Original subtitles

particularly, speaks to these adolescent fears

of not having control.

You can only trust kids of your own age to even believe in Freddy Krueger.

And all the adults are telling you,

"Get some sleep." "Get to sleep." "Get some rest."

And you know that's the worst possible thing you can do.

You can look at classic movie monsters -

Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, Dracula --

and Freddy just fits right in there with them.

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" not only speaks the language of cinema, but it speaks

this universal story of the bad dream, the nightmare and the boogeyman.

In the early 1980s, Wes Craven -- best known for such brutal films as

"Last House On The Left" and "The Hills Have Eyes"

would find the inspiration for his most innovative project in the pages of real life.

The beginning of "Nightmare on Elm Street" really came to me with a series of articles

in the L.A. Times about a young men who were dying in the middle of nightmares.

They were specifically from the Asian Rim and in this particular case

a young man had a severe nightmare and told his parents,

"I can't go back to sleep, I'm gonna die, I just know it."

And the father was a physician and said, "Let me give you some sleeping pills."

The kid didn't sleep the first night, then the second night he didn't sleep again.

And then it became clear that he was trying to stay awake despite everything.

Then finally the kid fell asleep and they took him upstairs and put him to bed thinking,

"Thank God that little crisis is over."

And in the middle of the night they heard screams and ran into the room and he was thrashing

on the bed horribly.

Literally, before they got to him he fell still and he was dead.

In the aftermath, the parents found

all the sleeping pills. He had not taken them, he had hidden them in the bed.

And they also found a Mr. Coffee machine in his closet with the hidden extension cord that went to the nearest plug

which, to me, was just so out of a movie.

What if there was somebody in his dream that was,

who killed him? What killed him? What if it's a guy? My ovim Bible training of the sins of the parents

being visited on the children. That's perfect as something the parents did to him and just kind of

pieced it together from there.

The reason Elm Street was used is that I wanted to have an idea

of a place that was just pure Americana.

The school I taught at before l jumped ship out of academic teaching

was Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York and the main street of Potsdam is Elm Street.

And then, of course, Elm Street was the street that

Kennedy was shot on.

I remember showing it to Sean Cunningham, who did "Friday the 13th."

He was my first producer

and he said, "I hate to say it, but nobody's going to be afraid of this

'cause it's a dream, they'll know it's a dream so they won't be afraid."

And it went around Hollywood for three years.

The one guy who thought that the script was interesting was Bob Shaye.

Freddy came along after 10 or 15 years and we had had some successes before "Nightmare on Elm Street."

We had made 3 or 4 films before that, small films, all of which

we were able to sell and make our money back, but none of which did particularly well.

I always did think that producers had something to offer besides raising money. And I didn't get into this business because

I wanted to make a lot of money, I got into the business

because I wanted to entertain people.

When he started the company, which was 1968, originally it was not a production company, it was

a distribution company.

New Line Cinema at that time was a small, tiny, tiny company, I think a few people out of a storefront in the Lower East Side.

Bob was a copyright lawyer and the way Bob started New Line was that he discovered that the copyright on

"Reefer Madness" had expired and he picked it up.

When I came to him he had just gotten

"Pink Flamingos" and it proved to be a big hit.

I think he would carry it around in the trunk of his car and show it at midnight shows.

They would distribute them in 16 mm to army bases and prisons and colleges. Those were their three venues.

That was the very, very, very beginning of New Line as a distribution company.

There was a lot of blood, sweat and toil that went into the whole process over 40 years.

To everyone's credit that worked there

they worked as hard as they could for something they loved because it certainly wasn't for money.

It was rough, it was rough. There were times we couldn't cash our paychecks.

We'd go down to the bank and they'd go, "You can't do this," you know.

One of the guys said, "You know, we know the youth market so well that if we could come up with a low budget horror film,

we could really make money."

"Nightmare on Elm Street" came to Bob Shaye, he read it and liked it very much.

He immediately knew there was a premise there

that was strong and original.

And I thought it was incredibly inspired because it had this great marketing hook that was a familiarity

to the entire world, because we�ve all had nightmares. Everybody sleeps.

Bob is many different things, but he has an extraordinary intelligence and he was

able to see how that could grab an audience.

We worked with Wes for six months, maybe even a year, on the story - again -- with very little money.

"Nightmare" had a killer story. it's one of the two scripts I've ever picked up and read straight through.

It tried to be something as deep as it could be, you know,

to get right into your soul. What's the source of fear?

It scared me so much, I actually didn't sleep the night after I read it.

I don't think there's any film I've ever worked on since then that was effective like that in terms of

just being sheer, plain-ahead terrifying.

Now one step closer to making "Elm Street" a reality, the time had come to find the cast of characters:

sympathetic victims, a resourceful heroine and the man who would terrorize their dreams.

We had a brilliant young casting woman,

Annette Benson, and she found everyone.

I wanted very much to do young heroines who didn't trip and fall down, who could fight if they had to.

"Moving angle favoring Nancy. She's a pretty gin in a letter sweater

with an easy, athletic stride and the look of a natural leader."

I really feel that she's a totally different kind of heroine and

I don't think she is interchangeable like a lot of the girls in slasher movies.

'Heather was interesting to me because'

she embodied sort of what I was looking for, which was a legitimate girl next door.

A survivor girl, one of the leading, classic ingredients of contemporary horror.

Heather probably being the leading example.

I never felt like, "Oh gosh, I really need to take a lot of time

and develop a character.

I really felt like I was going to bring myself to the set

and be as close to me as I could.

I think Freddy considered her a worthy adversary, but she also has to be the one to go.

She's like his penultimate, if not ultimate, challenge.

As hard as Nancy tries, the only life she can really save is her own.

And I think that that's actually kind of a very tragic part of Nancy's character

is that as hard as she tries, she isn't that successful.

"Tina Gray, a strong girl of fifteen in a thin night shift, moves toward us

down a dark corridor."

I did find the character Tina when I read it, there was something intrinsically sad about her because

she as sort of a victim

of this broken home and

she's left to really raise herself.

Tina's experience was, "I want to feel good and sort of escape

this life that I have," but I don't think Tina's character was

much of a survivor.

"''Tina turns to Nancy, but before either can say more, Rod Lane, a lean, Richard Gere sort in black leather interrupts.

I was pretending to be Italian. My agent at the time gave me a name

called Nick Carri.

It was taboo. No Latin actor was going to make it.

"Hey, up yours with a twirling mower."

Just, there was a lot of me in it, a lot of me: cocky, big ego, womanizer.

We weren't really typecast, but our essence of who we are really was displayed in those characters

and I think that's why all of us were very successful in portraying that group of teenagers.

'(spooky sound)'

The character of Glen was kind of the romantic

lead in a sense. He was the heroine's boyfriend.

We were looking at all the standard Hollywood guys, but I didn't see anybody that seemed to be

that really charismatic.

Charlie Sheen wanted the role but he wanted $3000 bucks a week and we didn't have it.

Johnny hadn't done any acting, I don't think.

He was in a band.

I remember Wes saying that it was between Johnny and one other guy.

My daughter said, "Dad, Johnny Depp." I said, "Really? But he looks kind of sickly and pale."

She says, "He's beautiful." (laughing) And that was it.

The role of Johnny's was supposed to be a jock,

some white dude, big muscular guy.

Johnny comes in with a little baby voice, really sensitive.

(laughing) "Did you see his face?" (mocking) "Did you see his face?"

But he really went for the straight-laced. He did everything he could do to be that wholesome guy.

I thought he was really successful in it.

Johnny was so terrified when he was first performing.

He would always be in sort of a cold, clammy sweat and his hands would be trembling.

He was really pushing himself, you know, into an area that was totally different and

I don't think, something that he felt prepared for at all.

He had an energy level that

just a lot of actors don't have and I think that's why he's become such a superstar.

He's always been very sweet about acknowledging that I gave him a start

and I think on "Actor's Studio" I've heard that he has a nice comment about

"Nightmare on Elm Street."

What was your role in "Nightmare on Elm Street?" (laughing) I played Glen.

And what happened to Glen?

I get sucked into bed. (audience laughter) Not a bad gig, you know.

It's interesting the people you get to work with on lower budget films

because a lot of them have quite distinguished careers

and then their careers have maybe gone down a little bit and they don't get that much work.

So, you can get somebody that's affordable and at the same time has fantastic experience and chops.

Whether it's Lieutenant Fuller

in "Black Christmas"

to Lieutenant Thompson,

I guess I made a bridge between the two in some way.

He's worked with everybody

I mean, John Saxon is the man.

You know, you realize

this guy's a legend and he can act and he's awesome.

It's funny, he arrived at the first makeup session with two little boxes

and he opened them up and there were hairpieces. I don't think he'll mind me telling this story.

He said, "Would you like this one, it's a little bit more full, or this one, I look a little bit more aged."

I think it's kind of rare in horror movies that the heroine has

so many different

relationships going through the plotlines.

We all clicked and that's part of his genius is picking the right people that had chemistry, that he clearly saw had chemistry.

