10 Movies Inspired By Things NOBODY Expected
5. Articles About Hmong Refugees Dying - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street is another one of those incredible loglines that every filmmaker wishes would just fall into their lap - a serial killer who eliminates his victims in their dreams.
Wes Craven came up with the idea after reading a series of Los Angeles Times articles in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which a number of Hmong refugees in the United States died mysteriously in their sleep.
The refugees, having fled war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, were plagued by horrific nightmares which left them refusing to sleep.
The spate of deaths baffled medical personnel, who considered the possibility that the refugees died from "nightmare death syndrome" - that is, being quite literally scared to death by abnormally traumatic nightmares.
Though the actual cause of the deaths is contentious to this day - most often described as sudden cardiac arrest of some kind - it served as the foundation for cinema's great dream killer, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund).