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Description
Lets continue our FrightFest with the inaugural outing for burned dream killer Freddy Krueger.

Tina Gray awakens from a nightmare where she is attacked by a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove in a boiler room. Her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. The following morning, Tina is consoled by her best friend Nancy Thompson and her boyfriend Glen. The two stay at Tina's house when Tina's mother goes out of town but their sleepover is interrupted by Tina's boyfriend Rod. When Tina falls asleep, she dreams of being chased by the disfigured man. Rod is awoken by Tina's thrashing and sees her dragged and fatally slashed by an unseen force, forcing him to flee as Nancy and Glen awaken to find Tina bloodied and dead. The next day, Rod is arrested by Nancy's father Don despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and dreams that the man, who calls himself Freddy, chases her to the boiler room where she is cornered and burns her arm on a pipe. The burn startles her awake in class and she notices a burn mark on her arm. Nancy goes to Rod at the police station, who tells her details about what happened to Tina along with his own recent nightmares. This makes Nancy believe that Freddy is responsible for Tina's death. At home, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and is nearly drowned by Freddy. Nancy then depends on caffeine to stay awake and invites Glen to watch over her as she sleeps. In her dream, Nancy sees Freddy prepare to kill Rod in his cell before he turns his attention towards her. Nancy runs away and wakes up when her alarm clock goes off. Freddy kills Rod by wrapping bed sheets around his neck like a noose. Nancy, her father and Glen find his body hanging in his cell, making it look like Rod committed suicide. At Rod's funeral, Nancy's parents become worried when she describes her dreams about Freddy. Her alcoholic mother, Marge, takes her to a sleep disorders clinic where, in a dream, Nancy grabs Freddy's fedora (with his name written in it) and pulls it from the dream into reality. Upon barricading the house, Marge reveals to Nancy that Krueger was a sadistic child murderer released on a technicality and then burned alive by parents living on their street seeking vigilante justice. Nancy realizes that Krueger, now a vengeful ghost, desires revenge and to satiate his psychopathic needs. Now it's up to Nancy to pull Freddy out of the dream world into reality, where she has a few surprises waiting for him.

Pros:
1. Freddy is an awesome villain, and his design with his burned flesh, red and green striped sweater, fedora, and bladed glove is very iconic and memorable.
2. Nancy is a pretty good protagonist.
3. Glen, Don, Tina, and Rod are all good side characters.
4. Very effective scary and suspenseful moments.
5. The kills are very well executed.
6. Stellar special effects.
7. The atmosphere is very eerie and dark.
8. The music by Charles Bernstein is very well done and memorable.
9. The writing is very well done with a unique premise.
10. The cast brings some pretty good performances.
11. The sets during the dream scenes are very well crafted.

Cons:
1. A few of the effects haven't aged well.
2. Marge can be pretty unlikeable at times.

Overall:
This is an awesome and unique horror film, and is definitely worth a watch.