We would have serious discussions with Wes about, "Look, we don't want this to be another "Friday the 13th"

where it's just we're camping and

then a knife goes through the bed

and it's, "uhhh uhhh." (knife sound)

Let's really make it psychologically damaging and real

and that's what the movie ultimately became.

Freddy's origins, they're sort of multi-various and they all come together with this character. One was, there was this kid

named Freddy in elementary school

(laughing) and he would beat me up with some regularity.

So the name Fred/Freddy to me was like one of those names that just brings up all these bad memories.

And then there was this incident of myself as a child

lying in bed at night and I heard this mumbling

and couldn't figure out what the hell it was, you know. So I crept to the window and there was

this man who, if you would say, "Oh, put Freddy down the street,"

that's what he would look like, you know.

Somehow he sensed that somebody was watching and he looked right up into my eyes

and l jumped back in the room and sat on the edge of the bed waiting for him to go away

and I went back and he was still there and he just went and then he started walking.

The thing that struck me most about that particular man was that he had a lot of malice in his face and

he also had this sort of sick sense of humor

about how delightful it was to terrify a child.

The way most villains are cast in these kinds of movies are usually stuntmen.

Wes' idea was to get a real actor in the role to add some personality and some elan to it.

I was casting for an old man

because that's how Freddy was written. When I was reading older men, there was a softness to them,

there was something about having seen,

I think, so much of life, there was a tenderness to them (laughing) as far as they couldn't really be evil.

David Warner was origin ally cast as Freddy

and I was excited because I saw "Afier Time."

I loved him as the villain and I was kind of excited about working with him and then

at the last minute he said he had a prior commitment that he couldn�t commit to their timeframe and all that,

and that's when Robert came in.

I was really sort of self-preoccupied with my first boom of success as a result of

the miniseries

My agent had suggested this film called "A Nightmare on Elm Street"

with this guy Wes Craven, and I went on this interview

expecting to meet the prince of darkness and there was

erudite, tall, preppy, Ralph Lauren-attired Wes Craven there.

He looked kind of semi-geeky

and he was much younger than I was looking for.

I saw him coming and it was like

"They want him to play Freddy?" He just didn't look it, he was kind of happy-go-lucky.

Wes is very kind to me

and says that he saw something in me. And perhaps he did. I hope that's the truth.

He just relished being evil

and it brought out that wonderful thing about Freddy

of, it's the guy on the sidewalk frightening the kid,

but he was also was able to do it in almost a funny way.

Robert created the character, he created a real, real character.

So everyone was thrilled because Robert brought much more to the table than a guy in a hockey mask.

The rest was makeup and once the makeup was on you didn't know how old he was anyway.

(laughing) It was like, "Duh, what was I thinking?"

David Miller

was of "Thriller" with John Landis,

so I knew I was in good hands because that was the state-of-the-an phenomenon.

The final design for Freddy was based on pepperoni pizza.

I was at a restaurant one night and I was having pizza and I was just kind of deep in thought.

I started playing around with the cheese,

putting it around the pepperoni and I actually made Freddy's face on the pizza.

David just whipped open this medical textbook for me

the first day I sat down

and he said, "This is what we're going to do to you."

And it was real burn victims.

It's hard to imagine that Robert alone could have the patience for someone

touching his face like that all the time. Always touching, always prodding.

A lot of what I discovered that I used for the entire experience of playing Freddy

was those first few makeup applications

in David Millers garage somewhere,

teasing him or telling him to get a brush out of my eye.

(menacing) "David!" I found a little bit of Freddy in there.

When Robert was done with the day, as soon as they yelled "Cut!"

he would start ripping it to pieces and throw them behind him

as he would walk to the makeup room for me to take the makeup off, and by the time

he would get there, half his makeup was off already, and there would be people behind him

with plastic bags picking up the pieces,

(laughing) and they'd come to me later on and say,

(laughing) "What pan do I have?"

He came up with a lot more physicality, you know,

the way he was moving the claws and everything

that were very original and distinctive.

I really made conscious choices

I recognized how great the silhouette was

and how great the shadow was. And so I really physicalized him a lot.

I used Klaus Kinski but I also used a little bit

of Jimmy Cagney in there,

that little spread-legged, strong gangster stance that Cagney uses, was something I kind of had

going on in the back of my head, too.

A lot of the monsters of past were misunderstood,

they were kind of innocent.

But Freddy Krueger is not innocent.

The real fact of Freddy that nobody really talks about,

I think it was that Freddy molested the kids, but they really kind of...

side-stepped that.

While we were filming the original film, there was this

huge national news story.

The McMartin trial was going on endlessly. A school for children where the children had accused teachers of molesting them,

on a very systematic way.

We had to salt-pedal the sexuality a little bit, but that was probably even better

because it becomes subtext.

That's a character entire modus operandi is about the fact that he knows the fear he's causing you, he knows

that he's screwing with you before the kill.

He could kill you right away, that's not the point. The fun is in prolonging it. It's the foreplay, in Freddy's case.

Freddy's in those teenage girls' bedrooms,

he's in their bed with them,

he's in their dreams with them, and that's about as much as you could ever hope to violate anyone.

That's more of a violation than rape and so I think that, in and of itself, is one of the great hooks to "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

You know, in my mind, the killer of children is about the most despicable

thing you can think and the most,

the deepest and most profound betrayal of the innocence of a child.

But at the same time, there was something deeper in the original about morality play with Freddy being a child molester

and the whole town having their dirty secret

that they had committed murder,

group murder, themselves.

And it also made the moral issue of if it's a really despicable human being, do you have the right

to take the law into your hands.

It is this story that makes you search your own soul about vigilante justice and decent people doing bad things

in the name of what they consider justice.

Two wrongs don't make a right and, certainly, being burned alive is not

'due process..

Oh, I do think that vigilante justice is an answer to someone like Freddy Krueger.

I would never want that kind of crime on my hands, but

it happens, it happens all the time.

Freddy is a warning. He is talked about and he's whispered about.

The spectre has infiltrated their imaginations.

I love the idea that behind one of those garage doors, in a white trash neighborhood, Fred Krueger was there

with his vise making that thing...

and dreaming and fantasizing about what he was going to do and

when he put it on it emboldened him.

There was a lot of killers with masks and with some sort of an edged weapon.

Wes was sort of stuck on what the weapon was going to be.

What's the earliest weapon that mankind might have been afraid of?

And it would be, well, the weapon of an animal.

The cave bear, you know, something that could reach around the comer

with these big giant claws.

And he described it as something like "long fingernails,"

so I went off and did some sketches

and actually built the test fingers, how the glove might look and function.

Reading that script and knowing that I had to build that glove,

I felt I was just building this character that was part of the film.

The claw extends Freddy,

it extends his evil, it extends his anger.

Freddy made it in the basement,

so the glove had to actually be kind of crude.

It almost looks like a junior high school shop project from hell.

I think in those boiler room scenes he's the scariest, 'cause he was always scratching those nails against the pipes.

He would really do that and annoy everybody.

'(nails scratching)'

Aaahhh!

How the glove affected me was, it's heavy, and when I put it on

one shoulder dropped a bit and it affected my movement

and it affected my posture, and I immediately thought,

it's like a holster, it's like a gunslinger's thing.

So that posture became signature

for Freddy Krueger.

When I first meet Freddy head-on in the alley

we shot that in the middle of the night in Venice, California

it was freezing.

Freddy was coming down the alleyway

and his arms were extending.

That was all simple marionetting,

where you've got guys on the garage roofs

with long versions of fishing poles,

with wire holding up the Freddy arms.

It looked ridiculous.

Jacques hated this thing and with good reason.

I was a little concerned that it was going to look too fake, too cheesy, not scary enough.

I was surprised...

at how well it came out in terms of people accepting it.

The death of Tina

is pretty brutal stuff, I mean, it really holds up.

It appeared to be a little bit of a red herring because you almost kind of think...

Tina's going to be the heroine at the beginning, in a way.

That's the real nod to Hitchcock.

Since Wes wanted something really big and fantastic and out there for the first death, Tina's death,

I suggested that we do a rotating room.

They took it from Fred Astaire

dancing on the walls and the roof.

And that situation was quite a hairy situation,

that scene where she's dragged up the wall,

there were no wires or anything dragging her, we were rotating the entire set.

Everything in the room was naked down,'

the cameraman was in like an airplane seat attached to the wall.

It would take a couple of people

to just turn that room

and actually make it move without

using any mechanical means.

As you get turned upside down, you're still operating the camera,

but you're brain is upside down.

I was either crawling or being dragged,

however I was always on the floor.

Boy, did she ever do that that moment when she's killed

she just nailed it.

The blood and her being dragged up the walls and down walls,

a brutal sequence.

It was extremely disorienting. I know at the end of the take, she stood up and she said, "I can't move."

I had the sensation I was falling

and I completely flipped out. It was like, "Stop, I have to get out! I have to get out!"

And then here comes Wes, all calm, sticking his up through the window.

He's like, "Check this out, I'm standing on the ground,

you're laying here, we're looking at each other, you're not falling." (laughing) It's like, "onnnn!"

As I looked around thinking I was going to reassure her, I started feeling nauseated.

It was a very, very strange set.

