Audrey Fox
Michael Myers and Jason may be slasher icons in their own right, but there’s something uniquely unsettling about Freddy Krueger. One of the most unnerving horror films of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street blurred the line between reality and dreams, creating an instant icon out of its terrifying antagonist with long, piercing finger knives. Unsurprisingly, such a dark movie has equally dark origins to match, and Wes Craven’s inspiration for Nightmare on Elm Street goes a long way in explaining exactly why Freddy is as twisted as he turned out to be.
Under normal circumstances, even nightmares aren’t inherently threatening – after all, no matter how scary they are, you’re still safe and sound in your bed. Not so in the universe of Nightmare on Elm Street. If Freddy Krueger is prowling around in your dreams, he has the power to kill you in the real world. For the teenagers who have been targeted by Krueger, their own hope is to avoid sleep for as long as they possibly can, driving themselves to the brink of exhaustion but staving off another onslaught from their terrifying adversary in the process. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) keeps herself awake through sheer force of will, hoping to avoid the fate that befell her best friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp), both of whom fall into the clutches of Freddy Kruegger after nodding off.
According to director Wes Craven, his original inspiration came from a series of articles written about a post-Vietnam War phenomenon referred to as sudden unexplained death syndrome, which affected over 100 male refugees from Southeast Asia. These men would stay up for days on end, terrified of the nightmares that awaited them when they eventually drifted off, and each eventually died in their sleep. In an interview with Cinefantastique, Craven recalled the story of one young man he read about, saying that after he finally passed out from exhaustion, “In the middle of the night, [his family] heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons. They found in his closet a Mr. Coffee maker, full of hot coffee that he had used to keep awake, and they also found all his sleeping pills that they thought he had taken; he had spit them back out and hidden them.” Their horror of falling asleep combined with the bizarre circumstances surrounding their deaths lead Craven to create a threatening dreamscape in Nightmare on Elm Street.
But in addition to this disturbing backdrop for the horror film, there’s the ghoulish character of Freddy Krueger himself. As we learn towards the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, Krueger was a child murderer who met his untimely – and rather fiery – end at the hands of a group of vigilante parents outraged at his release from prison. The details of his specific crimes are left vague (at least in the original film, although future films elaborated on his backstory), and this choice was apparently intentional. Although Craven’s script originally referred to Krueger as a child molester, the director moved away from classifying him as such in the film. During the 1980s in California, there had been a series of child sex abuse investigations that received a great deal of media attention at the time, from the Kern County child abuse cases in 1982 to the McMartin preschool trial in 1983. Craven was reluctant for it to appear as though he was capitalizing on these high-profile cases by explicitly labeling Freddy as a child predator – instead, there’s a seedy undercurrent to the discussions of his crimes, but they’re not spelled out until much later in the franchise.
Wes Craven is a master of the horror genre precisely because of his ability to tap into what audiences find most frightening. In addition to his utilization of real-life horror stories about bizarre deaths and disturbing crimes, he called upon his own childhood experiences to flesh out the now-iconic figure of Freddy Krueger – a neighborhood drunk supplied the menacing energy of the character, while his elementary school bully provided his name. Nightmare on Elm Street has a fanciful storyline, where the world of dreams exists right alongside a teenager’s everyday existence and nightmares have the power to kill. But thanks to the inspiration Wes Craven drew from lived experiences, the film maintains a tenuous but powerful connection to the real world, making it all the more chilling.
“A Nightmare on Elm Street” is streaming on PlutoTV. It was also recently released on 4K UHD.
