Nightmare Elm Street 4 Soundtrack

[Sean Vaidhyanathan]

ANightmare 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]

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]

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, 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 20 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.

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]

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]

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]

Actor David Warner was originally cast to play Freddy.[32][33] Make-up tests were done,[34][35] but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.[36] 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. According to Hodder, "I had a meeting with Wes Craven about playing a character he was developing called Freddy Krueger. At the time, Wes wasn't sure what kind of person he wanted for the role of Freddy, so I had as good a shot as anybody else. He was initially thinking of a big guy for the part, and he was also thinking of somebody who had real burn scars. But obviously, he changed his whole line of thinking and went with Robert Englund, who's smaller. I would have loved to play the part, but I do think Wes made the right choice". Hodder would in a way eventually play Freddy, as the hand that grabs Jason's mask at the epilogue in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993).[37][38] Wes Craven explains that:

3a8082e126