A Nightmare on Elm Street
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,[6][7] 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 can murder people through their dreams, as retribution against their parents who burned him alive.[8]
This article is about the 1984 film. For the franchise, see A Nightmare on Elm Street (franchise). For other uses, see A Nightmare on Elm Street (disambiguation).A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wes Craven
- Patrick McMahon
- Rick Shaine
- New Line Cinema
- Media Home Entertainment
- Smart Egg Pictures[1]
New Line Cinema
- November 9, 1984 (United States)
91 minutes[2]
United States
English
$1.1 million[3]
Craven filmed A Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of $1.1 million.[3] The film was released on November 9, 1984, in limited theaters until its nationwide theatrical release on November 16, 1984, and grossed $57 million worldwide.[4][5] The film received critical acclaim upon its release, and has since been considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. The film spawned a franchise consisting of six sequels, a television series, a crossover with Friday the 13th, various other merchandise, and a remake of the same name.[9][10] Along with Stunts, Polyester, and Alone in the Dark, 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[11] 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 1978 horror film Halloween, including the morality play that revolves around sexual promiscuity in teenagers resulting in their eventual death, leading to the term "slasher film".[10][12] 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.[13] Later critics praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real",[14] toying with audience perceptions.[15] The film was followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985).
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".[16]
Plot[edit]
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. Tina's best friend Nancy Thompson and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz, reveal that they each also had a nightmare, Nancy also about the disfigured man. During the girls' sleepover at Tina's house, Tina's boyfriend, Rod Lane, arrives and they have intercourse. When Tina falls asleep, she dreams of the disfigured man who attacks her; in real life, Rod sees her fatally slashed by an unseen force, forcing him to flee as Nancy and Glen find Tina bloodied and dead.
Nancy's policeman father, Don Thompson, arrests Rod despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and dreams that the man chases her to the boiler room. She deliberately burns her arm on a pipe, which startles her awake in class, and she notices a burn mark on her arm. 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 dream, she sees the man preparing to kill Rod in his cell, but he turns his attention toward 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 become worried when she describes her dreams. Her mother, Marge, takes her to a sleep disorder clinic where, in a dream, Nancy grabs the man's fedora with the name "Fred Krueger" written in it, and pulls it into the real world.
After barricading the house, Marge explains that Krueger was an insane child murderer who killed twenty children but was released on a technicality. He was then burned alive by the victims' parents who lived on their street, seeking vigilante justice. Krueger, now a vengeful ghost, is killing her and her friends out of revenge and to satiate his psychopathic needs.
Glen falls asleep and is killed by Krueger. Now alone, Nancy asks her father, 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 Krueger out of her dream 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 green and red striped top suddenly comes down and locks them in as the car speeds down the street. Three girls in white dresses playing jump rope chant Krueger's nursery rhyme as Marge is grabbed by Krueger through the front door window.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements from director Wes Craven's childhood.[20] 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.[21] 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."[22] 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.[23] Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from Eastern religions.[24]
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.[25][26]
The film's villain, Freddy Krueger, 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.[20] 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.[18] 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!".[27]
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.[18] 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.[22]
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.[3] 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.[27]
Writing[edit]
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;[28] however, Craven declined.[18][22] 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,[3] 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."[29]
Finally, the fledgling and independent New Line Cinema corporation, which had up to that point only distributed films, agreed to produce the film.[18] 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 bigger and more profitable films, A Nightmare on Elm Street was its first commercial success and the studio is often referred to as "The House That Freddy Built".[30][31]
New Line Cinema lacked the financial resources for the production themselves and so had to turn to external financiers. They found two investors in England who each contributed 40% and 30% respectively to the necessary funds; one of the producers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre contributed 10%, and home video distributor Media Home Entertainment contributed 20% of the original budget. Four weeks before production began, the English investor who had contributed 40% backed out, but Media Home Entertainment added in another 40% to the budget. Among the backers were also Heron Communications and Smart Egg Pictures.[30] According to producer Robert Shaye, all the film's original investors backed out at one point or another during pre-production. The original budget was $700,000. "It ended up at $1.1 million ... half the funding came from a Yugoslavian guy[N 2] who had a girlfriend he wanted in movies."[3]
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Themes[edit]
Freddy exclusively attacks teenagers and his actions have been interpreted as symbolic of the often traumatic experiences of adolescence.[75] Nancy, like the archetypal teenager, experiences social anxiety and her relationship with her parents becomes strained. Sexuality is present in Freudian images and is almost exclusively displayed in a threatening and mysterious context (e.g., Tina's death visually evokes a rape, Freddy's glove between Nancy's legs in the bath). The original script called for Krueger to be a child molester, rather than a child murderer, before being murdered.[76]
Wes Craven has explained that "the notion of the screenplay is that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children, but the fact that each child is not necessarily stuck with their lot is still there."[49] Robert Englund observes that "in Nightmare, all the adults are damaged: They're alcoholic, they're on pills, they're not around". Blakley says the parents in the film "verge on being villains." Englund adds: "the adolescents have to wade through that, and Heather is the last girl standing. She lives. She defeats Freddy." Langenkamp agrees: "Nightmare is a feminist movie, but I look at it more as a 'youth power' film."[3]
Release[edit]
Censorship issues[edit]
When the film was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system (MPAA), they required two cuts to grant it an R rating.[23] The theatrical version was released with an R rating and thirteen seconds of cuts. In the United Kingdom, the film was released theatrically and on home video uncut.[77] The Australian theatrical release was edited to an M rating,[78] but the VHS home video was released uncut in 1985 with an Australian R rating.[79] The uncut version would not see a release in the United States until the 1996 Elite Entertainment Laserdisc release.[80] All DVD, digital, and Blu-ray releases use the R rated theatrical version; the uncut version has yet to be released on a digital format,[77] though six seconds were restored for home video and a further two seconds for current releases.
Home media[edit]
The film was first introduced to the home video market by Media Home Entertainment in early 1985 and was eventually released on Laserdisc. It has since been released on DVD, first in 1999 in the United States as part of the Nightmare on Elm Street Collection box set (along with the other six sequels), and once again in a restored Infinifilm special edition in 2006, containing various special features with contributions from Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon and the director of photography.
The special edition consisted of two DVDs, one with the film picture and sound restored (DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1, and original mono audio track) and another DVD with special features. Along with the restored version of the film, DVD one also had two commentaries, and other nightmares (if not all) from the film's sequels (two through seven and Freddy Vs. Jason). It also included additional, extended or alternate scenes of the film, such as one scene where Marge reveals to Nancy that she had another sibling who was killed by Freddy. These unused clips and scenes were not included or added to the DVD film but could be viewed separately from the DVD's menus.
On April 13, 2010, the film was released on Blu-ray Disc by Warner Home Video,[83] with all the same extras from the 2006 special edition;[84] a DVD box set containing all of the films up to that point was released on the same day.[85]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
A Nightmare on Elm Street premiered in the United States with a limited theatrical release on November 9, 1984, opening in 165 cinemas across the country.[86] Grossing $1,271,000 during its opening weekend, the film was considered an instant commercial success. The film eventually earned a total of $25,504,513 at the US and Canadian box office[86] and $57 million worldwide.[4][5]