Rating:
9/10 (Amazing)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements 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 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 that “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. Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from Eastern religions.
2. 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.
3. 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. 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. 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!".
4. 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, 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. 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.
5. 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 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. At a time Craven had considered a sickle to be 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.
6. Wes Craven began writing the screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street around 1981, after he had finished production on Swamp Thing. He pitched it to several studios, but each one of them rejected it for different reasons. The first studio to show interest was Disney, although they wanted Craven to tone down the content to make it suitable for children and preteens. Craven declined. Another studio Craven pitched to was Paramount, which passed on the project due to its similarity to Dreamscape. Universal 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."
7. Finally, the fledgling and independent New Line Cinema corporation, which had up to that point only distributed films, agreed to produce the film. 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".
8. New Line Cinema lacked the financial resources for the production themselves and so had to turn to external financers. They found two investors in England who each contributed 40% and 30% respectively to the necessary funds; one of the producers of The Texas Chainsaw 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. According to 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 who had a girlfriend he wanted in movies."
9. Actor David Warner was originally cast to play Freddy. Make-up tests were done, but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Replacing him was difficult at first. Kane Hodder, who would later be best known for playing fellow slasher icon Jason Voorhees, was among those who Wes Craven talked with about the role of Freddy. Robert Englund has stated that Craven was indeed in search of a "big, giant man" originally, but casting director Annette Benson had talked Craven into seeing him about the role after Englund had auditioned for National Lampoon's Class Reunion previously. Before Englund's agent at the time, Joe Rice, sent him to the casting office, Rice's friend Rhet Topham recommended Englund to act "rat-like", "weasel-like", adding that "When we read about abusers and molesters in the newspaper, they're not big, hulking men, but weasels. I thought he should go in and play it like that. And it worked!". Englund had darkened his lower eyelids with cigarette ash on his way to the audition and slicked his hair back. "I looked strange. I sat there and listened to Wes talk. He was tall and preppy and erudite. I posed a bit, like Klaus Kinski, and that was the audition," he said later. He took the part because it was the only project that fit his schedule during the hiatus between the V miniseries and series.
10. Craven said he wanted someone very non-Hollywood for the role of Nancy, and he believed Heather Langenkamp met this quality. Langenkamp, who had appeared in several commercials and a TV film, had taken time off from her studies at Stanford to continue acting. Eventually she landed the role of Nancy Thompson after an open audition, beating out more than 200 actresses. Langenkamp was already known to Anette Benson as she had auditioned for Night of the Comet and The Last Starfighter previously, losing out to Catherine Mary Stewart at both occasions. Demi Moore, Courteney Cox, Tracey Gold, and Jennifer Grey have all been rumoured to have auditioned for A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Benson definitely ruled out Moore and Cox while also being unsure of Gold and Grey.
11. Johnny Depp was another unknown when he was cast; he initially went to accompany a friend (Jackie Earle Haley, who went on to play Freddy in the 2010 remake) but eventually got the part of Glen. According to Depp, the role was originally written as a "big, blond, beach-jock, football-player guy", far from his own appearance, but Wes Craven's daughters picked Depp's headshot from the set he showed them. Charlie Sheen was considered for the role but allegedly wanted too much money. Anette Benson states that they did in fact offer the part to Sheen but he passed on it due to his agent demanding twice of the weekly wage of $1,142 for Sheen, which New Line Cinema did not consider themselves to have the budget for. Sheen himself objects to the sentiment that he turned down the role for the reason of money. Mark Patton, who would later be cast as Jesse Walsh in the sequel, auditioned for the role of Glen Lantz and claimed that the auditioners had been winnowed down to him and Johnny Depp before Depp got the role. Other actors like John Cusack, Brad Pitt, Kiefer Sutherland, Nicolas Cage, and C. Thomas Howell have been mentioned over the years, but Anette Benson have failed to definitely recall those actors as having been among the auditioners. Though Cage had probably not auditioned for A Nightmare on Elm Street, he was in fact involved in introducing Johnny Depp to acting, through Cage's own agent who introduced Benson to him, resulting in an audition for the film.
12. Principal photography began on June 11, 1984 and lasted a total of 32 days, in and around Los Angeles, California. The high school the protagonists attend was filmed at John Marshall High School, where many other productions such as Grease and Pretty in Pink has been filmed.The fictional street address of Nancy's house in the film is 1428 Elm Street; in real life this house is a private home located in Los Angeles at 1428 North Genesee Avenue. The Lantz' family home was at 1419 North Genesee Avenue on the other side of the road. The boiler room scenes and police station interior were shot in the Lincoln Heights Jail (closed since 1965) building, while the exterior used for the police station was Cahuenga Branch Library. The American Jewish University on 15600 Mulholland Drive was used for the Katja Institute for the Study of Sleep Disorders visited by Marge and Nancy.
13. During production, over 500 gallons of fake blood were used for special effects production. For the blood geyser sequence, the filmmakers used the same revolving room set that was used for Tina's death. While filming the scenes, the cameraman and Craven himself were mounted in fixed seats taken from a Datsun B-210 car while the set rotated. The film crew inverted the set and attached the camera so that it looked like the room was right side up, then they poured the red water into the room. They used dyed water because the special effects blood did not have the right look for a geyser. During filming of this scene, the red water poured out in an unexpected way and caused the rotating room to spin. Much of the water spilled out of the bedroom window covering Craven and Langenkamp. Earth's gravity was also used to film another take for the TV version in which a skeleton shoots out from the hollowed out bed and smashes into the "ceiling".
14. More work was done for Freddy's boiler room than made it into the film; the film crew constructed a whole sleeping place for Freddy, showing that he was quite a hobo, an outcast and reject from society, living and sleeping where he worked, and surrounding himself with naked Barbie dolls and other things as a showcase of his fantasies and perversions. This place was supposed to be where he forged his glove and abducted and murdered his victims.
15. 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 a stuntwoman. The melting staircase in Nancy's dream was Robert Shaye's idea based on his own nightmares; it was created using pancake mix. The film's special effects artist Jim Doyle portrayed Freddy on the scene where his face and hands that stretch through the wall and reach out for Nancy when she dreams; the wall was built by Doyle out of spandex.
16. In the scene where Freddy walks through the prison bars to threaten Rod as seen by Nancy, Wes Craven explains that, "we took triangulations of the camera so we knew exactly the height of it from the floor and the angle towards the point where the killer was going to walk through", and then "we put the camera again at the exact height and walked the actor through that space. Then those two images were married and a rotoscope artist went through and matted out the bars so it appeared they were going straight through his body." Jsu Garcia, who was cast as Rod and credited as Nick Corri, says the production was difficult for him. He was dealing with depression due to recent homelessness by snorting heroin in the bathroom between takes. In 2014, he revealed that he was high on heroin during the scene with Langenkamp in the jail cell. "His eyes were watery and they weren't focused," Langenkamp said. "I thought, 'Wow, he's giving the best performance of his life.'"
17. About halfway through the film, when Nancy is trying to stay awake, a scene from Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead appears on a television. Craven decided to include the scene because Raimi had featured a Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977) poster in The Evil Dead. In return, Raimi featured a Freddy Krueger glove in the tool shed scene of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, and later in Ash vs Evil Dead.
18. Sean Cunningham, whom Wes Craven had previously worked with while filming The Last House on the Left, helped Craven at the end of the shooting, heading the second film unit during the filming of some of Nancy's dream scenes.
19. Craven originally planned for the film to have a more evocative ending: Nancy kills Krueger by ceasing to believe in him, then awakens to discover that everything that happened in the film was an elongated nightmare. However, New Line leader Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending, in which Krueger disappears and all seems to have been a dream, only for the audience to discover that it was a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream.
20. Craven explains that the effect of the mentioned fog did not work out for the team and they had to film without it: there were around 20 persons with fog machines, but the breeze at the time was too much, and the fog was gone before they had the opportunity to film the intendendly foggy scene. Though several variants of an end scene were considered and filmed, Heather Langenkamp states that "there always was this sense that Freddy was the car", while according to Sara Risher, "it was always Wes' idea to pan to the little girls' jumping rope". Both a happy ending and a twist ending were filmed, but the final film used the twist ending. Filming wrapped at the end of July, and the film was rushed to get ready for its November release.

