A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American slasher film directed and written by Wes Craven, and the first film of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The film features John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, Robert Englund, and Johnny Depp in his feature film debut. Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, the plot revolves around several teenagers who if they fall asleep will be killed by Fred Krueger in their dreams, killing them in reality. They don't know what is going on but the parents hold a dark secret from long ago.

Craven produced A Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of just $1.8 million,a sum the film earned back during its first week. An instant commercial success, the film's total United States box office gross is $25.5 million. A Nightmare on Elm Street was initially met with relatively mixed critical reviews but went on to make a significant impact on the horror genre, spawning a franchise consisting of a line of sequels, a television series, a remake, and various other works of imitation.

The film is credited with carrying on many clichés found in low-budget horror films of the 1980s and 1990s, originating in John Carpenter's 1978 horror film Halloween, including the morality play that revolves around sexual promiscuity in teenagers resulting in their eventual (usually graphic) death, leading to the term "slasher film". Critics and film historians argue that the film's premise is the question of the distinction between dreams and reality, which is manifested in the film through the teenagers dreams and their realities.Critics today praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real", toying with audience perceptions.

Plot

Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) has a dream in which she is stalked through a dark boiler room by a mutilated figure with distinctive razor-sharp knives attached to the fingers on his right hand. Just as he catches her, however, she wakes up screaming, only to discover four razor cuts in her nightdress identical to the cuts in her dream.

The next day, she finds out that her friend Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) experienced a similar dream involving the same sinister figure, but Nancy is convinced that all is well. That night, Tina, Nancy and her boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) have a sleep-over to make the distraught Tina feel better, as she is still troubled by her nightmare. Tina's rebellious boyfriend, Rod Lane (Nick Corri), crashes the party. He and Tina have sex in her mother's bedroom. However, Tina has another nightmare, and this time the killer catches and murders her brutally. Rod wakes up to find Tina being cut open by invisible knives, then dragged up the wall and across the ceiling. Rod, being the only other person in the room at the time, is accused of the murder, flees the house and is caught the next day.

Nancy then has three violent nightmares in which she is viciously stalked, then attacked, by the same terrifying figure who attacked Tina. These nightmares cause her to talk to Rod in jail, who tells her what he saw in Tina's mother's bedroom, and also remarks he had a nightmare involving the fiend with the "knives for fingers". Much to the dismay of her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley), Nancy becomes increasingly convinced that the figure appearing in her dreams is the person who killed Tina. After Nancy has another dream in which she sees the mysterious killer in Rod's jail cell, she and a skeptical Glen rush to the police station late at night to help Rod, only to find that he's been strangled by his own bedsheets. To everyone except Nancy, it appears to be a suicide.

Nancy's mother takes her to a Dream Therapy Clinic to ensure she gets some sleep. Once again, she has a horrendous nightmare. This time, her arm is badly cut, but she finds that she has brought something out from her dream: the killer's battered hat. It arouses concern, but also other feelings in Marge, who is clearly hiding a secret. Eventually, while drunk, Marge reveals to Nancy that the owner of the hat, and the killer, was a man named Fred Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer who killed at least twenty children over a decade earlier. Furious, vengeful parents burned him alive in his boiler room hideout when he was released from prison on a technicality due to an improperly signed search warrant. Now, it appears he is manipulating the dreams of their children to exact his revenge from beyond the grave. Nancy's mother, however, reassures Nancy that Krueger cannot hurt anyone, pulling Krueger's bladed glove from a hiding place in the furnace as proof. Eventually, Marge installs bars on all the windows and begins to lock the door as "security".

Nancy and Glen devise a plan to catch Krueger, but when Glen falls asleep that night he is pulled into his bed and regurgitated as a spew of gore and bone. Nancy is left alone with Krueger after pulling him out of her dream into the real world. She runs around her house and forces him to run into booby traps she had set earlier. After setting Krueger on fire Nancy locks him in the basement and finally gets her father, police lieutenant Donald Thompson (John Saxon) and the rest of the police to help. After discovering that Krueger has escaped and that fiery footsteps lead upstairs, Nancy and her father witness Krueger smothering Marge with his flaming body, disappearing to leave her corpse to sink into the bed. After sending her father away, Nancy faces Krueger on her own and succeeds in destroying him by turning her back on him and draining him of all energy.

The scene changes to the next morning as Nancy gets in a car with Glen and the rest of her friends, on their way to school. Krueger possesses the car just as she gets in. The car drives away with Nancy screaming for her mother, and Marge being pulled through the door window by Krueger's bladed hand.

Cast

Members of the Nightmare on Elm Street series

Freddy Krueger. The task of creating Krueger's horribly burnt face fell to makeup man David Miller, who based his creation on photographs of burn victims he obtained from the UCLA Medical Center.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. The low budget curtailed the number of well-known actors that Craven could attract, and most of the actors received very little compensation for their roles.

Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson: Nancy Thompson is an intelligent teenager that has recently been plagued by eerie, sadomasochistic dreams of a man in a dirty green and red sweater, later revealed to be Fred Krueger. Craven claimed he wanted someone very "non-Hollywood" for the role of Nancy, and he believed Langenkamp met this quality. Langenkamp, before becoming an actress, worked as a newspaper copy girl, and saw an advertisement for extras needed on The Outsiders earlier that year, which was being shot in Tulsa. She did not get the part, but it encouraged her to continue acting and she eventually landed the role of Nancy Thompson after an open audition, beating out more than 200 actresses. Langenkamp returned as Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and also played herself in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994).

Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger: Krueger is a child murderer who killed at least twenty children over a decade before the film takes place. Furious, vengeful parents burned him alive in his boiler room hideout when he was released from prison on a technicality. Now, it appears he is manipulating the dreams of their children to exact his revenge from beyond the grave.

