A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) on Netflix
Nancy Thompson and her friends dream of the same disfigured man in a bladed glove. When teenagers in their town begin dying in their sleep, Nancy searches for a cause.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Tina Gray wakes from a nightmare in which a disfigured figure in a bladed glove attacks her, and her mother points out mysterious slashes on her nightgown. Nancy Thompson and her boyfriend Glen Lantz tell Tina they have dreamed of the same man. Tina's boyfriend Rod Lane joins the sleepover; when Tina falls asleep, Rod sees her attacked by an unseen force and flees the house. Nancy's father, policeman Don Thompson, arrests Rod. During a class at school, Nancy drifts off and the man chases her through a boiler room; she burns her arm on a pipe to wake up, and the mark remains on her forearm.
Cast
Show all 15 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Wes Craven based the screenplay on 1970s Los Angeles Times articles about Hmong refugees who fled war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, suffered disturbing nightmares and refused to sleep; some of the men died in their sleep, a phenomenon doctors called Asian Death Syndrome.
- David Warner was originally cast as Freddy Krueger. Make-up tests were done, but he had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts.
- Johnny Depp bombed his audition for Glen, a part written as a big blond football-player type, and was rejected; he got the role after Wes Craven's daughters picked his headshot from a set the director showed them.
- While filming A Nightmare on Elm Street, New Line Cinema's distribution deal fell through and the studio was unable to pay its cast and crew for two weeks.
- For the blood geyser, the crew reused the revolving room set from Tina's death, mounting the cameraman and Wes Craven in fixed seats from a Datsun B-210 as the inverted set rotated and red water was poured in.
- Wes Craven said in a 2014 interview that twelve frames of blood had to be cut from Tina's death scene or the film would have been axed.
SPOILER
Wes Craven's planned ending had Nancy kill Krueger by no longer believing in him, then wake to find the whole film was a nightmare, but New Line head Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending that turned out to be a dream within a dream within a dream.- Gary Wright's 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" sealed the story for Craven, giving him an artistic setting to jump off from and a synthesizer riff for the film's soundtrack.