Description
Lets continue our FrightFest with the inaugural outing for burned dream killer Freddy Krueger.

Tina Gray awakens from a nightmare where she is attacked by a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove in a boiler room. Her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. The following morning, Tina is consoled by her best friend Nancy Thompson and her boyfriend Glen. The two stay at Tina's house when Tina's mother goes out of town but their sleepover is interrupted by Tina's boyfriend Rod. When Tina falls asleep, she dreams of being chased by the disfigured man. Rod is awoken by Tina's thrashing and sees her dragged and fatally slashed by an unseen force, forcing him to flee as Nancy and Glen awaken to find Tina bloodied and dead. The next day, Rod is arrested by Nancy's father Don despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and dreams that the man, who calls himself Freddy, chases her to the boiler room where she is cornered and burns her arm on a pipe. The burn startles her awake in class and she notices a burn mark on her arm. Nancy goes to Rod at the police station, who tells her details about what happened to Tina along with his own recent nightmares. This makes Nancy believe that Freddy is responsible for Tina's death. At home, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and is nearly drowned by Freddy. Nancy then depends on caffeine to stay awake and invites Glen to watch over her as she sleeps. In her dream, Nancy sees Freddy prepare to kill Rod in his cell before he turns his attention towards her. Nancy runs away and wakes up when her alarm clock goes off. Freddy kills Rod by wrapping bed sheets around his neck like a noose. Nancy, her father and Glen find his body hanging in his cell, making it look like Rod committed suicide. At Rod's funeral, Nancy's parents become worried when she describes her dreams about Freddy. Her alcoholic mother, Marge, takes her to a sleep disorders clinic where, in a dream, Nancy grabs Freddy's fedora (with his name written in it) and pulls it from the dream into reality. Upon barricading the house, Marge reveals to Nancy that Krueger was a sadistic child murderer released on a technicality and then burned alive by parents living on their street seeking vigilante justice. Nancy realizes that Krueger, now a vengeful ghost, desires revenge and to satiate his psychopathic needs. Now it's up to Nancy to pull Freddy out of the dream world into reality, where she has a few surprises waiting for him.

