Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) - full transcript

"It's time for you to be asleep, Billy."

"I'm not a bit sleepy."

"You have to get up early tomorrow,

remember?"

"Oh, I don't want to go to bed yet."

"It's bed time and sleep time."

"You'll be asleep before you know it.'

"Goodnight, Billy."

"Billy's mother didn't know the real reason

why he didn't want to go to bed."

Even though I've had lots and lots of people tell me, "You've given

me nightmares," for years, they always have a smile on their face.

Freddy operates on a lot of levels: as a character,

as a symbol, now as a logo.

He's an American original. I can't think of

anybody like Freddy.

He's kind of the rock star of boogeymen.

I think Freddy was to dreams

what Jaws was to swimmers.

It is so on the surface scary, it is so scary when

you think about who he is and where he comes from.

He was this child molester, you know, that

the parents came after him and they burned him.

And then he comes back

and kills what they love.

Freddy makes no apologies,

Freddy is on a revenge motif.

Freddy Krueger has a plan,

Freddy Krueger has a reason.

He is a metaphysical monster.

He moves into our dreams.

He doesn't have any time and space limitation.

That's what makes Freddy a little more fun to watch.

The "Nightmare" movies were more

complicated and ambitious.

It's different from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

or "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th."

You never, ever feel like you're

in a slasher movie.

It's more fun, it's more open ended,

it's more infinite.

It wasn't superficial.

That's one of the things that makes honor films great.

"Nightmare on Elm Street" series,

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.

Chuck came in with this massive passion,

but what came out of that

was how difficult it was to work with Chuck. (laughing)

They were very touchy about the imagery of

Freddy Krueger and where we took it,

and I was trying to, frankly, loosen them up, you know,

and take it into a crazier place

and move it further, or there's! be no point.

He was getting a lot of frustration

from the powers that be over him.

It was just a really hard shoot.

I think there was more tension

on that set than any set I've ever been on.

I think Chuck really had his hands full.

We were always hours and hours

behind because the stuff was so difficult.

Lots and lots of effects.

Diff cult effects.

Chuck Russell, he was really somebody with

tremendous detail

with everything. Didn't let anything slide.

There was a couple of times, for me, that I think Chuck

did not know how speak to some ofus actors.

I don't think he had a great deal of

experience before doing that film.

You were aware that there was

this expectation of you

to do certain things, but you just

didn't really kn ow what they were.

It was Patricia Arquette's first film and

the first night that she shot,

we didn't get to her 'til 4 in the morning.

She couldn't remember her lines.

We did 52 takes with her and still couldn't get it right.

She just couldn't do it, you know. We had to do cue cards.

She really rose to the game, but Chuck

never got over that original discomfort

and never really gave her the support

that I thought that she deserved.

One thing about, I think, maybe any "Elm Street" film

is you're trying to take young performers and get

'that sense ct tension, get the tear, take them to the edge..

And it's not an easy kind of film to make.

The dream set at the end, kind of the climax of the film,

was kind of an elaborate boiler room set

that was stretching the limits

for what we could do on budget and time.

I just remember it was like they, literally, cut

the air conditioner ofiand it was

crowded in there, it was hot.

Those scenes are hard because there's

lots of fire, lots of smoke.

That smoke smells really bad.

Always the fire department was

on our rear end. Always threatening to

close us dovm.

It was mayhem.

If we could have photographed behind the scenes

what was happening, it would have been a bigger circus

than what was in front of the camera.

And I remember, at one point,

the tension on the set was so thick

that one of the producers stopped

the whole shooting and he called

everybody together and he went to the top of the

stairs and he said, "This shit is going to stop."

After the 21st hour one day, I said,

"Chuck, can you define for me what is a director?"

And he said, "The last man standing."

And I've never heard a better definition.

We put in long hours, but it was interesting.

Everyone had their hearts in it.

And I think the results are on the screen.

The junkyard scene was filmed

very late at night, early morning.

I think I was there until 3:30 or so.

The sun almost began coming up.

Frank Darabont, who co-m/rote that script with me,

and I are both

big Ray Harryhausen fans, so we found

a way to get our little homage

to Harryhausen with

bringing Freddy's skeleton to life.

We decided to build a skeleton and found how diff cult it was

to build a stop-motion skeleton.

