As required by Section 107-14-8 of the Podcast Code, every movie podcast must do a horror-themed show during the month of October. We thus fulfill our requirement by offering this first part of a two-part series on the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
This is the first part of a two-part miniseries about the Elm Street movies. Part Two, where I discuss the movies with Jeff Townsend (The Podcast Father) and how different generations interpret them, can be found here.
The films discussed on this episode include:
Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven, 1981)
Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003)
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991)
The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)
The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994)
If you’d like to read along with the episode, a full transcript can be found below.
I really want to hear what you think, both positive and negative. Please leave your notes below. If you really like the show, please consider rating and reviewing the show on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Music, or the podcatcher of your preference.
Thank you again.
Edward
You can also listen to The 80s Movie Podcast on most other major podcatchers.
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
It’s the Halloween season, and it is required by podcasting law, as stated in Section 107-14-8, that every movie podcast must do a horror-themed podcast during the month of October. Last year, at the suggestion of Jeff Townsend, also known as The Podcast Father and host of the Indie Podcaster podcast, I did A Brief History on the Halloween movies. This year, at the suggestion of Jeff Townsend, also known as The Podcast Father and host of the Indie Podcaster podcast, we’re going to dive in to another successful horror franchise of the 1980s.
And in case you weren’t paying attention from the title of this episode, this is A Brief History of The Nightmare on Elm Street series.
But before we can get to the movies, we first need to get to know the man behind the series. The man who created Freddy Kruger. The man who was able to, intentionally or not, launch not one, not two, but three successful horror movie franchises.
The man. The myth. The legend.
Wes Craven.
Like many of the greatest people in the entertainment industry, Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio.
Side note: the man who founded Cleveland, General Moses Cleaveland, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. True story. My dad, Don, was the seventh generation of my family born in Cleveland, and the last of my family to be born in Cleveland. His favorite thing about being from Cleveland, he says, is being FAR from Cleveland. I actually like Cleveland, but to be fair, I don’t remember when we lived there as a small child, and I’ve only been there for about fifteen days in the past forty years. But I digress.
Craven was a rather intelligent man. After graduating from high school, Craven earned degrees at Wheaton College, double majoring in English and in psychology, and then earning his masters in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. In the mid-60s, Craven would teach English at a college in Pennsylvania, then move on to be a humanities professor in upstate New York. In the late 60s, at the urging of his friend Steve Chapin, brother of future Cats in the Cradle singer Harry Chapin, Craven quit academia to become involved in film.
Like almost everyone who doesn’t come from a wealthy and heavily connected family, Craven didn’t start out as a director.
Nope.
Wes Craven would, for the first several years of his film career, write and edit pornographic movies.
Since he used a variety of pseudonyms while working in the porn industry, and since he never publicly acknowledged his work in the industry outside of appearing in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, where he hinted at having made “many” hardcore X-rated films, we’ll probably never know which pornographic films from the 60s and 70s he made.
But he would be successful enough in his porn endeavors that, in 1971, he and his producer, Sean S. Cunningham, would be given $90,000 by Hallmark Releasing to make another movie, having had some success with the duo’s previous film, a soft-core sex movie called Together.
At first, Night of Vengeance was going to be a graphic horror film, something meant to push the boundaries of what had been seen on movie screens since the abolishment of the Production Code a few years earlier. Unlike many of the movies being released both before and after the fall of the Production Code, Craven wanted to show the violence being depicted on screen in great detail. Craven felt that too many movies were glamorizing violence, and were giving the viewing public the wrong impression of death, especially during the time of the then-current Vietnam War. Ironically, this film would be in production when Dirty Harry, featuring Clint Eastwood as a violent cop on the beat in San Francisco who loved to shoot first and ask questions later, was released into theatres and becoming one of the most successful releases of the year.
The film was full of mostly unknown at the time actors, including future Karate Kid sensei Martin Love, who played a local deputy sheriff, and Steve Miner, who would become a horror legend in his own right by becoming the only director to make both a Halloween movie and a Friday the 13th movie, as a hippie who taunts Love’s deputy.
But after filming was completed, and Craven and Cunningham went to work on editing the film, it was decided that, while many of the gruesome practical effects looked great on screen, that maybe the film should be toned down a bit, to try and capture a larger audience.
Before its initial theatrical release in August 1972, Night of Vengeance would go through a series of title changes and test screenings, including Sex Crime of the Century, and Krug and Company, before a marketing expert friend of Cunningham’s suggested Last House on the Left, which Craven thought was a horrible name for the movie. But the name would stick, and the film, with promotional key art that warned the film was “not recommended for persons under 30,” would become something of a hit for Hallmark, grossing more than $3m between August 1972 and March 1973.
And you’d think some smart producer in Hollywood would snap up a young filmmaker with a decent hit under his belt, but Craven would go nearly five more years before getting his follow-up to Last House on the Left made.
But, boy, did it make an impact.
One of the reasons he had trouble getting a second movie made was that, ironically when you see where his career went, Wes Craven did not want to make another horror film. And that’s exactly what Hollywood wanted from him. Craven would hold out as long as he could, but money was starting to get tight, and he needed to work. So he would hook up with his friend, producer Peter Locke, and another low budget independent filmmaker, Sean S. Cunningham, to come up with a modern twist on the Brothers Grimm story Hansel and Gretel. If Craven needed to return to horror, he wanted to make something more sophisticated than Last House on the Left.
It was while doing research at the New York Public Library, about truly horrific things that humans have done to other humans, where Craven would learn about Alexander “Sawney” Bean, the head of a 16th Century Scottish clan who reportedly murdered and cannibalized more than 1,000 people. Craven would mix the two stories together to come up with Blood Relations: The Sun Wars, set several years in the future, 1984 to be exact, and told the story of a family stranded in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey who must protect themselves against a family of cannibals.