I remember that when the stuntwoman slammed onto the bed, blood slapped me on the face.

There was this beautiful, sort of slow-motion (blood splashing sound)

because we had the bed just loaded with blood. And the censors, the censors

went after that whole scene. As soon as she hit the bed,

we were not allowed to show any splash whatsoever.

There was nothing fake in the first one. We were all there in the same room, we were all acting together.

The reality of it being really there with the actor makes such a difference in their performance.

The fact that we do the stuff live

and that we do it on camera and we get it in one take or two takes, or whatever,

is pan of the romance of the genre.

In the high school scene Where I'm sitting in the class,

we had a lot of extras there.

It's the first time that Heather is really confronted with the dream.

Lin Sh aye is the sister of the producer, so she had this really important part as the teacher.

I gotta say, I was somewhat shocked how much impact

the English teacher

had on people. That they remembered her and, "I have a teacherjust like that."

And then the strange reading of "Hamlet," which is so Wes, you know,

to have some classic Shakespeare reference on top of that.

I read it straight, and then Wes came up and asked me if I'd repeat it again in a stage whisper.

(whispering) "Bad dreams."

When "Cut!" was called, people started kind of laughing and then I received a standing ovation.

Wes and I, we always had a joke.

I'm like, "Try to explain this to me, Wes," and he's like, "I can't explain it, it's just a dream."

And I'm like, "Okay, thank you." (laughing)

The image of the body bag

just in the hallway, scared me so much.

First of all, your psyche does not want to be in a bodybag when you're alive.

Your body and your brain says, "Don't let them zip this up," because there's not a zipper on the in side

so you're really at the mercy of the people

taking care of you.

My heart was going out to Amanda because she had to do the grossest things.

There were eels and centipedes and

it was very disturbing and I was upset. Both Heather and I were very upset while we were filming those scenes.

And she's always such a trouper

and they always kind of push the envelope to see how much she would do.

And then, finally, she would say, "Okay, three centipedes... that's enough

The hall pass line is, of course,

became a favorite of people's, actually.

"Where's your pass?"

"Screw your pass!"

With Robert's voice coming out of my mouth, I guess kids didn't expect it and it just really grossed them out.

"No running in the hallway."

It's an archetype that Wes just tapped into,

even the clothes that he wears, the stripes.

And the red and the green together actually were from an article on how

the eye and the retina deal with color and those two colors

were very diff cult for the eye to see side by side. So I said, "Great, that will be the stripes of the sweater." (laughing)

So I, literally, made him into a sort of painful optical effect.

There was a lot of pressure on the original film, I think, because...

there was no money.

There were tensions between Bob and Wes, and it was obvious to everybody.

And I knew that Bob had mortgaged his company and his life and his house and everything

to create this film. And I knew that Wes had signed away the rights to the characters and all this to create this film.

Wes and I had a little bit of a disagreement

about who was doing what, and he wanted me to stick in my role as a producer.

You've got two strong personalities, both ofvimich shared a vision of the end

but they might not have shared every day

the vision of how to get there.

One of the big fights I remember between Bob and Wes was over the sticky stairs.

'Bob was obsessed with this image and Wes'

wasn't particulany interested in it.

The Bob Shaye imprint in large measure came from some of my own nightmares

that's why I was just offering them up to Wes. (laughing)

I don't know if it was in the script, but they decided to have

the carpet just cut

and then they poured in a bunch of oatmeal mixed with mushroom soup or something like that.

'K was Bisquick'

If you mix Bisquick up too thick and you let it sit for about an hour, it becomes the most sticky, gooey,

tenacious stuff on the planet.

Wes fin ally deigned to let me say "Action!" at least. (laughing) There wasn't very much directing to go on.

Letting him "direct," call "Action!" and "Cut!" on that, was kind of a way of saying, "Come on, we're friends,"

and you know, "We're in this together."

You know, ultimately, I think Bob and I both respected each other all the way through and we both knew

we had everything to win or lose with the film.

We had 80 effects, shots

OI' SEQUEHCES

in a 90-minute film

that we were shooting in 26 days.

Poor Heather's been haunted by

phallic moments, you know. (laughing) The first one with Freddy coming out of the bathtub

between her legs.

They built a bathtub on our soundstage that had no bottom and then it had, instead, a tank.

So I had the distinct pleasure of having Heather Langenkamp sitting on my knees

with her feet resting on my shoulders for an entire day.

And he's the one who has the hand that comes up with the Freddy glove on it.

Rod's death scene in the jail

was technically complicated.

When they try to hang me, they hang me

on fishwire, but the fishwire wasn't

strong enough, so the first time I crashed and burned, I fell.

There's one shot in there where it's shot in reverse

where the thing actually snakes around his neck.

It was the old days, it was the way to do it, you know. Kind of archaic, but it works.

"I couldn't even see the fucker."

Well the jail scene, I was really depressed. I'm not going to say the drug I was doing,

but I was ripped.

I was passed out

and Wes, I think, Wes was like, "Are you ready for this shoot?"

I'm crying, not because of the scene,

I'm crying because my life is shitty at the time.

I really regret that I brought a substance and changed my acting,

but I'm clean after 25 years. I'm sober.

What I like so much about the story,

and about Renee Blakley and John Saxon's

portrayal, is that you really don't understand at the beginning why they have this kind of conspiratorial relationship.

I guess I played the role,

or it was intended to be, someone who is harsh and a little tough.

My relationship with my father is the most distant and the most diff cult.

He's not willing to go there and admit that Nancy's

having these real dreams.

Heather was saying things about

"Fred Krueger"

and I'd say, "Stop that kind of stuff, this is nonsense. Don't talk to me about that."

Ronee Blakley's character was interesting, you know. She's this alcoholic mother and it was important to me

that there was this drifi from a woman who was saying

"You're crazy," to her child.

And she actually has the weight of the world on her shoulders because of her crime

in creating Freddy Krueger.

And once she has disclosed that she and her cohorts of the other parents have essentially caused

the deaths of their own children,

starts drinking heavily

to the point where when Nancy is about to face her worst test, her mother isn't there and has to be

kind of put to bed like a little child.

She becomes such an important yin to my yang.

I don't think the movie would have been as good without her being a little bit more intense than I think

our average parent character is these days.

Nancy comes home and there's bars on all the windows.

And then, later, when she needs to get out of the house, she can't because

she's locked from the inside.

And goes to her mother and the mother says,

"Locked, locked, locked." (laughing)

The battle's about to be

enjoined with Freddy and it's going to take place in the house.

And what her mom has done by putting bars on is ensured that

there will be no escape.

I'm trying to talk to Glen and trying to wam him that, you know, he's about to get killed by Freddy

if he falls asleep

and I look dovm and it's Freddy's mouth and tongue and he says,

"I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy."

That shocked people so much.

It was one of the most startling moments of the first film

and the special effects cost $5.

Heather unwanted to, eventually,

take that thing home

and we thought it was a little strange.

Then the rotating room ended up getting used again

for Johnny Depp's death, but that wasn't originally planned that way.

Johnny Depp went through a mattress.

(laughing) He's got his headphones on, and all of a sudden

The blood spilling out of the bed,

that was a one take deal.

Big pressure there.

Wes, who is now strapped to one of the camera chairs, would say, "Go."

We tumed the room upside down, the bed was now

at the top.

When they started dumping the red water, the blood, through the thing, as soon as it hit the ceiling

and hit the light

it immediately electrified the water, so the guy pouring the water got electrocuted.

(laughing) Oops.

You got hundreds of gallons of water now sloshing on the floor.

Which threw the weight off entirely, and the WhOIE thing suddenlyjust shifted.

And the room started going like this.

That room started to turn.

And the room got out of control from the operators.

And there was no way we were stopping it.

It rolled all the way over

because the weight of the blood went to the wrong side of the ceiling.

And we were up there

jumping out of the way of

cables and ropes that were ripping out.

Water went into all the lights and there were these huge flashes in the dark, and we were spinning in the dark

(laughing) with sparks going off.

And the wall had a window in it.

And, of course, the blood all poured out the window on us,

so the crew that was turning the room is standing there completely covered in blood.

So, the room stopped upside dovm and we were hanging upside dovm for at least 20 minutes.

Caused Jacques to make noises that no man should ever have to make unless he's actually dying.

Itwas pretty funny, though.

(laughing)

No one was hurt, we got the shot.

It just came out so totally cool. So, pan of the reason

that that effect looks like that

is because of this fortuitous mistake.

I think there was a little bit more to John ny Depp's

bloody room scene.

I guess his head was going to come out of the bed once he gets sucked down in there

and it spits him back out.

Actually, I remember it was pretty scary. I don't know why it was cut.

At a certain point, you felt like, "Well, the scene's over."

We did use the room again

in "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."

"Booby Traps and Improvised Anti-Personnel Devices?"

I had read this Army manual called "Improvised Weapons"

and it was all about how to make booby traps.

Every one of those little gags and all those things were things that came out of either somebody's

imagination

or we got from one of the books on doing booby traps.

(laughing) There were several films that I did that had booby traps.

I just thought they were fun.

After a while I just said, (laughing) "You can't have any more booby traps, Craven."