I wish he'd had Ray there because

maybe we could have done a better job of it.

We used Robert Englund's attitude,

his posture and stuff for the Freddy skeleton

as much as we could so it looked like him.

I don't remember how they did it, but they

must have put me on some sort of a dolly

going toward this Cadillac fender in the back,

the tail which pierced me.

I must say I didn't like the scene.

"3" was the first time when you see the souls

of children. This is an effect where all the souls

that are trapped inside of Freddy make

an appearance on his body.

The screaming souls on Freddy's chest was something that

we didn't really know we could pull off,

but that particular effect

actually is a quite haunting, strange

concept that worked well.

It was actually a chest piece that fit under Robert's

own chest. It was about 3 inches thick and inside

there were cables that came out the back of him and all that.

And they blinked the eyes and moved the jaws and all that stuff.

"It's a dead end."

One of the very toughest things, strangely, was

the mirror sequence, the mirror hallway.

My character screams and

breaks all the mirrors and

it turns out that my dream power is my voice.

Mirrors shattering in that hallway was a really huge effect.

And this is before CGI, so we had to get very inventive.

I mean, unbelievably technically diff cult.

It was something we ended up getting done

at the optical house, at the last minute,

literally manipulating mylar in front of a camera.

That sequence and where Freddy gets blown apart

were two very, very complicated sequences.

We had to build this puppet head

'and this 'make thing was mechanical.

And then, later, the guys, the optical guys, went in there

and rotoscoped light pouring out of him

and that's how he sort of just tore apart

with the light of God.

They had to bury Freddy in the hallowed ground,

that made sense.

And so Chuck understood sort of the

religious connotations and things like that.

I wanted to bring in these kind of

classic Christian values almost.

We kill Freddy with a cross.

I mean, this is old school vampire stuff.

"Nightmare on Elm Street 2" was, I guess,

the gayest horrorfilm ever made and

"Nightmare on Elm Street 3" was the Christian version.

I think in doing the third one I knew

we had to fill in a little bit of the Freddy backstory.

And in the "Elm Street" series that means

it has to be something big and dangerous.

I love the idea that

some twisted DNA somehow made

its way into this poor little nun,

Amanda Krueger, who got the Christmas shifi

in the asylum, getting raped by a hundred maniacs.

"Freddy?!"

"The bastard son of a hundred maniacs."

And this was just one of the ideas that came out

that we realized was appropriate,

but, in a way, dangerous to put on film.

It's always a balancing act between

how much you're going to reveal the monster

and how much you're going to keep mysterious.

V\flth his dark history revealed and his bones laid to rest,

the time had come for Freddy's final reckoning.

But if Krueger had to go, he would take with him

one of Elm Street's finest.

"Die!"

Heather being killed offis not that unusual.

If the original characters were in the sequel,

usually they didn't last until the end because

they either aged or the studio would feel like

now we have to have new characters.

I do believe that it's very appropriate that

Nancy dies at the end of

It's almost like killing a recurring character

or a regular off of a television show,

and it takes some courage.

Her dying off was in the original screenplay

and it was a bold thing to do.

She goes out heroically, which is, I think, very fitting.

All stories of heroes have to come to an end and

I thought that the way that she died

in Patricia's arms was very touching.

But I knew it would in crease kind of the

whole suspense and jeopardy.

If Nancy can die, anything can happen in the series.

Now that Krueger had been vanquished,

at least for the moment,

the filmmakers wanted to find a way to

market Freddy to the masses.

There is something naturally heavy metal

about Freddy Krueger.

And there was a sudden opportunity to use Dokken.

I just moved out fiom Tampa, Florida.All I knew was Dokken.

Doing the movie was kind of like ourwhole career:

50% talent, 50% luck.

It was specific. It had to be called "Dream Warriors" and try

to make it spooky and the lyrics should be about the movie.

I still remember my version -- it didn't make it.

Mine was (singing), "Dream warriors,

we can be heroes inside of our dreams."

Which is exactly why it didn't get accepted. (laughing)

That's how it went, yeah. (laughing)

The Dokken video was kind of ahead of its time.

We were at the eany end of MTV and it was

kind of the perfect opportunity to take

heavy metal and horror and make one

nasty thing out of it.

