The film: One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again...no, seriously, don't. It wasn't made explicit until the recent remake but Freddy Krueger was a man local to the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio that was probably abusing kids; the parents took it upon themselves to form a vigilante mob and kill him by setting fire to his shack. They keep this dark secret amongst themselves and from their children right up until the point that Freddy starts haunting the dreams of their progeny, his face all deformed and pizza-like and a clawed glove on his hand. At first they're just bad dreams, but then kids start actually dying in their sleep often bearing the injuries of the sort they were having a nightmare about. Hey, and Johnny Depp's in the first one! The true story: Right, so clearly this can't be a true story, can it? The bit where young Depp gets sucked into his bed and becomes a sort of blood geyser? The end where Freddy pulls a mannequin through the door? The killer car? How could any of this have any basis in reality? You're right to be sceptical about those aspects of A Nightmare On Elm Street but, like many of the cinematic terrors on this list, the kernel of its basic conceit is one of those ripped-from-the-headlines jobbies. In fact the idea for the film (and its myriad sequels of varying quality) came from a series of articles in the LA Times about immigrant families from South East Asia, where the men had died in the middle of nightmares - and nobody ever made a connection between the stories despite, to Craven's eyes, all of them seeming to be spookily similar. Possibly even supernaturally, if you're that way inclined. All of them were around twenty-one, and apparently they all just died without explanation - no heart attack, no nothing, they just died for no reason, according to the autopsies. Turns out it's some sort of cultural phenomenon in Laos, Cambodia, and the third of this spate of mysterious deaths is the one that sounds the most like Elm Street, based on the director's retelling: "I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount - something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, 'Thank god.' They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead." Looks like we're gonna have to take that children's rhyme a little more seriously...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
