10 Things You Didn't Know About A Nightmare On Elm Street

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."