It was cutting edge, you know.

Nobody had done it

and we were like the first band to do that,

you know, all that stuff and mix it with the movie.

I thought it was the greatest video.

It really helped our careers.

And, in fact, ours was the first video

ever included on a VHS of a movie. First one.

I can't sing the song anymore.

(singing) "...forever."

It's so high.

Even vmen I did it and I was young --

I was probably SO-something, in my eany 30s --

it just was too frickin' high.

(singing) "Dream warriors"

(singing) "We're the dream warriors...

(singing)"Don't want to dream no more."

(singing) "And maybe tonight, maybe tonight

you'll be gone. Dream warriors."

I have a platinum record from that Dokken song.

That is one of the few prop things that's

actually up in my house

because it's so funny that I could

possibly have a platinum record ever

with my mmite, Jewish rhythm.

I've never gone anywnere, or performed anywhere,

any of us, where we either don't see the EP

or an album, or get asked to do the song.

It's just part of our legacy.

"What a nightmare!"

"Dream Warriors" was released on February 27, 1987.

Aimed straight at the mainstream, "Nightmare 3"

paved the way for Freddy Kruegerto become

a household name.

I felt like, honestly, it couldn't be more frightening than

what Wes did in the original, but I thought adding an element

of wit and black humor would balance out

some of the really dark imagery in the piece.

The fact that they made Freddy more and more jokey,

took him farther and farther away fiom that child molester thing

that just kind of sticks to you in a way maybe you don't like.

I think there's a great combination between horror and humor.

And it always goes that way,

it doesn't matter how scary your first film is.

They really walked a fine line with it.

It was never cheesy or campy, it was always with a purpose.

It's why "3" was a little bit of a surprise for the series and for the

fans and I think maybe hard to get exactly right after that.

There's only so much you can do with Freddy's comedy

before it becomes too much.

After "2" there were not a lot of people that really thought

that it was going to be successful.

So it was really up to Chuck to make it successful,

and I think he made it successful.

"For the very first time in history, a small, independent film

has swept the weekend box office grosses."

"The number one movie in the country last week. In Syracuse they

called in the mounted police to control the crowds at theaters."

It was in the Top 10 grossers of the year that it came out.

That movie made a lot of money.

Seeing the audiences respond to it,

seeing the series become so successful

from that point on, was my payoff.

"Nightmare on Elm Street" went from being cult

to being an international, huge success.

"The worst!" "Don't leave

home without it!" (laughing)

When Siskel and Ebert reviewed the film

they got into a heated debate on the show and

Roger Ebert was very adamant that he felt like the film

deserved an "X" rating.

Considering his movie is being pitched to teenagers and young teenagers. Don't talk

to me about the "R" rating, they know exactly who they want to see this movie."

'(shattered glass)'

I have to say that over the years and having met

lots of fans all over the world, that I think

the fan favorite is "Nightmare on Elm Street Pan 3."

I mean, more of my fans say they like that movie

than any of them.

"Dream Warriors" is what the best franchise

sequels in any genre should be, because

it's a film that moves the franchise along,

adds to the mythology without taking anything auvay from

what's come before, and also manages --

and it is a very hard thing to do --

to maintain or reintroduce

characters that we already know and

care about while balancing them with new characters

that we ultimately actually care about just the same.

There were some successful "Elm Streets" after it

and some not so successful. But they were all,

from that point on, I think more imaginative.

We started getting into the groove, so to speak,

and everybody was wailing with ideas.

All the elements that worked in that

I was instrumental in trying to feed into the next scripts.

And I think we set the tone for the other sequels.

After "Dream Warriors," Freddy's audience expanded

far beyond expectations and New Line Cinema,

like Freddy Krueger himself,

began growing by leaps and bounds.

By this time "Nightmare" had a reputation

and New Line had a reputation.

The company was really evolving into

less of an unstable

and uncertain entity,

into one that was very financeable.

Bob was very good at promoting.

I mean, in a way that Roger Corman did the same thing.

He was very good at promoting people who he thought

were smart and he thought supported the company.

He was building an empire,

he wasn'tjust making movies.

That was the New Line way. lfth ey liked you,

they lefi you alone.

They worked the crap off of you and

they didn't pay you a lot, but you knew

you were doing their next movie.