Pros:
1. Freddy is an awesome villain, and his design with his burned flesh, red and green striped sweater, fedora, and bladed glove is very iconic and memorable.
2. Nancy is a pretty good protagonist.
3. Glen, Don, Tina, and Rod are all good side characters.
4. Very effective scary and suspenseful moments.
5. The kills are very well executed.
6. Stellar special effects.
7. The atmosphere is very eerie and dark.
8. The music by Charles Bernstein is very well done and memorable.
9. The writing is very well done with a unique premise.
10. The cast brings some pretty good performances.
11. The sets during the dream scenes are very well crafted.

Cons:
1. A few of the effects haven't aged well.
2. Marge can be pretty unlikeable at times.

Overall:
This is an awesome and unique horror film, and is definitely worth a watch.

Rating:
9/10 (Amazing)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements 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 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 that “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. Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from Eastern religions.
2. 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.
3. 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. 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. 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!".
4. 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, 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. 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.
5. 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 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. At a time Craven had considered a sickle to be 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.
6. Wes Craven began writing the screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street around 1981, after he had finished production on Swamp Thing. He pitched it to several studios, but each one of them rejected it for different reasons. The first studio to show interest was Disney, although they wanted Craven to tone down the content to make it suitable for children and preteens. Craven declined. Another studio Craven pitched to was Paramount, which passed on the project due to its similarity to Dreamscape. Universal 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."
7. Finally, the fledgling and independent New Line Cinema corporation, which had up to that point only distributed films, agreed to produce the film. 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".
8. New Line Cinema lacked the financial resources for the production themselves and so had to turn to external financers. They found two investors in England who each contributed 40% and 30% respectively to the necessary funds; one of the producers of The Texas Chainsaw 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. According to 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 who had a girlfriend he wanted in movies."
9. Actor David Warner was originally cast to play Freddy. Make-up tests were done, but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Replacing him was difficult at first. Kane Hodder, who would later be best known for playing fellow slasher icon Jason Voorhees, was among those who Wes Craven talked with about the role of Freddy. Robert Englund has stated that Craven was indeed in search of a "big, giant man" originally, but casting director Annette Benson had talked Craven into seeing him about the role after Englund had auditioned for National Lampoon's Class Reunion previously. Before Englund's agent at the time, Joe Rice, sent him to the casting office, Rice's friend Rhet Topham recommended Englund to act "rat-like", "weasel-like", adding that "When we read about abusers and molesters in the newspaper, they're not big, hulking men, but weasels. I thought he should go in and play it like that. And it worked!". Englund had darkened his lower eyelids with cigarette ash on his way to the audition and slicked his hair back. "I looked strange. I sat there and listened to Wes talk. He was tall and preppy and erudite. I posed a bit, like Klaus Kinski, and that was the audition," he said later. He took the part because it was the only project that fit his schedule during the hiatus between the V miniseries and series.
10. Craven said he wanted someone very non-Hollywood for the role of Nancy, and he believed Heather Langenkamp met this quality. Langenkamp, who had appeared in several commercials and a TV film, had taken time off from her studies at Stanford to continue acting. Eventually she landed the role of Nancy Thompson after an open audition, beating out more than 200 actresses. Langenkamp was already known to Anette Benson as she had auditioned for Night of the Comet and The Last Starfighter previously, losing out to Catherine Mary Stewart at both occasions. Demi Moore, Courteney Cox, Tracey Gold, and Jennifer Grey have all been rumoured to have auditioned for A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Benson definitely ruled out Moore and Cox while also being unsure of Gold and Grey.
11. Johnny Depp was another unknown when he was cast; he initially went to accompany a friend (Jackie Earle Haley, who went on to play Freddy in the 2010 remake) but eventually got the part of Glen. According to Depp, the role was originally written as a "big, blond, beach-jock, football-player guy", far from his own appearance, but Wes Craven's daughters picked Depp's headshot from the set he showed them. Charlie Sheen was considered for the role but allegedly wanted too much money. Anette Benson states that they did in fact offer the part to Sheen but he passed on it due to his agent demanding twice of the weekly wage of $1,142 for Sheen, which New Line Cinema did not consider themselves to have the budget for. Sheen himself objects to the sentiment that he turned down the role for the reason of money. Mark Patton, who would later be cast as Jesse Walsh in the sequel, auditioned for the role of Glen Lantz and claimed that the auditioners had been winnowed down to him and Johnny Depp before Depp got the role. Other actors like John Cusack, Brad Pitt, Kiefer Sutherland, Nicolas Cage, and C. Thomas Howell have been mentioned over the years, but Anette Benson have failed to definitely recall those actors as having been among the auditioners. Though Cage had probably not auditioned for A Nightmare on Elm Street, he was in fact involved in introducing Johnny Depp to acting, through Cage's own agent who introduced Benson to him, resulting in an audition for the film.