But when it came time to shoot the movie in October 1976, Craven would need to rewrite portions of his script to reflect a new shooting location: California’s Mojave Desert. Filming conditions were brutal, as temperatures would rise to as high as 120 degrees during the day before dropping to as low as 30 degrees at night.
When the film was finally released in theatres as The Hills Have Eyes in July 1977, it would become a horror sensation. Playing in secondary markets like Tucson and Tacoma at first, the film would gross more than $2m in its first five months, which doesn’t sound like a lot at first, until you realize it never played in more than 100 screens on any given week during that timeframe, and that tickets were only $1.50 or $2 in most markets. It would finally open in Los Angeles and New York in October 1977, and after several months in theatres, The Hills Have Eyes would gross $25m, nearly 36 times its $700k budget.
And once again, it would take Craven years to set up another project, and, once again, he would be working in the horror genre.
Deadly Blessing would be his first film with seven figure budget, and his first working with name actors including Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine, Jeff East, who played the young Superman in the 1978 Richard Donner classic, and Maren Jensen of Battlestar Galactica fame. It would also be the first major role for a young actress only seen once before on screen, as a dream girl in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, Sharon Stone.
Originally budgeted at $2m, the producers of the film were able to raise enough money pre-selling worldwide pay television and syndication rights to the Showtime cable channel based solely off Craven’s name to increase the budget to $3m.
But when it came time to release the film in the US, original distributor Universal Pictures would delay the release of the film several times from its original planned March 1981 release, until ultimately dropping the completed film altogether. United Artists would pick the film up and release it into 1000 theatres on August 14th, 1981. Reviews were bad, and business was not as strong for Deadly Blessing as it had been for The Hills Have Eyes. But it would show a bit of profit for everyone involved, grossing $8.3m after four months.
Craven would finally be given the chance to work outside the horror genre with his next film.
Sort of.
Swamp Thing was an adaptation of the DC comics superhero series, but just because of the nature of the character, a one-time scientist who becomes a monster when his laboratory is sabotaged by an evil paramilitary leader trying to protect a secret formula.
The budget for Swamp Thing was only $2.5m, a half million less than he had for Deadly Blessing, despite the makeup effect-heavy title character. But Craven would complete the film on time and on budget, but like Deadly Blessing, would perform only moderately well, grossing a little over $5m.
Which brings us, finally, to our main topic.
A Nightmare on Elm Street.
After completing work on Swamp Thing in late 1981, Wes Craven knew he needed to something big to get him back in the game. Something fresh and original. Something that would knock people’s socks off. So he did something he had never done before in his career.
Write a spec script.
Sidebar: a “spec” script is a screenplay that was not previously commissioned by a producer, without any prior attachments or deals.
The “spec” is short for speculative.
One writes a spec script in the hopes of finding a producer or distributor who likes the story and screenplay enough to purchase it from you and your representatives. While every studio in town rejected the screenplay, the small, New York City-based independent distributor New Line Cinema would purchase the screenplay, intending to make it A Nightmare on Elm Street one of the first movies they would produce themselves.
Craven originally conceived of the story when he heard news reports of Laotian immigrants living in various places across the United States who each died after having the same nightmare. But much of the film would be somewhat drawn from Craven’s own experiences. Freddy Krueger, the villain of the film, was based on an elderly man the young Craven saw one night walking on the sidewalk outside his home. As the young boy watched the older man walk, he would become startled when the gentleman stopped and stared directly at him. But it wasn’t the sudden stop that startled Craven. It was HOW the man stared at him. With dead eyes that fronted a dead soul. That’s how that man made Craven feel, and in Freddy Krueger, the director would finally find a way to use that in one of his movies.
The name Freddy Krueger itself was also from Craven’s past. In elementary school, Craven was regularly bullied by an older kid named Fred Krueger, and in this vile child murderer, the director would once again find a way to use that in one of his movies. I say “use again” because the name of the main villain in The Last House on the Left, Krug, was also based on Craven’s young tormenter.
New Line Cinema had been founded in June 1967 by Robert Shaye as a packager of older films and shorts for college film societies. One of the films Shaye would license for these packages in the early 1970s was a little remembered propaganda film from 1936 called Reefer Madness. The film was hilariously bad, and modern college kids, often high on the reefer when watching it, would make it a somewhat hit. New Line would make enough money from Reefer Madness where Shaye could start acquiring movies from filmmakers and releasing them into commercial theatres. One beneficiary of this sudden flush of cash to New Line was Baltimore filmmaker John Waters. New Line would acquire his 1970 comedy Multiple Maniacs for theatrical release, beginning a nearly twenty year relationship where New Line would release every John Waters movie from Multiple Maniacs in 1970 to Hairspray in 1988, and again in 2004 with A Dirty Shame, Waters’ last film to date.
New Line would decide to make A Nightmare on Elm Street one of the first films it would fully finance.
If only it were that simple.
Despite the fact that the film would only be budgeted for around $700k, and New Line had recently found another success in the re-release of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which the company had just picked up after the governmental foreclosure of that film’s original distributor Bryanston, the company would find themselves in a bit of a cash crunch, which almost caused the cancellation of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Eventually, New Line would end up securing enough financing from other production companies and, according to Robert Shaye, a Yugoslavian guy whose girlfriend wanted to be in the movies, that they would not have any direct investment in the film. They would also be able to raise the budget to $1.1m.
For the lead role of Nancy Thompson, Craven wanted someone who was not a quote unquote typical Hollywood starlet. He wanted someone believable as an average teenager who finds herself in an unusual and horrific situation. More than 200 actresses would audition for the role, including Courtney Cox, future Growing Pains co-star Tracey Gold, who was only 14 at the time of her audition, Jennifer Grey and Demi Moore. In the end, the film’s casting director would push for Heather Langenkamp, whom she had already met when the actress had auditioned for The Last Starfighter and Night of the Comet, losing both roles to Catherine Mary Stewart.