So if you got on that New Line boat,

that was a good ship to be sailing on.

The way I got involved in "Nightmare on Elm Street 4" was

very unusual and very complicated.

We had our pick really of directors, but, again,

we wanted young, hot, up-and-coming, cheap.

I had come

from Finland a few years prior to seek my fortune.

He and his pal were living out of

baked bean cans in a single room

in Hollywood somewhere.

I'd lost all my credit cards, all my money,

I was really down on my luck.

I had seen the movie he made.

I think it was called "Prison."

It was made for about $1 million

and it had a lot of sort of homemade special effects.

I knew he would be great.

I met with him, I thought he was fantastic.

And after fifteen minutes Bob Shaye's like,

"Okay, goodbye."

And he pretty much throws me out of his offlce.

Bob kept saying, "He doesn't speak English." (laughing)

He said, "It's not his main language."

I went five times back to New Line,

pretty much unannounced.

I didn't, you know, call an assistant and make an appointment,

I just would go and hang out in the lobby and

go to Bob Sh eye's office and say, "Hi, I'm back."

And he's like, "The Finnish guy? What is he doing here?"

And every time he'd come in for an interview he looked, frankly,

dirtier and dirtier and he'd wear the same clothes. And I

really think they started to smell.

He was like a Viking, you know,

this guy's huge. He had hair down to his ass.

And I thought, "God, I've got to hire this guy

just to get him a bath."

We needed a director desperately and I knew it was

going to be a huge amount of work and

we decided, he's a big guy, you know (laughing)

he probably has a lot o energy and he can work really

hard 24 hours a day for six weeks to get the film ready.

So they kind of compromised and finally said, like,

"Okay, you won us over. You can direct the movie."

I was very scared stepping into this movie.

It was my first sort of a Hollywood movie and

though it was only a $5 million budget,

for me it was gigantic.

Brian Helgeland wrote "Nightmare 4"

and he was another hot, young,

up-and-coming writer that we could afford.

There was sort of a rough script, but a very,

very sort of like a blueprint for the movie.

And sooner than we knew, the writers' strike started.

"Nightmare 4" was just this writers' disaster.

So a lot of it was really made up,

because we had no writer to write it.

Mostly I would come up with the nightmares

because I had an endless amount of nightmares

in my memories from my childhood.

He knew that he had to make the film more visual

and he had to up those stakes because

we didn't have as strong a script.

What I felt was very important was to

sort of reinvent the series.

From the very get-go I said,

"I feel that Freddy has sort of become

like James Bond of horror films

and we should make him, in a way,

the hero of the movie."

We saw a movie before the movie was made,

which was called

"Chinese Ghost Story."

We were inspired by the feel of it.

And this movie was really meant to be done in that

Hung Kong action style,

which is a lot of quick cuts, a lot of different shots.

Renny was like ahead of everybody on that film.

He totally understood the youth culture,

he was young himself.

He completely understood how to make the script work.

Looking to preserve the continuity of the previous film

Renny Ham“ sought out a new cast'

of likeable young actors to team up with the last

of the "Elm Street" children.

The casting of the movie was an interesting process.

I wanted to see really fl'esh faces in the film,

people that nobody had seen before.

"Alice is not especially well put together.

And yet there's something about this

shy-loooking girl that suggests that

she might be incredibly attractive if she had any confidence."

I was that gin. I uvas that shy girl.

I thought I would never have a boyfriend.

Alice was a daydreamer,

that was mmere she felt most comfortable.

In her mind, imagining being with the hunky Dan.

"Alice's attention drifts to a tough pick-up

that is pulling up not far from them.

A handsome, dark-haired teenager,

Dan, climbs out of the car."

Well, they made a joke, because they

gave me the pan pretty eany on and the script-

I don't know if his name was Dan - they were like,

"Just call him Dan, that'll work."

At first I was, like, man, these guys think

I'm so bad, they're giving me

my own name so I answer to it. (laughing)

I didn't know I was going to be in the

film until my agent called and

told me there was a script for "Nightmare on Elm Street 4"

and I was in it.

They forgot to kill me in "Pan 3" so that's why

they brought me back in "Part 4." (laughing)

Oh, they let the black man live? (laughing)

We'll fiX that.