The whole sequence of Freddy getting lit up in the cellar-

turning, running up the stairs,

falling down, rolling back dovm the stairs -

is all one shot.

That was one take.

And I wouldn't have believed that anybody

could burn for that long and then get up and start back up the stairs again.

We were just standing there in awe.

The scene where my mom gets pulled dowrn into the bed in the fiery blaze of light,

of all the scenes in the movie, it's the most fantastic.

You have Freddy, you have my mother,

you have my dad, you have me,

and nothing really makes sense at this point.

"I take back every bit of energy I gave you."

What the ending of the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" means, symbolically with Nancy turning her back on Freddy, is

"I won't participate in fear."

The fear that Freddy engenders.

It's a very simple solution to all this mayhem.

Nancy realizes that that's how you stop it

is not to surrender to it. So that's actually, I think, a very satisfying ending.

It's a confusing scene because with the ending that we now have, it doesn't quite make sense. If I turn my back and

and that was supposed to be a successful resolution, then the fact that Freddy comes back means I failed.

We were uncertain about the ending. We didn't really feel like we had it right.

Wes wanted the ending to be that Heather woke up in the morning and the sun was shining and she walked away.

He wanted to have a big hook to the picture so that he could have a sequel.

And I thought he was crazy. There will never be a sequel. Boy, was I stupid.

I've been accused of fighting for a movie that could have sequels

but that wasn't really the case. I just felt that

the ending to the movie didn't send the audience out

with any great excitement.

He and I had lots of arguments.

I even think my father got involved. (laughing) They were asking his opinion.

I said, "Okay, fine I'll put them in a car

and we'll have the car have Freddy's stripes.

They asked us to do three or four different versions of different things happening surrounding the car.

There always was this sense

that Freddy was the car.

We ended up shooting two or three different endings.

There was one Wnere I drive the car.

There was one where Johnny drives the car.

We shot it without the top coming up, we shot it with the top coming up.

The irony is that we used all of the endings, just about.

But it was always Wes' idea to pan to the little ginsjumping rope,

which is such an evocative ending.

That's the real ending and it's brilliant.

But he did get his hook. We kind of compromised on the hook.

(screaming)

The effect with Ronee works great on film, but When we shot it, it was really silly shit. (laughing)

It was just so comical looking.

I couldn't figure out how they did it, so I thought it was totally cool.

We had an articulated dummy that we used for several different things in the film,

and so we just dressed it up as Renee.

It had to be all very squishy 'cause he wanted it to go through a window.

And the dummy went (swooshing) and was sucked through the window. (laughing)

it worked well enough, there's no question about that, but, you know, when you see it today it's a little silly. But, so what?

I felt actually very bad about doing that, but I also felt very much that Bob was the only person

that was able to get this picture going and championed it, so I gave him his hook.

I look at the entire film "Nightmare on Elm Street"

as a precognitive nightmare of Nancy.

Everything in it will happen, but it hasn't really happened, she's just dreamt that it's going to happen and she's trying to

wam everybody. And then it begins

at the very ending there.

(singing) "...three, four, better lock your door..."

Before I came on "Nightmare on Elm Street" the little jump rope nursery rhyme thing had been worked out.

(Singing) "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..."

(humming)

which was set to this little nursery rhyme that I had written, but I had no idea of how that could be set to music.

And I think it was Heather's boyfriend who came up with that little rhyme.

My boyfriend was a musician. We were just sitting around the piano one time and he sat down

and he just did this little minor key thing.

And I kept that element and kind of worked it into the score in a few places because it seemed to be important,

and I'm sewing the film.

If you can get just the right musical phrase and then play it a million different ways, and backwards and upside dovm and

different instrumentation, it unifies the entire film.

And then I thought, "Let's have a theme.

Let's get a melody involved here."

(Playing piano)

So, the melody is playing with your sense of order (playing piano), maybe we go to there (playing piano),

and another note that doesn't belong (playing piano).

That theme really created the flavor for the film.

When "ANightmare on Elm Street" was rejected by every major Hollywood studio,

Robert Shaye and New Line Cinema took the ultimate gamble by releasing the film on their OWH.

And on November 9, 1984, all eyes watched to see if that bet would pay off.

The film could have, literally, destroyed the company,

and, so, there was a lot of tension around that during the release of the film.

When the film open ed

to see this huge line around the block on Broadway

of people waiting to get into the theater, then I knew that the fuse had been lit.

I took my son, who was 12. We sat and watched it.

My son nudged me and said, "Pop, this is really good." And I said, "Yeah, I think it is, it really is."

Completely scared me. I think I was enough removed from it that I got lost in the story.

Even though I worked on the film, there were parts that scared me.

It got into your bones on some level.

That's why Wes is so good at this. He really loves to explore the psychology of people's minds

and understands that fear is one of the most important emotions that people have.

The fact that "Nightmare on Elm Street" was a critical success and a financial success

helped me immensely. When I started on the film I was penniless.

It was the first film that made that amount of money for us. I mean it wasnt like hundreds of millions of dollars,

but it was a few million anyhow.

It put New Line Cinema on the map.

To think that it was such a big financial issue that a company's life depended on less than $2 million -- that's pretty amazing.

I think "Nightmare on Elm Street" put me into the big time, so to speak. I mean, it certainly gave me recognition.

Wes became "Horror Meister" Wes Craven and I became "Horror Star,"

"Slasher Star“ Robert Englund.

It had already achieved a cult status very quickly, and very shortly

after that it began to snowball.

"1" was the real seminal movie and it still has some really genius scenes in it.

And I think I did some things that were really innovative

and have had the chance to work with some enormously talented and wonderfully spirited people.

And it doesn't get much better than that in the business.

Aiter their first taste of mainstream success, New Line Cinema immediately realized it was time to think about Freddy's future

and the "Nightmare" they now owned.

I don't think that we were thinking about a sequel. Who knew that it would even be this successful? We didn't know.

After the film opened so big on the weekend

the head of distribution went right in to Bob Shaye and said, "We need a sequel."

We weren't calculatedly trying to capitalize on the thing,

we just, this was the only project we had that had sequel potential.

Bob Sh aye had basically leveraged his ass off on the first one. He'd sold all the rights off to get the movie made.

The other entity, the other financial entity, I think, just kind of crucified him and took a lot ofvmat he had.

So that when "Nightmare on Elm Street" the original made a healthy profit

it wasn't really a profit that went into Bob's pockets, nor did it really help his studio.

What Bob came away with was a copyright on something that could be very, very valuable.

And New Line was always stumbling fl'om one distribution movie to another distribution movie,

and, so, this was a chance to be able to create a little bit of cash flow.

The signal definitely was there that, "I own this and I'm gonna do with it what I want."

Wes didn't want this movie to be a franchise.

I didn't want to keep going on something that was owned by somebody else.

I don't think that there was a real conversation about Wes doing "Nightmare 2"

because he and Bob had such a stressed relationship. It was a longtime before, I think, they spoke to each other.

The bone of contention really was a profit participation and not so much about having the courtesy to offer him

to direct the next movie.

So, we ended up going to a young man, David Chaskin,

who worked in our 16mm distribution department, (laughing) but he had written a script that we'd

option ed because we liked it.

I just thought that it would be fun for

Freddy to have a human avatar

that's actually doing stuff in the real world. That was where I took ofifrom:

possession.

I thought the script was quite inferior and I had a lot of notes. And they said, "We just want to shoot this," so off they went.

A good friend of mine, Jack Sh older, agreed to direct the film.

Jack Sholder had been making trailers for us and he was very talented.

One of our first films that we ever produced

he directed, called "Alone in the Dark."

Jack was pretty good technically. He had come out of editing, so he knew how to tell stories.

I was never a huge fan of the original.

I mean, I understood why it was good

and I understood why it was successful,

but I felt no compunction to follow the template of the first film.

I wasn't asked to do "Nightmare 2." I think that the script was probably developed quickly afler "Nightmare 1."

To my knowledge, nobody ever talked about bringing Heather Ian genkamp back

to do "Nightmare 2" simply because I think they had determined, at that point, to do a completely different story.

And, you know, that house was so iconic,

that it made a lot of sense to focus on the house and the next inhabitants of that house.

There was a problem with Robert

because Robert's agent started getting wise.

I was already feeling ownership

of Freddy by then.

They were asking all kinds of money that we didn't have and we were certainly in a dither about what to do.

And Bob Shaye said, "Why do we need to have Robert Englund? Because it's just a guy in a rubber mask."

They didn't even know that Freddy was the franchise.

We started "Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2" with an extra in a rubber suit and mask.

And he was just atrocious. He would walk like a

dime store monster. He would sort of hunker around.

Moving around like Frankenstein,

going like this.

He was just terrible, terrible.

Jack said to Bob, "You're a fool if you use anybody else besides Robert."

So, by him saying that, I think eany on, to Bob Shaye

I think that kind of helped me.

It really proved to everyone that it's not just a guy in a rubber mask.

Casting "Nightmare 2" was

a fascinating experience.

We really were looking for the best actors, period.

"Closer angle - the boy, about 17, four-eyes, bad skin, lousy posture and an obvious inferiority complex."

