10 Horror Movies You Didn't Know Were Based On True Stories
4. A Nightmare On Elm Street
Freddy Krueger's whole shtick is that he invades the dreams of his victims, chases them down, and kills them, murdering them while they sleep. As outlandish as the concept is, it actually has roots in a real-life phenomenon called sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, which involves people dying unexpectedly in their sleep.
Director Wes Craven was inspired by one particular case involving this syndrome, which he read in an L.A. Times article. The article spoke about a family that managed to survive the Cambodian Killing Fields in the 1970s, and made their way to the United States. Thinking they were safe and well, tragedy soon struck the family when the youngest boy died in the middle of the night, screaming.
In 2014, Craven went into further detail about the boy's story in an interview with Vulture:
"I’d read an article in the L.A. Times about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and managed to get to the U.S. Things were fine, and then suddenly the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. 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."
From here, Craven expanded upon the idea of people dying during nightmares, which led to the creation of arguably the most iconic horror villain of all time.