12. Principal photography began on June 11, 1984 and lasted a total of 32 days, in and around Los Angeles, California. The high school the protagonists attend was filmed at John Marshall High School, where many other productions such as Grease and Pretty in Pink has been filmed.The fictional street address of Nancy's house in the film is 1428 Elm Street; in real life this house is a private home located in Los Angeles at 1428 North Genesee Avenue. The Lantz' family home was at 1419 North Genesee Avenue on the other side of the road. The boiler room scenes and police station interior were shot in the Lincoln Heights Jail (closed since 1965) building, while the exterior used for the police station was Cahuenga Branch Library. The American Jewish University on 15600 Mulholland Drive was used for the Katja Institute for the Study of Sleep Disorders visited by Marge and Nancy.
13. During production, over 500 gallons of fake blood were used for special effects production. For the blood geyser sequence, the filmmakers used the same revolving room set that was used for Tina's death. While filming the scenes, the cameraman and Craven himself were mounted in fixed seats taken from a Datsun B-210 car while the set rotated. The film crew inverted the set and attached the camera so that it looked like the room was right side up, then they poured the red water into the room. They used dyed water because the special effects blood did not have the right look for a geyser. During filming of this scene, the red water poured out in an unexpected way and caused the rotating room to spin. Much of the water spilled out of the bedroom window covering Craven and Langenkamp. Earth's gravity was also used to film another take for the TV version in which a skeleton shoots out from the hollowed out bed and smashes into the "ceiling".
14. More work was done for Freddy's boiler room than made it into the film; the film crew constructed a whole sleeping place for Freddy, showing that he was quite a hobo, an outcast and reject from society, living and sleeping where he worked, and surrounding himself with naked Barbie dolls and other things as a showcase of his fantasies and perversions. This place was supposed to be where he forged his glove and abducted and murdered his victims.
15. 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 a stuntwoman. The melting staircase in Nancy's dream was Robert Shaye's idea based on his own nightmares; it was created using pancake mix. The film's special effects artist Jim Doyle portrayed Freddy on the scene where his face and hands that stretch through the wall and reach out for Nancy when she dreams; the wall was built by Doyle out of spandex.
16. In the scene where Freddy walks through the prison bars to threaten Rod as seen by Nancy, Wes Craven explains that, "we took triangulations of the camera so we knew exactly the height of it from the floor and the angle towards the point where the killer was going to walk through", and then "we put the camera again at the exact height and walked the actor through that space. Then those two images were married and a rotoscope artist went through and matted out the bars so it appeared they were going straight through his body." Jsu Garcia, who was cast as Rod and credited as Nick Corri, says the production was difficult for him. He was dealing with depression due to recent homelessness by snorting heroin in the bathroom between takes. In 2014, he revealed that he was high on heroin during the scene with Langenkamp in the jail cell. "His eyes were watery and they weren't focused," Langenkamp said. "I thought, 'Wow, he's giving the best performance of his life.'"
17. About halfway through the film, when Nancy is trying to stay awake, a scene from Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead appears on a television. Craven decided to include the scene because Raimi had featured a Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977) poster in The Evil Dead. In return, Raimi featured a Freddy Krueger glove in the tool shed scene of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, and later in Ash vs Evil Dead.
18. Sean Cunningham, whom Wes Craven had previously worked with while filming The Last House on the Left, helped Craven at the end of the shooting, heading the second film unit during the filming of some of Nancy's dream scenes.
19. Craven originally planned for the film to have a more evocative ending: Nancy kills Krueger by ceasing to believe in him, then awakens to discover that everything that happened in the film was an elongated nightmare. However, New Line leader Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending, in which Krueger disappears and all seems to have been a dream, only for the audience to discover that it was a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream.
20. Craven explains that the effect of the mentioned fog did not work out for the team and they had to film without it: there were around 20 persons with fog machines, but the breeze at the time was too much, and the fog was gone before they had the opportunity to film the intendendly foggy scene. Though several variants of an end scene were considered and filmed, Heather Langenkamp states that "there always was this sense that Freddy was the car", while according to Sara Risher, "it was always Wes' idea to pan to the little girls' jumping rope". Both a happy ending and a twist ending were filmed, but the final film used the twist ending. Filming wrapped at the end of July, and the film was rushed to get ready for its November release.