I was cast as Jesse in the lead role in "Nightmare on Elm Street Pan 2"

after auditioning for the first "Nightmare on Elm Street" forWes Craven.

I knew who Mark Patton was from

"Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." I'd seen that and I just thought he was wonderful in that.

He had a real kind of vulnerability about him that I liked.

Brad Pitt and Christian Slater also came in to read for the role

and I had no idea who they were.

How many famous people I actually rejected in favor of Mark Patton.

"Ronny Grady, a tou gh-looking wise-ass type, steps up to the plate."

'

The last day of filming "Weird Science"

was the day I had an audition for "Nightmare 2."

Robert Dovmey Jr. gave me a ride to my audition

and Mark and I went in and we read together

and they hired us on the spot.

Robert Rusler and I were allowed to sit in on the casting of the girl, for the lead, for Lisa.

"Jesse opens the front door to Lisa Poletti. Real pretty, with an intelligence and sweetness about her. She is truly lovely."

The bond that Mark and I had

really began from the time we met.

There was just an easy quality in how we related.

I just loved her from the minute I met her. She was adorable.

It was her first, you know, big break.

We auditioned her and we cast her simply based on her talent.

And the fact that she looked like Meryl Streep.

"Kerry, a dizzy, Bloomingdale's-punk, steps up alongside Lisa as the latter catches Jesse's stare."

The reason I love this movie is that it changed my life.

I had a ticket to go back to NewYom,

move back to New York and be done with Hollywood and they cast me in the movie. And it was like the deciding thing

of me staying here, and I never left.

And then it was just off and running, it was ofiand running.

The first big gag was the scene

when the bus is hurtling through the burnt out desert.

Jesse was this nerdy outcast

and Freddy is taking over

and about to take him for this ride.

The whole movie is the ride that Freddy takes him through.

We had this mechanical bus up on a thing and it would tilt back and forth

and we got into the bus.

And at, one point, there wasn't a whole lot of acting for me going on 'cause we were getting jostled all over the place

At one point, it was, like, "Wham!" and I slam my nose on the fiont of the bar and the rest of the day I was in such pain I was screaming and crying.

Robert was very into it, which is great. You need that, you know.

It's great to feed off of. For me, I love that.

For the first one, you didn't see anything of Freddy.

I mean, you saw him in the shadows, he barely said a word.

We tried to make Freddy a little more talkative.

Freddy got more vocal, his character got more dimensionalized.

"We got special work to do here, you and me."

At the time, horror movie villains --

Jason, Michael Myers -- they didn't talk.

Freddy talked.

He had a certain black sense of humor.

David Miller started off doing the special makeup effects for Freddy Krueger

and did a brilliant job. So brilliant, I guess, that when we came in to do the sequel, we decided to bring another guy in.

I just didn't have time to do another "Nightmare on Elm Street." I just finished the other one and I thought, "Okay, time to move on."

We got another guy, Kevin Yagher, who we'd worked with in the past.

Dave Miller and I just spoke at the very beginning about basically passing on the torch, passing the baton to me.

There's a big myth that we have a big rivalry going and all that stuff,

'cause he stole Freddy and all that. It's not like that at all.

They didn't know what they had

in "Nightmare on Elm Street 1," they had no idea what kind ofhit it was going to be, so they barely took any photographs.

Kevin had a really hard time just trying to figure out what was going on on the face. It was like, "What is all this? I can't figure it out."

I wanted to give it bone structure. I wanted to give it cheekbones and kind of make it

more like a male witch. You know, give it a hook nose.

I had convinced Bob Shaye to change Freddy's eyes from Robert Englund's normal green eyes to these sort of

demonic, red and yellow/amber-colored eyes.

There was something odd about it and it fits in fine, it actually worked.

"What that boy needs is a good goddamn kick in the butt."

The parents in a horror movie usually don't get to be up front and center and doing really cool thin gs.

They're usually in sort of reactive roles.

It's very dangerous being a male actor in motion pictures.

As I discovered, repairing a home

is equally dangerous.

One of my favorite moments in Nightmare's sophisticated mechanical effects history, was the parakeet on a stick.

There was a scene in mmich the father

was attacked by a bird in the living room.

I think that was a reference to the movie "The Birds."

The birds are the first ones to react to, like in a mine, they react to the gas, that was basically the concept. That the bird

was the warning signal of Freddy coming.

So we built this demonic parakeet and itwas demonic, I'll tell ya.

It was oversized, it had a rod coming out of its butt

and it could flap its wings and move its head.

I think it didn't get used because it wasn't parakeet-like enough.

The physical effects guy was a guy named Dick Albain, he was an old-timer.

When I interviewed him I asked him what he felt his greatest work was and he thought a minute and he said,

"I think the work I did with the Three Stooges'

was my greatest work."

So that probably should have given me pause.

He had this big long stick with this invisible fishing cord tied to this prosthetic bird and

he would wave it back and forth in front of my face.

He wanted it to attack.

The parakeet was not exactly what I had in mind.

It was one of those things that we just did in five minutes.

It just was so obvious that it wasn't going to work.

And sure enough, it cracked right into my eye, scarred it.

I don't know if Clu ever recovered from the parakeet scene. He's a little tweaked by it still.

It scared the shit out of me. I was just petrified.

It was a kind of a dopey scene. I mean, a lot of the scenes in the movie were.

Any movie with Clu Gulager and an exploding bird, gotta be good.

One of the film's many detours saw a role reversal that introduced audiences to a new kind of horror hero,

bringing Freddy out of the boiler room, and most memorably, out of the closet.

I think there was a certain amount of seduction going on between Freddy and Jesse.

There always is a dance with Freddy.

There always is a seduction, there always is a dare.

And if Freddy was in fact what they always say Freddy was -- he was a pedophile, child killer -- sex meant nothing to him.

All he wanted was me.

Because I was the vehicle he was going to move through.

Almost all the horror films of the '80s featured women as the protagonist

and it's not hard to understand why.

They were easier to portray as victims.

It just made the sexual threat and the chemistry richer.

But I think they had to have made "Nightmare on Elm Street Pan 2" to discover that.

Because when you suddenly cast your male lead in the victim role, and then you have him scream like a gin for 90 minutes,

you're going to have some people going, "Well, that's not the manliest performance I've ever seen."

(screaming)

In fact, I may be the first male scream queen.

I simply did not have the self-awareness to realize that any of this might be interpreted as gay.

And I actually don't think that, originally,

Jesse was written as a gay character.

I think it's something that happened along the line by serendipity.

I also had not the slightest idea that one of my lead actors was gay.

The fact that Mark Patton was an openly gay actor I don't think had been revealed at that time yet.

We made "Nightmare 2" absolutely clueless that it had any gay overtones whatsoever.

I'm absolutely sure there's not one moment that I remember that it was discussed.

I never saw it.

I didn't get it.

When I was shooting I had no notion this was happening. Although, I didn't get a blowjob on the set, if that's what you mean.

But looking back,

it was so gay, it was amazing.

If you're called the "Homo Nightmare on Elm Street" on the net by a million pre-pubescent boys,

'men a bunch of grown men had m know what may were doing..

All I can say is we were all incredibly naive or all incredibly latently gay. I'm not sure which.

But I do think it remains one of the most sort of debated movies of all time because it's so,

it's not even under the surface, it's so there.

You know, we've always pussyfooted around this.

Look, it was supposed to be subtext, alright, it really was.

David Chaskin, without a doubt, knewvimat he was writing.

You have to remember again, this was the 1980s,

this was post-AIDS. People were really out a lot then...

maybe not in Kansas, but certainly on both coasts.

And I started thinking about guys being unsure of their sexuality

and I thought, "Well, that's pretty scary."

If David said that I am astounded, because I certainly didn't get it either.

There was so much like S & M and this really precarious relationship

between Mark Patton and I throughout the movie.

It, you know, this is probably the "Top Gun" of franchise horror films.

I kind of think there was this subliminal thing that was going on in Jack's mind

where he didn't really realize it, but everything he did amplified it.

You have a board game named "Probe" on it,

he has a sign on the door that says "No Chicks Allowed."

The production designer in the film was gay.

And I think it became like an inside joke which they thought nobody would really pick up on.

But in terms of the kinky gimmick of "Part 2," I think it's really interesting.

Freddy appeals to that

gay part that's like, the questions, he appeals to the questions that Jesse's asking himself.

Freddy could represent the self-hatred, you know, in the gay community. He could also represent

just the taunt.

"You son of a bitch!"

I think that Mark gave a really great performance because there were so many levels of his insecurities.

And I think that's what I was doing in "Nightmare on Elm Street"

is I was revealing who I really was,

and I think that came clearly through the screen.

The gayest thing in the movie, by the way, is Bob Shaye himself.

Bob Shaye has always been a slightly fiustrated actor. He had wanted to play

the father of Robert Rusler.

I said, "I need a real actor to play that role." Bob got very offended by that and, at one point,

he even threatened to fire me.

Jack could end up being a jerk from time to time and that uvas one of his jerkier episodes.

I said, "Well, let me give you another role." So I thought, "Hey, I'll put him in this gay bar."

