A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American supernatural slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven, and produced by Robert Shaye. It is the first installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, and Johnny Depp in his film debut. The film's plot concerns a group of teenagers who are targeted by Krueger, an undead child killer who murders teenagers through their dreams, as retribution against their parents who burned him alive. Craven loosely based the screenplay on a series of news stories about Hmong refugees dying in the middle of nightmares.
Craven filmed A Nightmare on Elm Street in Los Angeles on an estimated budget of $1.1 million. It was one of the first films produced by New Line Cinema, who by that point mostly distributed films, leading the company to become a successful mini-major film studio and earning it the nickname "The House that Freddy Built". 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".Harper, Jim. Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies (Manchester, Eng.: Headpress, 2004), p. 126, .Rick Worland, The Horror Film: A Brief Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 106, . 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.Kelly Bulkeley, Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 108; see also chap. 11: "Dreamily Deconstructing the Dream Factory: The Wizard of Oz and Nightmare on Elm Street," . Later critics praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real",Ian Conrich, "Seducing the Subject: Fred Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films" in Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and its Audience, ed. Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heldi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 119, . toying with audience perceptions.James Berardinelli, review of A Nightmare on Elm Street, at ReelViews; last accessed August 30, 2006.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was released on November 9, 1984, and grossed $57.1 million worldwide. The film received critical acclaim upon its release, and has since been considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. In 2021, A Nightmare on Elm Street was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film spawned a franchise consisting of six sequels, a television series, a crossover with the Friday the 13th franchise, various other merchandise, and a 2010 remake. The film was followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985).
Plot
Teenager Tina Gray awakens from a terrifying nightmare in which a disfigured man wearing a bladed glove attacks her in a boiler room. Her mother points out the mysterious slashes on her nightgown. The following morning, Tina's best friend Nancy Thompson and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz, divulge that they too had nightmares about the same disfigured man. During a sleepover at Tina's house, Tina's boyfriend, Rod Lane, arrives, and they have sex. When Tina falls asleep, she dreams of the disfigured man attacking her, while Rod sees her fatally slashed by an unseen force, causing him to flee. Nancy and Glen find Tina's bloodied corpse.
The next day, Nancy's policeman father, Don Thompson, arrests Rod despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and dreams of the man chasing her in a boiler room. She deliberately burns her arm on a pipe, which startles her awake in class, and leaves a burn mark on her forearm. Nancy visits Rod at the police station, where he describes Tina's death along with his own recent nightmares about the same man.
At home, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and is nearly drowned by the man. She then relies on caffeine to stay awake and invites Glen to watch over her as she sleeps. In her nightmare, Nancy watches the man preparing to kill Rod in his cell, but he turns his attention toward her and attacks her. Nancy wakes up when her alarm clock goes off. The man kills Rod, staging it as a suicide. At his funeral, Nancy's parents grow worried when she describes her nightmares. Her mother, Marge, drives her to a sleep disorder clinic where, in a nightmare, Nancy grabs the man's fedora with the name "Fred Krueger" written in it and pulls it into the real world.
After barricading their house, Marge discloses to Nancy that Krueger was a child murderer who killed 20 children but was released on a technicality. He was then burned alive by the victims' parents, alongside other Elm Street residents, who sought vigilante justice. Marge then showcases Krueger's bladed glove concealed in their furnace, and Nancy realizes that Krueger targeted her and her friends because their parents were accomplices to his homicide.
Later that night, Glen falls asleep and is killed by Krueger. Nancy asks Don, who is across the street investigating Glen's murder site, to break into their house in 20 minutes. She rigs booby traps and successfully lures Krueger out of her nightmare and into the real world. The booby traps allow her to light him on fire and lock him in the basement.
The police arrive to find that Krueger has escaped from the basement. Nancy and Don find a burning Krueger smothering Marge in her bedroom. After Don extinguishes the fire, Krueger and Marge vanish into the bed before Krueger rises behind Nancy. Realizing that Krueger is fueled by his victims' fear, she calmly turns her back to him, and Krueger evaporates.
Nancy steps outside into a foggy morning where all her friends and her mother are still alive. She gets into Glen's convertible to go to school when the top suddenly comes down (colored in green and red stripes), locking them in as the car speeds down the street and Marge waves them goodbye on her doorstep. Three girls in white dresses playing jump rope chant Krueger's nursery rhyme while Marge is grabbed by Krueger through the front door window.
Cast
Robert Shaye has two uncredited roles as broadcasters for local television news and KRGR Radio station.
Make-up artist David B. Miller designed Krueger's disfigured face based on photographs of burn victims obtained from the UCLA Medical Center.
Production Development
A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements from director Wes Craven's childhood. The film was inspired by several newspaper articles printed in the Los Angeles Times in the 1970s about Hmong refugees, who, after fleeing to the United States because of war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, suffered disturbing nightmares and refused to sleep. Some of the men died in their sleep soon after. Medical authorities called the phenomenon Asian Death Syndrome. The condition afflicted men between the ages of 19 and 57 and was believed to be sudden unexplained death syndrome or Brugada syndrome or both. Craven stated, "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. 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 movie soundtrack.Wes Craven. A Nightmare on Elm Street DVD audio commentary. Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from Eastern religions.
Other sources attribute the inspiration for the film to be a 1968 student film project made by Craven's students at Clarkson University. The student film parodied contemporary horror films, and was filmed along Elm Street in Potsdam, New York.
Freddy Krueger, the film's villain, is drawn 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 the film's production. On Freddy's nature, Craven states that "in a sense, Freddy stands for the worst of parenthood and adulthood—the dirty old man, the nasty father and the adult who wants children to die rather than help them prosper. He's the boogey man and the worst fear of children—the adult that's out to get them. He's a very primal figure, sort of like Kronos devouring his children—that evil, twisted, perverted father figure that wants to destroy and is able to get them at their most vulnerable moment, which is when they're asleep!"
By Craven's account, his own adolescent experiences led him to the name Freddy Krueger; he had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger. Craven had done the same thing in his film The Last House on the Left (1972), where the villain's name was shortened to Krug. Craven chose to make Krueger's sweater red and green after reading an article in a 1982 Scientific American that said these two colors were the most clashing colors to the human retina.
Craven strove to make Krueger different from other horror film villains of the era. In 2014, he recalled, "A lot of the killers were wearing masks: Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason. 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 said the killer should use something other than a knife because it 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: the hero glove that was only used whenever anything needed to be cut, and the stunt glove that was less likely to cause injury. For a time, Craven had considered a sickle as the weapon of choice for the killer, but around the third or fourth drafts of the script, the iconic glove had become his final choice.
Writing Wes Craven began writing the screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street 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 preteens as a family-friendly PG-13 film; Craven declined.Rockoff, Adam, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986 (McFarland & Company, 2002), p. 151, . Another studio Craven pitched to was Paramount Pictures, which passed on the project due to its similarity to Dreamscape (1984). Universal Studios also passed; Craven, who was in desperate personal and financial straits during this period, later framed the company's rejection letter on the wall of his office, which reads in its December 14, 1982 print: "We have reviewed the script you have submitted, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Unfortunately, the script did not receive an enthusiastic enough response from us to go forward at this time. However, when you have a finished print, please get in touch and we would be delighted to screen it for a possible negative pick up."