Langenkamp was attending Stanford at the time of the audition, driving down to Los Angeles for the tryout, as she was looking to line something up for her time off from school during the summer. Langenkamp would get the role not only because of her girl next door looks but also how she played off another actress at the audition, Amanda Wyss, who would be cast as Nancy’s best friend Tina.
For Glen, Nancy’s boyfriend, Craven had originally constructed the character to be a big blonde beach-jock football player, but Craven was open to other ideas. It is said that Charlie Sheen was offered the role, but Sheen’s agent reportedly turned the offer down, as Sheen’s agent wanted $2500 per week for his client, and the production could only offer $1142. Craven would audition more people, including Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, C. Thomas Howell, Mark Patton, Brad Pitt and Keifer Sutherland. Jackie Earle Haley, the star of The Bad News Bears and Breaking Away, would also audition, but the role would go to a guy who had never acted before, who had accompanied Haley to the audition…
Johnny Depp.
Craven’s fifteen-year-old daughter Jessica happened to come to the offices where her dad was holding auditions, saw Depp in the waiting room, and she became instantly smitten with him. “You must cast him, dad,” she intoned.
He did.
But the hardest part to cast would be the film’s villain, Freddy Krueger. David Warner, the fantastic British character actor who had been so memorable as the photographer Keith Jennings in The Omen, Jack the Ripper in Time After Time, as Evil itself in Time Bandits, and as Ed Dillinger and Sark in Tron, was cast as Krueger, and even had started working with the makeup team to be fitted with the various prosthetics to play the horribly disfigured psycho, but there would be a scheduling conflict with another project he had previously signed on to, forcing the actor to drop out. Kane Hodder, the stuntman who would later find fame as Jason Voorhees in four of the Friday the 13th movies, but Craven wasn’t sure Hodder was right for the role.
Something was off.
Enter Robert Englund.
At five foot ten, he wasn’t as tall and imposing as either Hodder or Warner, he came prepared for his audition by playing up his lack of stature. At the suggestion of a friend, Englund showed up looking like a human version of a rat/weasel hybrid. Hair slicked back, black cigarette ash smeared across his eyelids. According to Englund, he just sat there in a chair, listening to Craven describe the character, but playing as if he were Klaus Kinski instead of himself, hardly even saying a word.
He got the part. It would be his first starring role after ten years in the business, and it would become the role that would define his career.
Craven did add two minor stars in supporting roles as Nancy’s parents. John Saxon, who had starred alongside Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and had played a policeman in the original 1974 Black Christmas, would play Nancy’s cop dad, while Renee Blakely, the Oscar-nominated star of Robert Altman’s Nashville, played Nancy’s alcoholic mother. Both characters would end up having far more to do with what’s happening in the story than most parental characters ever do.
Production on the film would begin in Los Angeles on June 11th, 1984, which lasted for 32 days. Craven would push himself and his crew to make the best film they could despite the limited budgeted. The same rotating set that was used for Tina’s death sequence would be redressed for Glen’s infamous “blood geyser” death. In a number of scenes, red colored water would replace the typical movie set blood because water is less expensive than the corn syrup usually used to create movie blood.
Robert Shaye, who was producing the film for his company, would come up with one of the nightmare scenes used in the film, that of the melting staircase in Nancy’s dreams, which came out of one of Shane’s own nightmares.
And Sean S. Cunningham, Craven’s producer on The Last House on the Left who had produced and directed the first Friday the 13th movie, would come in to help Craven with some of the second unit work during Nancy’s dream sequence.
One problem Craven would have with his producer Robert Shaye was the ending of the film. Craven’s original script had Nancy “killing” Freddy by simply no longer believing in him, stripping him of his power over her. Then she wakes up, realizing it was all just a dream. She gets ready for school and leaves her house on an unusually foggy morning. A car pulls up next to her in front of her house, with Glen and Tina and her other friends inside. At first startled because all her dead friends are no longer dead, Nancy gets in the car and the drive off into the fog as Nancy’s mother watches from just outside the front door. Is this also part of Nancy’s dream? A dream inside a dream?
But Shaye wanted something. He thought Freddy should be driving the car, and that the kids should be screaming as they drove away.
The pair would work on a series of other endings, but they’d only shoot one. The one that ends the film. Craven got most of what he wanted, and Shaye got the shocker ending he wanted.
Craven knew Shaye wanted the film ready for Halloween 1984, but they would settle for a November 9th release date, in part because that would give Craven four months to sculpt the final film instead of barely three, and in part because even by 1984, it was apparent that horror movies tied to the Halloween season usually die of very quickly after Halloween. It would also give Craven time to satisfy the MPAA ratings board, who would give the film an X rating twice before Craven cut enough of the gore out to secure the R rating, about twelve seconds worth.
Because New Line was still going through a money crunch at the time, A Nightmare on Elm Street would open on only 165 screens, including 77 in the New York City metropolitan area and 51 in the Los Angeles metro area. Despite opening up against the third George Burns Oh God! Movie, the Demi Moore/Jon Cryer rom-com No Small Affair, and the first Silent Night Deadly Night, A Nightmare on Elm Street would open in tenth place with $1.27m in ticket sales. Its $7703 per screen average would be the highest of all films in the top fifteen.
In week two, the film would add another 109 screens, and come in seventh place with $1.63m. Once again, it would have the highest per screen average of all the movies in the top fifteen. In fact, despite never playing on more than 274 screen during its first three months in theatres, the film would regularly be first or second in terms of per screen average, even if it never got higher than seventh place in actual gross.