Jack said, "Go to the Pleasure Chest

and get yourself an outfit."

So, I went to the Pleasure Chest and I happened to have my two young daughters with me,

who were like 10 and 12 at the time. The guywho was the clerk was watching

and my little daughter said, "Oh, there's a great

...thing to put on your arms with spikes and stuff," and "Here's a great T-shirt for you, Papa," and stuff like that.

So the clerk comes over to me and he said, (laughing) "I think these children should wait outside while you

purchase what you're going to be purchasing." (laughing)

Bob Shaye looked darling in his leather costume.

As the bartender. He was so sweet. And I want you to know that we all believed him.

Hmm.

(sighiflg)

And then you have Coach Schneider's character.

He, like the character of Jesse, had some secrets.

I don't think Coach Schneiderwas ever a very good guy.

I did direct a lot of the shower scene with Marshall Bell and,

wow, what was I thinking?

The Coach's balls being pan of the attack.

I'm trying to think through whether or not there was something Freudian about that.

I love that scene in the movie. I mean, I don't care for Marshall Bell's ass, though. (laughing)

I don't think it was my idea to snap Marshall's bare ass with towels.

It's what I would've liked to have seen happen to my Phys. Ed. teacher in school.

You get what you give in life and Coach Schneider was really good at giving and he wasn't really great at receiving.

Read into it what you will, but I just thought it was a horror scene,

which really makes me feel stupid.

If there was one thing that I could delete from my filmography and my entire life,

it would be that dance scene in my bedroom.

I actually find that scene a little bit embarrassing.

"Risky Business" had had this very successful scene with Tom Cruise.

We were just riffing on that particular

pop culture deal. It was some really

uncool dance moves.

Mark didn't want to do it.

And Mark kept kind of postponing it and finally, when it came time getting closer to the scene, he said,

"Look, I've got it all worked out, just roll the cameras and let it go and I'll

give you a whole performance."

And I'm going, "Oh God, this is not what I had in mind." (laughing)

I understand the video was played in gay clubs a lot.

It will go along forever and ever and ever

and my butt will bouncing and I'll have that horrible hair and those hideous glasses.

And, again, it was a choice. It was another one of those choices that really brought the subtext way up right in yourface.

When the shit hits the fan,

Jesse rejects his girlfriend to go and stay at the house

with the best friend.

"I need you to let me stay here tonight." "Are you out of your mind?"

I can't believe that this particular line is written this way.

"Something is trying to get inside my body." "And you want to sleep with me?"

(laughing) Sounds like, "And you want to sleep with me."

At that point I realized, you know, a lot of people are going to go down this road with these two boys.

And you get the, one of the strangest, most symbolic scenes potentially, in horror history,

as Freddy tears his way out ofJesse's body.

I remember the screenplay said distinctly, "Freddy bursts out of Jesse."

That's all it said. There was no description of what we're going to do.

Mark Shostrom created those effects and he did a tremendous job.

And the effect of making the prosthesis

was very, very intense because you have to be buried alive basically.

My main memories of Mark was like kind of reassuring him

because he had to have some life masks done

that up until that time, I think, were maybe the best ones ever achieved.

We did everything involving Jesse. The main sequence was Freddy

breaking out of his body at the end.

It took us like 11 weeks to build everything forthis one sequence

and pretty much every cut of that is a different effect.

The different phases of the transformation

it was storyboarded, designed very specifically.

We designed several different concepts for Jesse's transformation.

The blades growing... the eye in the throat.

Probably a little too reminiscent of "American Werewolf in London?

We had a dummy head of Jesse's face...

which actually Kevin Yaghefs girlfriend

played Freddy's eye looking up at the back of the throat

because she had a head small enough to fit inside our dummy head.

I'd never seen anything like that. It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen.

In Grady's death, lthought

it came out really well.

I thought that I was gonna get a major prosthetic slash.

I wanted to see this mist of blood all over the place and we didn't quite get that.

We didn't have time to do...

proper makeup

and as an actor, you're like, "Well, wait a minute, you know, hook me up.

Let's do the mmole thing." I don't know how to explain it,

but the rhythm of the movie, wnen I die it stunned everybody.

There's a lot of "oohs" and "aahs" and abrupt screams, you know. And in that whole movie the whole theater was silent.

Despite its daring choices, the film prompted the biggest debate in the history of the franchise.

You know, everybody says that "Nightmare 2" kind of took a turn from the rest of the series,

but there was no rest of the series at the time.

I can remember

those awkward times on the set, it just didn't feel right already.

I remember really bringing up the script issues and saying, "This is really, really problematic. Especially the ending."

I do remember Freddy

coming out of a pool party and feeling like, "Oh my God."

Wes objected to the fact that Freddy appears when everybody's awake.

There are certain rules you don't break and in the Wes Craven Bible, we broke a couple of rules.

If he's out someplace, just out in the open and surrounded by big teenagers,

it's not going to have the power, you're just running up against the wall right away as a director to make that scary.

The pool sequence I remember. I think we were there for two weeks.

It was a lot of shooting. Chaos

and swimming and fire.

And I think there was more tension in terms of Jacques Haitkin just struggling all the time to make the film look good knowing

there were things like this pool party that just made absolutely no sense.

We were bound to some extent by the script.

New Line developed the script and we're hired to shoot pages.

We were all just basically trying to get the work done.

I do have a couple of bad memories of just going, "This isn't going to work, this scene. Why are we doing this scene?"

"You are all my children now."

"You're all my children now" I think, was the phrase he made up. He got into the character to the point Wnere the character

was telling him more about himself.

There comes a point when you're playing a character a lot When you know more about him than anybody else.

You just have this sixth sense about mmafs right and what's wrong.

What we were looking for at the end was to open up our film as much as we could in a movie that could not afford visual effects

or big map paintings or big sets.

Lisa confronts Freddy to save her boyfriend

to save Jesse.

We found spectacular iron foundry that is so incredibly huge

that we don't have enough lights to light it.

There was a scene involving a mutant rat

and a mutant cat.

And I have to be honest, because I was working on "Aliens"

I didn't pay too much attention and those didn't turn out too good.

The same thing with the dogs from hell,

you know, with the masks on.

I was imagining them a little more frightening.

I did a robotic life mask for the very end when I burn up in that.

This meltdown head that I built,

it was simple mechanisms with toothpicks and super glue and dental acrylic and it was just thrown together,

but, to me it was this big huge thing we were building.

Awax bust was put under hair dryers andjust melted.

So, he melted away and that was the only set up we had of that shot.

I save the hero.

Her character tumed out to be the backbone of the movie.

That's why she's the one that finally confronted Freddy and won.

The character of Jesse is, in theater and movies, a female pan.

I was the woman and Lisa was the man.

Ultimately, he finds love through a heterosexual encounter,

at the end, but they could just be good friends after that, I don't know. (laughing)

Lisa and Jesse could've been sort of the "Will and Grace" of the horror genre.

Then the coda comes,

you know, the famous Bob Shaye coda.

Back on the bus.

There was a guy underneath my chair with his hand basically up inside my shirt ready to go like this at the end of the movie.

"It's all over."

We didn't have a happy ending on "Nightmare 2" either, did we? We sent 'em off down on a bus to hell.

We kill 'em all.

I do believe that he survived. I don't think

they went off into the desert and burned him up or something.

He didn't go to Burning Man, let's put it that way.

Opening on November 1, 1985 to mixed reviews

Freddy proved his power at the box office with numbers that New Line could not ignore.

At that time sequels would make 60, 50% of what the original made,

so they were expecting that "Nightmare on Elm Street 2"

they were hoping it would do 70% of what the first one did. it ended up doing 150% ofwlwat the first one did.

"Nightmare on Elm Street" was sold out in every theater in New York for every show by 10:30 in the morning.

I don't think it was until after "Nightmare 2" came out and we started seeing these huge numbers

that they realized that they had a franchise.

You saw a man who suddenly opened up andjust was staring into the future

with the most shit-eating grin you ever saw.

"Nightmare on Elm Street 2" rocked Europe because they picked up on the whole psychosexual, homoerotic subtext.

They love that film in Europe.

I give New Line a lot of credit for the success of the series because what they were

willing to do was not just do the same thing over and over again.

It's pretty interesting that in that day and age, as a sequel to a pretty successful film,

that they went that direction and made those choices. Pretty ballsy. No pun intended.

I mean just to take the chances with the sequel that they did was bravery or stupidity.

We definitely earned our share of criticisms of pretty much everything from

the nature of the film to the execution of the film.

We were trying to do something different, something original that hadn't been done in the first one. it was clear that it didn't work as well.

It's always hard to do a sequel 'cause the first one'sjust so good.

The second one was not quite as pure. It was much more of a commercial piece.

I don't thinkWes communicated his displeasure with the thing to me directly, but I realized that soon afierwards that it was really a bad idea. (laughing)

it didn't have a unity to it, it just had a bunch of scenes, which I thinkthe worst of the sequels or the worst moments...

of the sequels, were just kind of striking scenes, but "overall" the story didn't often cohere very well.

I'm proud that I did the film. The film really was the film that gave me a career as a film director.