I would tell my friends, "If you're going to the movie

to see me in "Part 4," go straight to the theaters,

don't get no popcorn, don't get no drinks or nothin',

'cause my ass will be dead by the time you sit down."

I remember our disappointment in "Nightmare 4"

that we couldn't get Patricia Arquette.

She had been such an integral pan to "Nightmare 3"

and people liked her so much.

I'm not 100% sure why Patricia Arquette did not return.

To this day, I don't know why.

I don't think there's any untoward reason,

I think maybe she was busy.

Patricia was already starring in other movies then

and it just simply may have been a conflict.

Maybe her agents

wanted too much money and Bob Shaye

didn't want to pay and said, you know,

Bob Shays-style, "Screw you."

They just wouldn't pay her the money that she asked for, and

it was very little and definitely what she deserved.

"Kristen, a beautiful, but pensive-looking blonde teenager,

is walking slowiy towards the ominous house."

I think stepping into that role

at first I was nervous, 'cause I'm like,

"I'm not Kristen. Oh no."

You know, "I'm not Patricia Arquette."

The chemistry between Tuesday Knight was not as great

as it was with Patricia Arquette.

"Hi guys."

It was quite difficult to do a scene

that was a heartfelt reunion on the page

with somebody I hadn't worked before.

I would have loved to have seen what that movie

could have become had Patricia Arquette participated in it.

We ran into Jim Cameron, so Renny's quite

excited and he introduces himself

and Jim says, "Well, so how are you resurrecting Freddy this

time?" And Rennyjust looks at him and goes,

"A dog pisses fire."

Renny was really the one who

did the mmole dog pee thing to resurrect Freddy,

mmich was, what a great way, right?

Someone just pees on it,

he's back.

I'm a dog lover, so it just came naturally, this whole dog idea.

Because it is an animal

and another animal

together with the pee.

It's lovely.

It comes out beautiful when you do it that way.

That's some strong pee.

(laughing) He had a urine infection like hell.

I think that a dog peeing on Freddy is, you know,

again it's mythic. It's like, if you start to examine that

and you want to be intellectual,

it's a hound from hell.

Freddy come back, why you runnin'?

Piss on his ass.

"Hows this for a wet dream?"

The sequence that was maybe one of the

more challenging ones was the water bed sequence.

I really did appreciate my death scene,

and again, at the hands of a beautiful naked woman.

Always my weakness.

That bedroom was built on about a 4 foot high

platform with

a water tank that was the actual water bed.

Very complicated. I don't know how we pulled it off.

And it was one of those scenes where

everybody was getting fiustrated.

"It's like 20-something takes. You guys have been shooting this

for 6 fucking hours. if you can't get it, it's your problem."

There was definitely tension on the set on that day,

but in the end it worked out perfectly.

Ken and Tuesday and I were the last of

the "Elm Street" children and to just sort of summarily

wipe us out

at the beginning

of "Pan 4"

just felt like a real sort of cheap trick.

What were we going to say, you know?

We're going to go up to Bob Shaye and say,

"Look, we want to be in the whole movie."

it was on page 11 , I think is when he got rid of me.

Should've got rid of me on page 2.

Kristen's death scene was kind of bizarre.

There was a beautiful beach,

palm trees and all that, and she's

suntanning herself there

and Freddy turns into a shark.

Renny wanted my bathing suits to be like the size of a,

like string, so I put it on and go,

"There's no way that I'm coming out like this. There's no way."

And he goes, "Oh Tuesday, your buttocks looks beautiful.

You come out like that."

And I want to get this shot and I get really pissed off at Tuesday,

I'm like, "Come on," you know. And she's like, "I can't, I can't."

I'm like, "No, I'm not coming out!"

"No, no, it's beautiful. No, it brings love."

It's not because I'm some, you know, sex pervert,

but I know what teenage boys want to watch.

So they had to sew

a little thing. That's why I had that little Hawaiian job.

I do remember that just to stay with

the sort of superhero concept with Freddy,

I said, "Let's give him sunglasses."

Almost like now he's like Tom Cruise.

Which was again, it was kind of like

against all the rules of the "Nightmare" movies.

After that, we cut to the scene where, you know, I'm

in the big fight With him

and so, I mean,

'she does sort of go down in sort of'

a blaze of glory.