Johnny Depp as Glen Lantz: Glen is Nancy's boyfriend and is also experiencing eerie dreams, although he does not react strongly to them. Depp was another unknown when he was cast; and initially went to accompany a friend (Jackie Earle Haley, who went on to play Freddy in the 2010 remake) so he could audition, yet eventually got the part of Glen. Johnny Depp made a cameo appearance in the sixth installment, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).

Amanda Wyss as Tina Gray: Tina is Nancy's best friend and is also being traumatized by Krueger in her dreams. Wyss was a stage actresss prior to being cast in this role, with very few screen acting credits.

Nick Corri as Rod Lane: Billed as Nick Corri, Rod is Tina's boyfriend who is charged with her murder, as he was the only one present during her death. Jsu Garcia also made a cameo appearance in New Nightmare (1994).

John Saxon as Lt. Don Thompson: Nancy's father and local police lieutenant. He reprised the role of Nancy's father in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). He later played himself in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Ronee Blakley as Marge Thompson: Nancy's alcoholic, but caring mother.

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 who 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 films 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 LA Times in the 1970s on a group of Cambodian refugees, who, after fleeing to America from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, 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. In addition, 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 then walked off. This served as the inspiration for Krueger.

Craven also stated he drew some inspiration after studying eastern religions. Other sources also attribute the inspiration for the movie to be a 1968 student film project made by students of Craven's at Clarkson University. The student film parodied contemporary horror movies, and was filmed along Elm Street in Potsdam, New York (the town in the film was named Madstop—Potsdam spelled backwards). Craven, however, has not credited Woodcock with serving any inspiration to Krueger. By Craven's account, the name had come from Craven's childhood. He had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger, and named his villain accordingly. In addition, Craven had done the same in his earlier film The Last House on the Left (1972), where the rapist's name was shortened to "Krug". He based Krueger's appearance on another childhood experience in which he had been scared by a drunk. Men wore this type of hat when he was growing up. The colored sweater he chose for his villain was based on Plastic Man comic book character. 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. 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 the synthesizer riff from the Elm Street soundtrack. Initially, Fred Krueger was intended to be a child molester, however the decision was changed to him being a child murderer to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestations that occurred in California around the time of production of the film.

Writing

Wes Craven began writing 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. Interestingly, 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 and moved on. Another early suitor was Paramount Pictures; however the studios passed on the project due to Nightmare on Elm Street's similarity to Dreamscape (1984), a film they were producing at the time. 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 movie 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 movies, Nightmare holds such an important place in the company's history that the studio is often referred to as "The House That Freddy Built".

Filming

Principal photography took place in June of 1984 and wrapped in July. The fictional address of the house that appears in the film is 1428 Elm Street in Los Angeles, California, the actual house is a private home located in Los Angeles on 1428 North Genesee Avenue. During production, over 500 gallons of fake blood were used for the special effects production. For the famous blood geyser sequence, the film makers used the same revolving room set that was used for Tina's death. They put the set so that it was upside down and attached the camera so that it looked like the room was right side up, then they poured gallons of red water into the room, because the normal movie blood would not make the right effect for the geyser. The scene where Nancy is attacked by Krueger in her bathtub was accomplished with a special bottomless tub. The tub was put in a bathroom set that was built over a swimming pool. During the underwater sequence Heather Langenkamp was replaced with stuntwoman Christina Johnson, who is also married to special effects artist Charles Belardinelli. The "melting staircase" as seen in Nancy's dream was created using pancake mix. Friday the 13th's director Sean S. Cunningham was uncredited for his direction of the chase scene.

Wes Craven originally planned for the film to have a more evocative ending: Nancy kills Krueger by ceasing to believe in him, then awakes to discover that everything that happened in the movie was an elongated nightmare. However, New Line leader Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending, in which Krueger disappears and the movie all appears to have been a dream, only for the audience to discover that they are watching a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream, where Fred reappears as a car that "kidnaps" Nancy, followed by Fred reaching through a window on the front door to pull Nancy's mother inside. Both a happy ending and a twist ending were filmed, but the final film used the twist ending. As a result, Craven (who never wanted the film to be an ongoing franchise), dropped out of working on the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge (1985).Production wrapped in July, and was rushed through editing at breakneck speed to get it ready for its November release.

Release

A Nightmare on Elm Street premiered in the United States on a limited theatrical release on November 9, 1984, opening in 165 cinemas across the country. The film performed moderately well commercially with little advertising — relying mostly on commercial advertisements and word-of-mouth. Grossing USD$1,271,000 during its opening weekend, the film was considered an instant commercial success. The film eventually earned a total of $25 million at the American box office. Additionally, A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in Europe, China, Canada and Australia.

Critical reception

Since its initial release, critics have praised the film's ability to rupture "the boundaries between the imaginary and real,"[25] toying with audience perceptions. Some film historians interpreted this overriding theme as a social subtext, "the struggles of adolescents in American society". Variety said the film was "A highly imaginative horror film that provides the requisite shocks to keep fans of the genre happy."

The film has a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1984. It ranked at #17 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004), a four-hour program that selected cinema's scariest moments. In 2003, Freddy Krueger was named the 40th greatest movie villain on American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. In 2008, Empire Magazine ranked A Nightmare on Elm Street 162nd on their list of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time. It also was selected by The New York Times as one of The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made.

Home media

The film was first introduced to the home video market by Media Home Entertainment in early 1985 and eventually in laserdisc format. 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 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 Blu-Ray disc was released on April 13, 2010 by Warner Home Video and features few extras. A DVD box set containing all of the films was also released on April 13 also.

(source:wikipedia)