Jack knew what he was doing.

We found out his next film, "Hidden," an American classic.

Cracked Magazine sent me 'The 10 Gayest Horror Movies Ever Made,'

and "Nightmare on Elm Street 2" was #1.

That I wear like a badge of honor.

I'm so proud to be pan of that, (laughing) I really am. That makes me really happy. Cool.

The experience of making "Nightmare on Elm Street" was wonderful.

Even ifClu didn't get a blowjob (laughing) on the set.

One day I did discover a hand in my trousers, but I just thought, "Boys will be boys." (sighing) Hmm.

Aware of Freddy's potential, but dismayed by the lukewarm reception irom critics and fans alike,

New Line Cinema was determined to get their franchise back on track, by recruiting some old friends and some new blood.

"2" had its serious difficulties,

although it did well just based on the reputation

and the growing interest in this storyline

and particularly in Freddy.

Even though it was a successful film in terms of box offlce,

it was a great disappointment, so I thinkthere was a huge amount riding on what to do in "Nightmare 3."

On every "Nightmare" I would go back to Wes Craven and ask him if he was interested, so Wes wrote the

original script for "Nightmare 3."

I wanted to take it up to the next level. I felt like if I'm going to do another one I want it to be somehow better.

I came up with the idea and then

Bruce Wagner and I wrote, I think, a really interesting first draft.

It had a lot of good stuff in it

and I think Wes did less of the writing and Bruce did more.

I was just about to start shooting "Deadly Friend."

I'd go away into pre-production and Bruce would be (typing sound).

But it didn't quite work. it was a very ambitious script, but it didn't have

a lot of the human vulnerabilities and the characteristics we wanted.

There were no rules. Everybody could do everything. So it was just the kitchen sink thrown in and all the really

elemental, scary things that in "Nightmare 1" had worked so well, was just,

it felt like, "I'm just gonna throw a bunch of junk in

'k was good for mat it was..

Wejust believed it needed more.

We were in the process of rewriting that script with Wes

when our producers at the time had met with

some young, smart up-an-coming writer-directors, Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell.

And they said, "Please hear their pitch. They have a great pitch. We thinkthis is the best way to go."

When I convinced Bob and Sara that Chuck was the guy, that he was going to be able to write a really good scnpt for it.

The whole series was in question. They really didn't know ifth ey wanted to continue,

so I was pushing the company itself. Let's make the third more fun, let's take

the boundaries of imagination a little bit further in the whole series.

I give Chuck complete credit for wrhat happen ed with the script in "Nightmare 3." -- he and Frank Darabont.

The original script to "Elm Street 3" was darker and

actually profane. I think Wes was trying to take it even into a more horrific place.

And I was much more interested in the imaginative element to the piece.

In fairness to the others who participated, Frank Darabont and his partner,

they did some great stuff to it.

And they changed the game completely.

But, the script came in and it's like, "Holy shit, this is huge."

This is like a $20 million script that nowwe have to make.

The budgets involved in the series, that was another limitation, but you know, that brings out the best in you. I think every filmmaker

has to kind of rise to the occasion when you start your career on a limited budget.

Despite Wes Craven's eany departure from the project, another familiar face would make a welcome return to Elm Street.

Bringing Nancy back was another hook that I thought was great for the series.

Wes Craven called me and asked if I would mind if he included

my character in a script he was writing for "Nightmare 3" and he gave me the basic idea ofhow she comes back

and is a psychologist for kids

who are having these terrible nightmares.

It took some convincing. She had other things going on in her life at the time, but she did a great job

and the character became a leader of sort of a new generation of "Elm Street" kids.

You've got this great gimmick of Heather as the binding element

Heathers the one that's been through it and can tell them all mmats going on

"You are the last of the Elm Street children."

The cast was just sensational, all these young actors were so good,

which made this particular film stand out from other horror films at the time.

"Kincaid, an enormous and powerful-looking 17-year-old with a shaved head is huddled in the corner of a white padded room."

It was a well-built, muscular guy and I looked in the mirror and looked at me and said, "Oh, hell no." So... (laughing)

But my agent talked me into going anyway. So I had to catch the bus and get to the audition. It was just pouring down rain,

it was running late and I was getting pissed.

So when I went in the director said, "Just do whatever you want to."

And I said, "Fuck you!"

And that's how I got it. I cussed his ass out. (laughing)

"Pan to Joey, a wan 16-year-old watching them fiom around the comer.

'He has a tear drop drawn in ink under one eye?'

In preparing for the role of Joey,

I had no lines until the very end of the script.

The characterwas completely mute.

Showing as much as I could with my eyes.

"Jennifer, a girl of 14, approaches. She extends her hand for inspection -- it is scarred with cigarette burns."

There wasn't a lot of rehearsal for the role.

That was something we all had to do on our ovm.

I just tried to connect with the emotional state of that character.

"Taryn, a 17-year-old girl, approaches. She appears exhausted, dark tired circles under her eyes."

How I approached the characterwas pretty much in the moment.

She has a drug problem. I think she has something hidden.

She has some kind of secret.

"All the kids of the Adolescent Care Unit are gathered: Kincaid, Phillip, Taryn, Joey, Jennifer, and VIflII,

a 17-year-old confined to an electric wheelchair."

I have to tell you, growing up I played so much Dungeons & Dragons,

I really felt secure with the aspect of the Wizard Master.

I mean, I was meant to play this role.

The cast member that stuck out to me was Patricia Arquette.

It was her first film. There was something so interesting and so haunting about her.

And I think that's always been a special gifi for her in her other work as well.

At least a third of the male cast fell in love with Patricia.

“Know Rodney'

was in love with Patricia.

I'm mean like lovelorn.

He had mad affection for Patricia Arqu ette, you know. He didn't talk in the film but his ass was talking off the film. (laughing)

It was so funny because they were all coming to me for advice, like, you know, I was dating her or something.

Nobody had a crush on me.

Everybody was in love with somebody else.

I think it also helped us off-set. We all became good friends.

I wanted to do something about

the bonding of kids at that age.

I think the beauty of the uvhole "Elm Street" series is that there's something the kids know that their parents don't believe.

In "Nightmare 1" and "3" Wes really explores why authority figures are trying the best they can and are failing.

At that time there was kind of a movement of such places that even advertised on television,

"Send us yourtroubled child and we'll make them okay." And, essentially, they were like prisons or, you know, insane asylums.

(screaming) "Take her to a quiet room and sedate her."

A lot of afflcionados of the show would come up and say, "Why were you so mean?" And I'd think, "Was I mean?

I didn't mean to be mean." (laughing) Because

I had thought ofher as a very respectable person who was doing her best.

So I thought I was a good guy.

It was a great horror riff on adolescence, on the point in our lives vlmen we all realize the world is not such a nice place, and maybe

everything weve learned in school or our parents have told us isn't exactly true.

One of the worst threats to them is the parents, (laughing) the "good intentions" of the parents.

When it happens in "Nightmare 3" where Kristen is, like, in her bedroom and her mom has some guy over,

"Honey, I've got a guest." "And you don't want to keep him waiting."

it's just tawdry and it's sad.

My daughter 'Fiffany and I had a difficult relationship. She was a teenager at the time, and, interestingly enough,

she has done several horror movies herself.

So I used it, I just kind of fell into that mode of "mom with teen age daughter“ thing that really didn't require a lot of acting.

And there's just something so real about that scene. Every time I look at it, I'm like, "Whew." (sighing)

I do believe that my character was definitely part of the mob that went after Freddy.

Elaine was guilt-ridden and she had this kind of bravado to cover it up.

But deep dovm inside, it's like, "Oh my God, what have I done?"

I got demoted from

Lt. Thompson to a security guard with suggestions of being a little bit of a drunkard, I think.

He realizes that he's made the wrong choices regarding his daughter.

I think he realizes right there that he's ruined Nancy's life.

He was a broken man as a result ofvmat had happened.

And that leads to his sense of failure as a man and as a father.

"Fred Krueger is dead."

It touched a little bit on the idea of

suicide in the young.

Young people and suicide is a tremendous question.

Looking back now, there was a whole lot

of suicide movies in the '80s. There really were.

I thinkthe "Nightmare" series, it's a message to parents to please listen to your kid. Your kid's not crazy,

your kid's not making stuff up.

To me that was the metaphor of "Elm Street," and "Dream Warriors" took it just a step further.

While the young cast immersed themselves in their roles, the team of special effects wizards behind "Nightmare 3"

found themselves faced with a mmole new set of challenges.

I read the script and loved it because it was just full of effects.

And I kind of pitched to them, "Listen, I'll do the movie, but I want to do all the effects."

And they were stupid enough to do it. No, they actually were really kind enough to give me the mmole show.

It looked like the script was going to be more fantasy, you know, and fun.

I had to make it magical. I was going to be the one who was going to give it the look.

All the money that was spent was not spent on anything other than effects. Effects got everything.

There was an image with a roasted pig on a table that was a kind of a classic, nightmarish image.

All of a sudden this pig said, (growling pig) (screaming)

The budget was astronomical for making an animatronic pig. We ultimately just roasted a pig and let it spoil and

the prop guys had to choose straws as to who got to puppet it from beneath.

