10 Things You Didn't Know About A Nightmare On Elm Street
Freddy Kruger isn't just a figment of Wes Craven's imagination...
A Nightmare On Elm street has long been a legacy franchise of the horror genre, acting as the birthplace of Freddy Krueger's special brand of slasher nastiness and paving the way for Wes Craven's schlocky film career in one bloody swoop.
Entertaining us with 9 films over 30+ years of dream demon antics, there's plenty of stories that come with bringing A Nightmare On Elm Street's gnarly premise to life - and from inspirational true stories to set-piece disasters, the franchise has got just about everything imaginable going on behind the scenes that most audiences are none the wiser to.
Every great movie has its endlessly interesting trivia, and A Nightmare On Elm Street is no different. So let's take a look at the back of the boiler room and see what secrets are lurking there, eh?
10. A Nightmare On Elm Street Was Inspired By Real-Life Events
One of the better known facts about the movie but definitely still one of the most interesting, the knowledge that Freddy Krueger wasn't entirely a fabrication is perhaps more terrifying than the whole film franchise itself. Whilst there's no specific true story about a burned child-murderer set loose on a dream rampage, there is one tragic phenomenon that inspired Wes Craven - that of a child mysteriously passing away in their sleep around the time of the movie's conception.
The boy had escaped the Killing Fields of Cambodia with his family and made it to America, but nightmares of his past still haunted him. In an oral history of A Nightmare On Elm Street for Vulture, Wes Craven describes the story as so:
"He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street."