The film would have legs. In its eleventh weekend, January 18th through 20th, 1985, the film would come in second place with $1.71m worth of tickets sold from 377 screens. As it moved from territory to territory across the country, the film would steadily gross $1.1 to $1.5m every week most weeks, until the audience started to drop in early February 1985. The film would play all through the winter and early Spring of 1985, and when all was said and done, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the little $1.1m movie with no stars and a small theatrical release, had grossed $25.5m in the United States.
Two things Wes Craven knew once A Nightmare on Elm Street had become a success: one, Robert Shaye would want a sequel, and two, Craven didn’t want anything to do with it.
He was right on both parts.
Another problem for creative types when it comes to selling a spec script is that you no longer own your characters. You know longer own your story. Wes Craven may have created Freddy Kreuger, but he did not own Freddie Kreuger. Craven understood this, and he wished Shaye well on the sequel.
The first pitch Robert Shaye liked from various screenwriters about a second Nightmare on Elm Street movie came from Leslie Bohem, a former bassist with the Los Angeles pop/rock group Sparks, whose father was a screenwriter himself.
Shaye loved Bohem’s idea of creating an homage to Rosemary’s Baby, with a new family moving into the Thompson house, a teenage boy, his pregnant mom and new stepfather, and the spirit of Freddy Kreuger getting into the mother’s womb and possessing the fetus.
Sounds familiar, right? We’ll get there.
But there was one person who wasn’t so keen on the concept.
Sara Risher, an executive at New Line who was the co-producer of A Nightmare on Elm Street and would be assuming those duties again, saw the merit in the idea, but didn’t want to go there just now. You see, no one knew it until she said something herself at that meeting that she was pregnant with her first child, and wouldn’t feel comfortable being on the set of a movie about a demonic fetus possession. So they would take the basic story of a new family moving into the Thompson house, and then have Freddy possess the teenage boy instead.
David Chaskin was hired to write the screenplay, and Jack Sholder, who had made the 1982 horror film Alone in the Dark for New Line, was hired to direct. Both Chaskin and Holder would contact Wes Craven for advice, and Craven would confer with both. Chaskin would say it was Craven who would suggest to him to focus less on Jesse, the teenager being possessed by Freddy, and focus more on Lisa, Jesse’s girlfriend, and the only person who seems to understand what’s happening to Jesse.
Sholder initially considered not doing the movie, but it had been three years since he had directed Alone in the Dark without any further offers, and directing a successful sequel to a hit film could lead to better things. And he wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.
For the lead role of Jesse Walsh, Robert Shaye would choose Mark Patton, who had auditioned for the role of Glen the previous year and was Shaye’s first choice before Johnny Depp caught his daughter’s eye. Like with Nancy in the first film, the filmmakers would cast a couple of cult actors to play the parents. This time, regular movie cowboy Clu Gulager and Peyton Place co-star Hope Lange played the parents. Freddy’s Revenge would also be the first film for actress Kim Myers, who played Lisa, and Marshall Bell, for whom this would be his first major role.
One person who wasn’t going to return was Robert Englund. Not because of loyalty to Wes Craven or because he thought the script was bad, but because despite the budget for Freddy’s Revenge being nearly triple the budget of the first film, Shaye was still trying to save money, and he got it into his head that he could save some cash by having an extra wear a Freddy mask, not unlike an otherwise faceless and replaceable actor playing Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, since Freddy didn’t really appear in much of the story.
But after a week of shooting, it was clear to everyone involved they needed to get Robert Englund back in the makeup chair and on screen as everyone’s favorite child killer.
The movie would begin production in Los Angeles in June 1985, and needed to be completed in four weeks, since New Line had already set a November 1st, 1985 release date for the film. Sholder was a competent director, and was able to bring the film in on time and on budget.
The first wave of the release for Freddy’s Revenge would find the film playing on 522 screens, mainly in New York City, Detroit, Washington D.C., Dallas, Houston and Austin, more than triple the first movie’s opening weekend release, and it would come in second place with $3.87m. The third Death Wish movie would come in first with $5.32m but it would play on more than 900 more screens. Just like the first film, Freddy’s Revenge would have the highest per screen average of the top fifteen films.
The critics, most of whom weren’t that fond of Craven’s movie, would be mixed on this one as well. But when did horror fans ever care about the critics? They would keep the film going until April 1986, still making close to a million dollars a weekend into its twenty-fifth week of release. The film would gross $29,999,213. Why not just go for the $30m? I don’t know, but that reminds of a story I need to tell when I finally get around to talking about Parenthood and Ron Howard’s 1980s output.
One person who was critical of the film was Wes Craven. Although writer David Chaskin had implemented some of Craven’s story suggestions, Craven wasn’t too fond of Freddy being turned into a comedian and some kind of hero. He felt bringing Freddy into the realm of reality the way the film did weakened the character.
So he would do something about it.
He would agree to at least write the story for a potential third entry in the series. Unbeknownst to Robert Shaye, Craven intended for this to be the end of Freddy Krueger.
Unbeknownst to Craven, both John Saxon and Robert Englund were also writing their own screenplays for the third film.
Saxon’s story would have been a prequel, delving further into what happened between Freddy and the parents of Springwood that would lead to the teenager killer we all know now. Saxon would prove Freddy innocent, by pinning the murders on the Manson Family, making Freddy innocent and making his lynching all that more tragic.
Englund’s script, called Freddy’s Funhouse, would have seen Freddy go up against Tina’s sister, who was away at college when Tina was murdered by Freddy, coming back home to Springwood to avenge Tina’s death, in part by following Nancy’s playbook for going after Freddy.
Part of this script would end up being used in the pilot episode of the Freddy’s Nightmare TV series. But, again, getting ahead of ourselves.