The pig absolutely stunk.

But ultimately it looks gnanier because it's real.

I can still

smell that pig to this day.

My main job for "Nightmare 3" was

the baby in the beginning of the film.

Patricia Arquette is running through the house and she rescues the little girl.

And when I met with Chuck Russell and I asked him kind of what he was looking for, he told me two words.

He goes, "ThinkAuschm/itz."

And I did a life-size sculpture of the 5-year-old girl that was emaciated and shriveled

and skeletal,

I spent 10 weeks constructing this mechanical puppet, which is very realistic in detail.

When they brought it in to Chuck and I

it was so terrifying and so grotesque and horrific that

we felt like it just, we shouldn't do it.

And they never even rolled film on it.

I think they ended up having a prop guy super glue some

fake skeleton together in about 10 minutes.

So they used that.

Well the biggest challenge for "Nightmare on Elm Street 3" was probably the snake sequence.

The scene with PatriciaArquette and the worm monster

is often mentioned as a wild point in the picture.

That was a really exciting thing for me because it was the first, you know, gigantic puppet I've ever made.

When I first saw the prop

I was stunned, because it was very, very phallic.

Chuck and I started laughing when we saw it.

I said, "You think what I think?"

He just said, "This looks like a penis." And I said, "Yeah, remember we talked about it? We had meetings about this."

He said, "I can't do that. We can't make it look like a penis."

I immediately called in the set painters and said, "Look, at least change the color." (laughing) We tried to throw the thing into blues and greens

so it wouldn't be quite so Freudian.

That monster was wonderful in concept an.

In reality, it was a big prop that was actually a bit dangerous.

"Ready? Go!" (screaming)

It was really a scary thing to watch Patricia being eaten by that.

It was huge and so she was like in there.

We did a lot of reverse in those days.

In fact, when Patricia Arquette's being eaten by the snake,

she's actually being pulled off.

The whole piece actually looked quite good that way. It gave it an eerie, dreamy aspect. But really we did it

that way because the prop didn't work.

But also, we had three or four different puppets. We had one that swallowed Patricia that was only like 6 feet long.

Then we had one that was even longer for this overhead shot, then he regurgitates her. That was another one.

And then the final one was this

whole mechanical thing that was a big, huge snake that kind of rears up and

it was a radio-controlled face.

Knowing how much work went into that and knowing

how diff cult it was to kind of get that thing to set,

I would've gone and bowed on hands and knees to him then because it was really an imaginative, really unusual effect.

'The puppet sequence -‘

mmere the marionette that's hanging on the wall turns into Freddy

then he severs himself off

and then grows to be normal size --

that was pretty creepy.

We actually made

a series of heads that we would, in camera, dissolve

from one head to the next.

Bradley and the marionette

tendons, you know,

people just love that imagery.

It was done by Greg Cannom -- my old boss -- and he did a fantasticjob.

I also remember Bradley Gregg during lunchtime

just looked like spaghetti sauce all over him and spaghetti arms.

Eating lunch, you know, as if it was no problem.

And he's sitting next to me and they had to

roll the veins so they didn't like get knotted or anything.

I'm sitting next to him reading and I'm just looking at him, going, "Oh My God, Oh My God, Oh My God. Oh, this is awful."

The work that Greg and everyone did in effects was absolutely extraordinary.

And the funny thing you have to remember about this film is virtually everything was done physically on it.

You know, in a way we're responsible for making the Freddy character a little bit more of a pop character.A media character.

And the Dick Cavett scene was a big part of that.

We spent a half a day shooting

Dick Cavett and he said, "Well they told me I could pick

whoever I wanted.

So I picked Zsa Zsa Gabor because I think she's the dumbest person I've ever met in my life

and I'd never have her on my show. And if there was one person I would want to see killed

by Freddy, it would be her." (screaming)

My other favorite kill from "Nightmare 3" was

when Penelope Sudrows character was lifted up

by the TV set with the great line,

"Welcome to prime time, bitch." (screaming)

"Welcome to prime time, bitch."

"Welcome to prime time, bitch."

"Welcome to prime time, bitch."

(laughing) Really a priceless line.

It was just classic.

"Welcome to prime time, bitch" was not a scripted line. That was from Ruben.

That which, you know, was a modification of the original line

because it didn't quite fit in my mouth, but people love that.

The one-liners and Robert's delivery of them, made the film, I think, a little more popular.

I actually enjoyed that scene

when they had

the mechanical arms come out and grab me.

That was, like, my favorite pan

just to scream.

(screaming)

(laughing) That was great.

We had to basically make a vacu-form puppet head that I made.

It would come out of this TV. We always had to use cut-aways,

so we'd cut-away and it was Robert's head sticking through the TV (laughing)

with antennas on his head. It was pretty hokey.

People have said that's their favorite death scene

of the series.

It's just a great kind of surreal, surreal "Nightmare on Elm Street" '80s moment.

Having met his match in the form of the "Dream Warriors," Freddy Krueger became even more resourceful in

finding ways to prey on his victim's darkest fears.

What "Nightmare on Elm Street Pan 3" did was it went to the logical conclusion ofhow Freddy

would operate within your subconcious and haunt you.

Freddy is in there with those private thoughts, with those

private fears. He knows what makes you tick.

He knows what he can use against you because he gets in there.

My characters

weakness was always women and not much has changed.

One of the more memorable moments from the film is

the sexy nurse scene where Freddy is using kind of a sexuality trap in a dream.

The one character that we spent the most time interviewing and auditioning was the nurse

who has to bare her breasts.

I had to go in and strip, which, you know, isn't easy, but that was the process. It was a little out of the norm.

She would have to stand there naked and stufffor the lighting and stuff. It was a pleasure.

I've had guys tell me, "Watching that scene was the first thing that really got me interested in girls and you've changed my life."

That's very flattering, and, wow. That's amazing.

The physical effect of switching the nurse with Freddy was

something we tried in a makeup effect that got a little too out of control and it wasn't exactly right.

What Chuck Russell wanted was

her to have the head of Freddy and then have it trail off into this beautiful woman.

Freddy with breasts,

it was too ofi-kilter.

Somehow the imagery was just,

it didn't quite go.

Again, this was one of those points that no one can play Robert like Robert.

And it just looked like a gin with a Freddy face on, you know, talking like Robert.

It just didn't quite work.

The spitting of the tongues

was really just a small piece of, it was like a type of latex that was rolled up.

I would open my mouth and

do this barking thing.

The tongues

were extraordinary.

You could stand right next to them and look at them

and the puppeteering was so good that you couldn't see any phoniness to it whatsoever.

That was actually shot in a room that they built sideways,

so I had to climb up on a ladder and be strapped to the bed.

Standing up.

That's what kills you in a crucifixion. Eventually, your heart can't pump blood to your extremities, so I

actually passed out while I was up in this contraption.

And I also think it's Wnythey hire young actors to be in all these horror movies, 'cause they can take the abuse.

The one I remember the most is when Jennifer Rubin got killed.

It was kind of the time when punkwas really hot.

We were developing the character still, so I hadjust walked up to Chuck Russell and said,

"Can I do this hairdo?" And he said, "Sure."

That line that she says,

"In my dreams, I'm beautiful...

and bad."

Oh my God, I mean, talk about one of the worst lines you would ever have to say on film.

One of the funniest things was

Taryn was in her full-blown makeup, we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner (laughing)

and it was hysterical, because the way that people were looking at her, you would've thought that

she was like an alien from a different world.

She ordered the chop suey with a look in her eyes

and they backed off. It was very funny.

I have a little bit of a problem being emotional.

"Let-s dance."

lfl get into it, I kind of will try to kill you.

I remember I did stab him once (laughing)

when we were really fighting and I got him.

Track marks on her arms

turning into sucking little mouths was just brilliant.

Incredible stuff. Absolutely incredible stuff.

"Lars get high," (hissing)

Jennifer Rubin's sequence

with an exploding head didn't quite make it to film.

"3, 2, 1. Oh no!" (laughing)

They didn't figure out how to work

my special effect.

Freddy's hypodermic needle fingers

was my little anti-drug statement that is very, was very effective.

I got a lot of fan mail from people

having quit drugs because of her. It touch es my heart to be remembered

that way because

this girl fights and never says die. But then I had to.

"I am the Wizard Master!"

I was a pre-Harry Potter.

And that was, again, the greatest thing about my character being a Wizard Master.

And having played Dungeons & Dragons, I was able to conjure up the spells.

That wheelchair

was huge. And it was so huge,

it virtually could not get dovlm the hallway. It had been built too large,

but it looks

really frightening when you see it in the film.

But there was also difficulty

because Freddy's claws were not retracting,

so they put a 2-by-4 right by my heart, underneath my cape

and I was just praying to God that Robert made sure that he hit it. (screaming)

I did get to show off who I was and I got to use my power,

mmich I felt was pretty important, you know, you get to see exactly what these kids get to do.

Whether they got killed or not, that's a mmole different story.

Faced with a grueling production schedule, diff cult working conditions and an overburdened

first-time director, tensions on the set of "Nightmare 3" began to rise.