol Pritikin as Cops
- Kathi Gibbs, John Richard Peterson, Chris Tashima and Antonia Yannouli as Kids (uncredited)
The task of creating Krueger's disfigured face fell to makeup man David Miller, who based his creation on photographs of burn victims he obtained from the UCLA Medical Center.
Development
"It was a series of articles in the LA Times, three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and had died in the middle of nightmares—and the paper never correlated them, never said, ‘Hey, we’ve had another story like this." |
— Wes Craven on the film's creation |
A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements, taking inspiration from director Wes Craven's childhood. The basis of the film was inspired by several newspaper articles printed in the Los Angeles Times in the 1970s on a group of Southeast Asian refugees, who, after fleeing to the United States from the results of war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, 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 and 57 and is believed to be sudden unexplained death syndrome or Brugada syndrome, or both. 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 for the Elm Street soundtrack as well. Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from Eastern religions.
Other sources also attribute the inspiration for the film to be a 1968 student film project made by students of Craven's at Clarkson University. The student film parodied contemporary horror films, and was filmed along Elm Street in Potsdam, New York (the town in the film was named Madstop—Potsdam spelled backwards).
The film's villain, Freddy Krueger, draws heavily from Craven's early life. One night, a young Craven saw an elderly man walking on the sidepath outside the window of his home. The man stopped to glance at a startled Craven and walked off. This served as the inspiration for Krueger. Initially, Fred Krueger was intended to be a child molester, but Craven eventually characterized 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 Freddy Krueger. He had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger, and he named his villain accordingly. Additionally, Craven had done the same in his earlier film The Last House on the Left (1972), where the villain's name was shortened to "Krug". 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 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.
Craven strove to make Krueger different from other horror-film villains of the era. "A lot of the killers were wearing masks: Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason," he recalled in 2014. "I wanted my villain to have a 'mask,' but be able to talk and taunt and threaten. So I thought of him being burned and scarred." He also felt the killer should use something other than a knife, which was too common. "So I thought, How about a glove with steak knives? I gave the idea to our special-effects guy, Jim Doyle." Ultimately two models of the glove were built: one called the "hero glove" used only whenever anything needs to be cut, and the other a stunt glove less likely to cause injury.
Writing
Wes Craven began writing A Nightmare on Elm Street's screenplay around 1981, after he had finished production on Swamp Thing (1982). He pitched it to several studios, but each one of them rejected it for different reasons. The first studio to show interest was Walt Disney Productions, although they wanted Craven to tone down the content to make it suitable for children and pre-teens. Craven declined. Another early suitor was Paramount Pictures; however the studios passed on the project due to A Nightmare on Elm Street's similarity to Dreamscape (1984), a film they were producing at the time. Universal Studios also passed; Craven, who was in desperate personal and financial straits during this period, later framed their rejection letter on the wall of his office.
Finally, the fledgling and independent 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 film fell through and for two weeks it was unable to pay its cast and crew. Although New Line has gone on to make much bigger and more profitable films, Nightmare holds such an important place in the company's history that the studio is often referred to as "The House That Freddy Built".
Casting
Actor David Warner was originally slated to play Freddy.
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