Craven and his writing partner, novelist Bruce Wagner, would fashion a story around a group of teenagers who have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, all of whom are being tormented by Freddy Krueger in their dreams. Bringing them back into Craven’s original mythology for A Nightmare on Elm Street, these teenagers are the final kids still alive from the parents who lynched and burned Freddy to death many years earlier. The subtitle of the film, Dream Warriors, would be based on the teens’ ability to fight Freddy when they team together when they’re all asleep. And they are assisted by Nancy, who is now an intern therapist at the hospital.
After Craven turned in his script with Wagner, Robert Shaye would bring Frank Darabont, who at the time had only written and directed The Woman in the Room, a short film based on a story by Stephen King, and Chuck Russell, who had written the 1984 Dennis Quaid film Dreamscape, to rewrite the script. Shaye would be so excited by Russell’s passion for the project, wanting to take the story even further into Freddy’s dreamworld that he would hire the writer to direct the film, even though Russell had no experience as a director before.
Dream Warriors would the first major acting role for Patricia Arquette, playing Kristen, one of the Springwood teens, and the one who is able to pull the other characters into the dreamworld. The film also features Craig Wasson as the doctor caring for the teens, Larry Fishburne as Max, one of the orderlies at the hospital, and then up-and-coming actors like Jennifer Rubin and Rodney Eastman.
The new movie would have a budget of $4.5m, more than the first two films’ combined budget, and would begin shooting around Los Angeles on July 28th, 1986, with a planned release date already set for February 27th, 1987. This would give Russell six months after the completion of shooting to get his film into shape, a luxury neither Craven nor Sholder were afforded.
Craven intended Dream Warriors to be the final movie in the Elm Street series, but of course Robert Shaye would have other ideas. He would make sure Russell shot the ending to be as ambiguous as possible, so in case there was a fan demand for another movie, it could be met.
There would be a fan demand for a fourth Elm Street.
Dream Warriors would be the first movie in the series to get a wide, nationwide theatrical release. In fact, it would be their first movie to open in more than a thousand theatres on the initial break, in 1343 theatres. That would be more than double the previous widest New Line release, April 1986’s Critters, which opened in 633 theatres. And Dream Warriors would be the first Elm Street movie to get predominantly positive ratings from the critics.
That first weekend, Dream Warriors would open in first place with $8.9m in its first three days. It would be the biggest opening weekend ever to date for an independent release. It would fall to second place in its second weekend, bested by the opening weekend of Lethal Weapon, but only by about $86k. Dream Warriors would stay in the top ten for seven weeks, an unusually long time for a horror film, and after five months in theatres, the film would end its theatrical run with $44.79m.
Wes Craven was asked to return to at least write, if not also direct, a fourth Elm Street movie. Craven said he would, on two conditions…
It absolutely had to be THE FINAL movie in the series, and that the new film be far different from the previous films. Namely, the characters fighting Freddy this time around would time travel within dreams, breaking all the established rules of dreams. It shouldn’t have been too much of a stretch, since Freddy was already breaking established rules of dreams, but the pitch was just too much for New Line.
Enter William Kotzwinkle.
At the time, Kotzwinkle was best known as a novelist who mainly wrote for children, having written both the 1982 novelization of the screenplay for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the 1985 sequel book, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet. Kotzwinkle wasn’t exactly a fan of the Elm Street series, but someone was offering him a payday to come up with a storyline, and he did. It would be Kotzwinkle who would come up with the film’s Dream Master idea, which would also be the subtitle for the film. But the script he would turn in would be too expensive to film. They would ask Kotzwinkle for a rewrite, but the author was already hard at work on his next novel.
Enter Brian Hegeland.
Today, you know Brian Hegeland as the Oscar-winning co-writer of the best film of 1997, L.A. Confidential, and the writer/director of the Mel Gibson revenge thriller Payback and the Jackie Robinson movie 42 that would catapult Chadwick Boseman to stardom. But in 1987, he was just another screenwriter trying to make it in Hollywood. He and his writing partner at the time, Rhet Topham, had sold their first screenplay, called 976-EVIL, to the independent production company CineTel Films, which would become Robert Englund’s first movie as a director. Englund had enjoyed working with Hegeland on the film, and would recommend the young writer to Robert Shaye to take a crack at Kotzwinkle’s first draft.
Shaye, still strangely loyal to Wes Craven, despite consistently ignoring Craven’s wish for the series to be over, would offer the rewrite job to Craven and Bruce Wagner first, but they politely declined.
Hegeland would be offered the job, on the condition that the new draft of the script be turned in New Line within two weeks. Hegeland would head back to his parents’ house, locked himself in his room, and FedEx his rewrite to New Line nine days later. New Line felt it was a better script, but was still missing something. They would turn to the Wheat brothers, Ken and Jim, who had written the moderately successful 1979 horror film Silent Scream, and had written and directed one of the Ewoks television movies for George Lucas, The Battle for Endor.
Satisfied with the final script, New Line would go on the hunt for a director. Tom McLoughlin, who had just completed shooting on the sixth Friday the 13th movie, Jason Lives!, was approached to take the reins on the film, but he would, after his experiences on the other horror icon film, accept on the condition that he be given complete creative control on the film.
New Line’s response?
They had already started shooting the film.
New Line had hired two second units to start shooting the various visual effects needed on the film, since second unit and effects are regularly done outside of the direction of the director, because, as usual, they wanted to get the film completed and into theatres as quickly as possible.
McLoughlin would not sign on.
The directing job would go to a little-known Finnish-born filmmaker named Renny Harlin, who had made the 1986 Mike Norris action film Born American, and the 1987 horror film Prison for Empire Pictures. This time, Shaye would have a second producer on the film, Rachel Talalay, who had worked as an effect supervisor on the first three films. New Line was growing as a company, in large part to the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and Shaye needed to focus on the overall company.
