10 Horror Movie Secrets You Didn’t Know
5. A Nightmare On Elm Street - The Bloody Bedroom
A little more ambitious in scale than Carpenter's slapdash classic Halloween, Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street saw the iconic horror filmmaker attempt to fuse fantasy elements with the by-now somewhat stale slasher sub genre.
By the mid eighties film fans were sick of mute masked men slicing their way through scores of teens, and a more imaginative monster was necessary for Craven's 1984 hit. Enter Freddy Krueger, the badly burned child killer whose innovative gimmick was that he could attack kids in their dreams, warping the surreality of them to his own nightmarish will.
This high concept required a higher budget than many slashers, but the film was a huge hit which spawned a string of sequels.
However, one particularly infamous death scene required some seriously ambitious technical trickery to pull it off.
Craven and co built an entire bedroom set on a rotating platform for poor future mega-star Johnny Depp’s brutally bloody death scene, then flipped over the set itself and poured gallons of fake blood from the bed in order to create the desired mega-geyser of arterial spray.