In The Dream Master, Freddy Krueger has completed his initial evil mission of killing all the kids of the people whose actions resulted in his death, but now Freddy was so addicted to killing, that he will now use the body of one of the major character’s best friends to continue his killing spree, not unlike the plot of Freddy’s Revenge.
Originally planned for a Halloween 1988 release, Robert Shaye decided just as filming was about to begin in April that the film needed instead to be released no later than the end of August, which would put an incredible strain on the director and the cast, since that would give the production less than five months to get a completed film into shape. It also didn’t help that the Writers Guild of America had gone on strike in March 1988, and as a signatory of the Writers Guild, New Line could not bring Craven or Hegeland or the Wheat Brothers back in to work on the script if necessary, nor could they bring in any other writer, a member of the Guild or not.
As filming went on, it became clear to everyone that there were scenes in the script that just weren’t working. But what do you do when you can’t bring in any writer to do some spot rewriting?
Improvise!
Many of the dream sequences, whose effects had already been completed before the movie started shooting, were created by Renny Harlin on the spot. Lisa Wilcox and Andras Jones, who play Alice and Rick in the film, would write out their own scenes and show them to Harlin for approval just before cameras would role on that scene.
It was not a good way to make a film, and that haphazardness would reflect in the final film, and add an additional 20% to the original $5m budget.
Some critics, like the usually stuffy Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, would praise the film’s performances, story line and special effects, but most would note the lowering of quality after Dream Warriors.
Audiences didn’t care.
As we established earlier, there was a voracious appetite for Freddy Krueger. Like Dream Warriors, Dream Master would set new records for the widest opening ever for an independent movie, 1765 theatres, and the highest opening weekend gross, $12.88m. It stay the #1 movie in the nation for its first three weeks, and stay in the top ten for another four weeks after that. It’s $49.37m final gross would be the highest for an Elm Street movie for fifteen more years, and would be the nineteenth highest grossing movie of the year. A year that included huge hits like Big, Cocktail, Coming To America, Die Hard, A Fish Called Wanda, Rain Man, Twins, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Not only was Dream Master a success, New Line would, while the film was still in the top ten at the box office, premiere a new syndicated show, Freddy’s Nightmares, an anthology series not unlike The Twilight Zone, which would run for two seasons and forty-four episodes.
Freddy Fever had gripped American audiences, and Robert Shaye wanted another movie as quickly as possible. And of all the pitches from writers that Shaye and Sara Risher heard, they couldn’t get Leslie Bohem’s pitch for Dream Warriors out of their head. Risher no longer objected to one of the scenes Bohem had pitched, where the baby possessed by the spirit of Freddy claws its way out of the mother’s womb. Risher herself would realize that the teenagers who made the first Elm Street movie in 1984 were now growing up and starting families of their own, and they would bring Bohem back to write a full screenplay.
New Line would continue their tradition of giving a newer filmmaker a chance to make their mark on the Elm Street series, hiring Australian filmmaker Stephen Hopkins to direct the new film, subtitled The Dream Child. After working as the second unit director on the original Highlander film, Hopkins had made an exceptional but little seen slasher film in his native country called Dangerous Game. The film had been submitted to New Line for an American acquisition, and while New Line passed on the film, it would hire its director.
Again, dreams play a major role in the story, but the turning point of the script would be the revelation of Freddy’s parentage. No spoilers here if you haven’t seen it, but it’s a game changer.
At $8m, it would be the most expensive Elm Street movie to date, and it would begin shooting in Los Angeles on April 7th, 1989, with a targeted release date of August 9th, giving the filmmakers barely four months to complete the entire film. Thankfully, the Writers Guild strike had been settled a week after Dream Master was released into theatres, so New Line could have writers ready if there were any rewrites needed. Leslie Bohem would not be available for those rewrites, so the production would bring the splatterpunk horror writing team of John Skipp and Craig Spector to work on the script just before and during production.
The writing credits for the film would be a mess.
The screenplay for the film would be solely credited to Leslie Bohem, while Bohem would also get a Story By credit alongside Skip and Spector, since the Writers Guild had determined the team’s changes to the script were less than half of the film’s running time but they should still get some credit. And because we were now in the fifth film of a series with characters who had been introduced to the series by different writers, there would also be a credit of Based on Character Created by that would list Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and William Kotzwinkle and Brian Hegeland.
For the third year in a row, the release of a new Elm Street movie would set a new record for widest opening weekend release, with Dream Child playing in 1902 theatres.
But it would not be the first place movie that weekend, coming in third with $8.1m in tickets sold, behind Ron Howard’s Parenthood and James Cameron’s The Abyss. It would fall to eight place in its second week, and place eleventh and fourteenth in its next two weekends before dropping completely out of the top twenty by week five. It’s final gross of $22.1m would be the lowest of the five Elm Street films released to date.
Critics were not kind to the movie, giving the film the worst reviews of the series so far, and even Stephen Hopkins years later would admit that the biggest problems were having a budget that didn’t match what the filmmaker was trying to convey, that the film was too rushed through production and post-production to meet an arbitrary deadline, and that the MPAA would give the film an X rating for its extreme violence and gore, forcing the production to trim or remove several major scenes, which would also mess with the continuity of the film.
Because of this misstep, Robert Shaye would take some time trying to get the sixth Elm Street movie off the ground.
Amongst the filmmakers Shaye would hear from concerning a potential storyline would be a young director from New Zealand who had directed two very bizarre comedies named Peter Jackson.
Jackson would get his first American assignment writing a draft of the screenplay, which would feature a new group of teens who were not afraid of Freddy and would take sleeping pills in order to combat him in his own world.
Rachel Talalay, who had worked her way up from the effects department on the first film to producing several of the later episodes, would get herself hired on as both writer and director. It would be her idea to not use the Nightmare on Elm Street title in the name of the new film, and to bring more name actors and personalities into the film, including Yaphet Kotto, Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr, Alice Cooper and, for a very small cameo, Johnny Depp, who in the past seven years had become a major star. Her biggest contribution would be to film the final ten minutes in 3-D, a process that, outside of Earl Owensby, hadn’t been used in a movie in eight years.
After Talalay turned in her outline for the film, the screenplay for Freddy’s Dead would be written by another New Line alum, who had been hired as a story editor by the company in 1985 and had quickly risen in the ranks to Vice President by 1990. This would be De Luca’s first produced screenplay.
Freddy’s Dead would dive deeper into the psyche of Freddy Krueger, getting to know just how horrific his life was, and would introduce a major twist that I again will not be spoiling for you if you’ve never seen the film.
In preparation for the release of the $11m, New Line would hold a mock funeral for Freddy Krueger at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which shares a border with the Paramount studio lot. Most of the stars of the film attended, along with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who would, the following day, Friday, September 13th, 1991, the day of the film’s release, to be Freddy Krueger Day in the city. This move would be highly criticized by a number of the mayor’s critics, who weren’t too keen on a governmental proclamation glorifying a mass murderer, albeit a fictional mass murderer.
The critics would lay into Freddy’s Dead even more than The Dream Child. Many critics would note how Freddy had changed from a truly terrifying character to a wisecracking goofball, and more than a few would complete their critiques with hopes that Freddy truly stays dead.
Audiences must have missed Freddy, because they would buy $12.97m worth of tickets in its first three days, knocking Kenneth Branagh’s beautiful Dead Again out of the top spot after two weeks. Freddy’s Dead would retain its #1 gross spot in its second week, even though it lost nearly half its audience, but the joy would be short-lived. The following three weekends would see it fall to fourth, than eighth, than eleventh, before completely falling out of the top twenty. It’s final gross of $34.87m was good but not great.
As he had with every other new Elm Street movie, Robert Shaye approached Wes Craven about being involved in another installment. For years, he would decline the offer, as he had been making movies for several years with Universal Pictures, who had been trying to re-establish their own dominance in the re-emerged horror genre. But after 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1989’s Shocker and 1991’s The People Under the Stairs failed to catch on with horror audiences, Craven was ready to give Freddy one final shot. But he would need to have far more creative control on the new film than he had before.
Shaye, surprisingly, was on board.
Craven would return to the storyline he had originally conceived for Dream Warriors, with some changes. First, the new movie would not be any kind of continuation of the series that ended with Freddy’s Dead. In fact, Freddy Krueger would barely be a part of the storyline. In the new film, Heather Langenkamp, Nancy in the original film, is pitched on making a new Elm Street movie by Robert Shaye, playing himself. Heather isn’t sure she wants to be a part of it, even after learning her special effects husband has been hired to work on the effects for the new Nightmare movie. While she doesn’t take the role, Heather finds herself and her son pulled deeper into the mythology of Freddy Krueger. There’s a visit to Wes Craven, playing himself, where he and Heather talk about his belief that the films captured an ancient, supernatural entity that has been freed with Freddy’s Dead, the end of the series.
John Saxon, who played Nancy’s father in the first movie, comes back into Heather’s life, concerned about her and her family’s well being. Robert Englund also seems to have some understanding of what Craven is talking about, and chooses to keep his distance from Heather, for her own safety.
In the climax, Heather and her son find themselves in the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio, back in the Thompson house, with Saxon back as Nancy’s father. Heather knows that, in order to beat Freddy once and for all, she will have to become Nancy again. There’s a fantastic climax, and when it’s over, Heather finds a copy of a screenplay at the foot of her son’s bed, with a note written inside from Wes Craven, thanking her for helping to imprison the evil entity once more. As she and Dylan read the screenplay, it mimics the actions we just saw on screen.
All things considered, the shoot for New Nightmare was a relative breeze. Craven would start shooting the film in October 1993, a full year before New Line planned on releasing the film. In one eerie moment of foreshadowing, Craven had written a scene for the film when the shooting of the new Elm Street movie would be interrupted by an earthquake. While they weren’t filming at the time, the 1994 Northridge earthquake would halt filming on the movie for a few days, although Craven and a skeleton crew did drive around town for a couple days to capture footage of the destruction that could be used in the film.
The film would be released on October 14th, 1994, in 1850 theatres, and it would enjoy the best reviews of any of the Elm Street movies. Critics loved how Craven played with the mythology he himself had created, how deftly he was able to weave fact and fiction together, and how he made Freddy Krueger scary again.
But whether it was audience fatigue of a seventh Elm Street movie in ten years, or audiences not being given the wisecracking hooligan they had become accustomed to over the past few films, or that audiences really wanted to see Pulp Fiction more, which had opened the same day, but New Nightmare would only open to third place with $6.67m, more than $2.5m behind Pulp Fiction and $2.5 behind the god-awful Sylvester Stallone movie The Specialist, which was in its second week of release.
The film would never recover. It would fall to seventh place in its second weekend, to eighth in its third, and to thirteenth in its fourth, before falling out of the top twenty. It’s $18.1m final box office gross would make New Nightmare the lowest grossing Freddy movie, and essentially put the final nail in the coffin on the series.
In 2002, Robert Shaye would hire Wes Craven’s old friend, Friday the 13th producer/director Sean S. Cunningham, to produce a crossover film between Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees.
Attempts to make a Freddy versus Jason movie had been happening since 1987, when Frank Mancuso, Jr., who had taken over producing the Friday the 13th series starting with Part 2, tried to get Tom McLoughlin, the director of Jason Lives who had been in contention to direct the fourth Elm Street film, to try and unite New Line and Paramount Pictures to get a pairing movie made, but it didn’t happen. After the failure of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, the rights to Jason Voorhees passed from Paramount to some of the producers of the series, who would end up selling them to New Line Cinemas. Joseph Zito, the director of choice for many of Cannon Films’ biggest hits, who also directed Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, almost got a spinoff pairing movie off the ground in 1992, but in the end, Shaye went with Craven and New Nightmare instead.
In 1994, there was almost a crossover film, with several writers or teams of writers taking a swing at the story. One team, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore from Star Trek: The Next Generation, would turn in Jason vs. Freddy, which threw traditional horror film conventions out the window and attempted to make a serious, more adult-toned horror film. New Line would then bring British writer Peter Briggs in, having been impressed with Briggs’ unmade screenplay for Aliens vs. Predator. Briggs’ story would bring back many of the characters from both series together.
In 1996, the writers of the Tales From the Crypt movie Demon Knight were brought in for a different take, and Robert Shaye would go so far as to hire special makeup effects wizard Rob Bottin in to make his directorial debut, after both Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson turned the film down. Bottin would throw out that script, and bring in David S. Goyer, who would be best known a few years later for writing the Blade movies with del Toro, to flesh out a story Bottin had come up with.
In 1998, Bottin was still attached to the crossover movie, but now two of the staff writers of the animated sitcom King of the Hill were brought in to take a stab at it. When their take didn’t take, it was next up to comic book writer Mark Verheiden, who had helped New Line to adapt Dark Horse’s The Mask comic book into a movie, to try and make something work.
Several years and several more writers later, New Line finally found the right pair to come up with a story. Mark Swift and Damian Shannon had originally been hired by New Line in 2000 to write an adaptation of the comic book Danger Girl. While New Line wouldn’t pursue that film, Shaye was impressed enough with the writers to bring them on Freddy vs. Jason.
Whether it was a really good script or the fact that Shaye had already spent nearly fifteen years and more than $6m trying to get a working screenplay that could be made into a movie, their take on the pairing of iconic horror characters would be the one to get made.
Shaye would offer the directing gig to Wes Craven first, but Wes was back on top of the movie world, having directed Scream and Scream 2 after New Nightmare, and would decline the offer. As would Guillermo del Toro, who had just made Blade 2 for New Line, and Rob Zombie, who was transitioning from cult rock star to filmmaker and wanted to focus on what was going to be his directorial debut, House of a Thousand Corpses. Finally, Hong Kong director Ronny Yu, who had made a successful American directing debut in 1998 with Bride of Chucky, would sign on to make the film.
It was never a question that Robert Englund would come back to play Freddy, but Yu wanted a different actor than Kane Hodder to play Jason. Specifically, he wanted to highlight the different characteristics of the two villains. And while the 6’ 3” Hodder would have towered over the 5’ 9” Englund, Yu wanted the difference to be even more pronounced, and would hire 6’ 5” Ken Kirzinger, who had doubled for Hodder in two scenes of Jason Takes Manhattan, to take over the role.
Like with Craven on New Nightmare, Yu would be given more creative control than previous filmmakers in the series had, and would be given a comfortable eleven months to get the film ready for release when camera rolled in Vancouver in September 2002. While the film’s official budget was $30m, Yu would only have $23m to actually make the movie, since New Line had spent all that other money on all the various scripts over the years. As if a budget higher than the cost of the first four Elm Street films combined could be considered “only.”
Most critics would not be excited about the pairing of the two horror franchises, but horror fans had been waiting for years for this film to happen. Opening in 3014 theatres on August 15th, 2003, Freddy vs. Jason would open in first place, earning $36.4m in its first three days. For comparison’s sake, the first Elm Street had only grossed $25.6m in its entire run, while the first Friday the 13th would gross $39.8m in its entire run. That gross would be more than double the amount the second place movie, SWAT, took in that weekend. The film would hang on to first place for a second week, despite losing more than 63% of its audience, and it would be a quick fall after that. Freddy vs. Jason would drop out of the top ten in its fifth week of release, out of the top 20 the following week, and out of the top thirty the week after that. The final gross for the film, $82.6m, would be more than the previous three Elm Street movies had grossed combined, or more than the last five Friday the 13th movies combined.
And then there’s the 2010 remake co-produced by Michael Bay. The less said about that film, the better, suffice it to say it would be highly ironic that Jackie Earle Haley, who had lost the audition for Glen in the very first Elm Street movie twenty-six years later would be in the remake as Freddy Krueger.
The film would be a financial success, earning $63m in ticket sales in the United States and another $52.6m in the rest of the world, making it the highest earning movie in the Elm Street Cinematic Universe, but it would also be the lowest rated Elm Street movie by critics, who genuinely saw no reason to remake a film that, over the previous quarter century, had been reassessed critically and was not deemed a high point in 1980s horror cinema.
As I have stated before on this show, I am not a big fan of horror films, but I do think the original Nightmare on Elm Street, The Dream Warriors, and New Nightmare are genuinely good movies, especially New Nightmare, which is on par with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Exorcist and Jaws for me as the best of what horror cinema can be. And it’s not coincidental that Wes Craven is the connective tissue between the three movies. I watched all of the movies again this past month, preparing for this episode, not having seen a number of them since their original theatrical releases, and my opinions of each movie had not changed in all that time.
And with that, we end this first part of our two-part miniseries about the history of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Part two will be released later today, and will be a discussion between myself and Jeff Townsend, the Podcast Father and the person who suggested this episode.
I thought it might be interesting to talk to someone of a different generation than my own about how they saw a film series that was multiple episodes into itself before they were even born. I’ll leave it up to you whether it was actually interesting or not.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again after the second part of this miniseries next Thursday, when Episode 92, on the forgotten 1987 crime drama Positive I.D., is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Wes Craven and the movies we covered this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.