It's kind of too late for her, but then she does pass it on

to Alice.

Alice did take on the qualities of her friends

as they were killed.

You could really see that arc in the character

in the course of the movie.

Somebody I could make seem timid and

vulnerable in the beginning

and who can then, in a believable way,

become kind of like

Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens"

or something like that.

Poor Lisa. I just remember her being so shiny

and they were always, always powdering her

because she was exerting so much energy because she

was so physical in that one.

They did send me

off to a day of karate school.

I was terrified I was going to hit myself

in the head with nunchucks.

And I've heard this comment so many,

it's like, "The wig was so bad,

it doesn't even look like

Alice from the back."

That's all acting, you know,

'cause she's really kind of

like a femme fatale in real life.

Your villain, to put a flip on a famous adage,

is only as good as his hero. And when we look at

the best of these franchises, be it "Dream Warriors"

or "The Dream Master,"

in which case he fighting against a capable hero,

those are the ones the fans generally like the best.

"Nightmare 3" and "Nightmare 4" has been

the highest making movies. I ain't braggin'

but those were the two I was in.

One of the cool things about "Nightmare 4"

is it's sort of a who's who of makeup effects.

I had done makeup effects for

"Prison" and so I got a call

from Renny saying, "Would you like to do this film?"

Yeah, okay, sure, absolutely.

I liked working with Ren ny. He was very creative

and really began to push what we could do

live, in camera.

I ended up passing the makeup off to

Howard Berger.

"Here, go make Robert up for the next six weeks.

And you can hear all his stories."

I was very polite and so I was waiting for Robert to finish talking

before I would do stuff.

But Robert talks and talks and talks and talks.

"I saw Barbra Streisand in New York,

my first time she was singing,

she was still singing like small clubs."

I've heard every Robert Englund story ever.

I mean, by year three or four I would sit there,

I could finish them for him.

"I flew, no one grabbed me, and 37 stitches.

I thought my careerwas over."

I could just say, "No, no, rest your voice."

"So, this is uvhat happen ed to Robert when he did this movie."

There would be times where I, literally, wouldjust

put my arm on Robert's head and hold him,

you know, like put him in a headlock almost,

and do his makeup, you know.

'Cause Kevin said, "Just get in there.

Just disregard what he has to say.

Justjump in and start doing the makeup."

It was a completely collaborative unit

that created those effects

and anybody could come in with

their ideas.

But they had no idea what the hell we were gonna

be doing, so we would brainstorm and figure,

"Well, what if we did this and what if this happened."

They would have a release date before they even had a script,

so we were just always up against the gun.

I think on "Nightmare 4" we, literally, were shooting something, I

want to say, like, two weeks before the movie came out.

Kevin called and was like,

"Oh, we've got a pickup to do." And I'm like,

"The movie comes out next week," or whatever.

But it didn't matter, it's just the way those movies work.

I think I remember seeing the poster for "Nightmare 4"

before we ever started shooting.

I was like, "This is just insanity."

I was pretty beat up from other work

wnen I began "Part 4". I was committed, I just wasn't

completely behind the project, I think, with enthusiasm.

Atter the first week of shooting, When I cut some footage together

and showed it to everybody, I think everybody sort of woke up.

I went, "Aha! this is the 'MTV' Nightmare."

It's energetic, it's kinetic.

They were using tricks and techniques, both in camera

and for post,

that I couldn't imagine.

I was so excited about seeing that, that I mean, I, literally,

got my second wind that night and for the rest of that shoot.

With Robert Englund back in the saddle again,

Freddy set his sights on fresh meat.

Once again, taking each of his victim's fears

to a mmole new level.

"The Black Girl looks a bit nerdy, with thick glasses short hair,

but makes up for it with a hip sense of style."

I loved my death scene.

(laughing) It was actually my first on-camera kiss.

The idea of the

hand coming through the desk,

I thought that uvas kind of

900W and

stupid.

Stupid.

It was like from another movie,

I don't know what I was thinking.

I was thinking "Terminator" or something.

And I just remember When he was coming towards me,

they said they had to use the real claws

because it was such an extreme close-up.

So they were really sharp.

And I just remember he pulled my skin with

the real claw

so when I was done with the day I had

these pin pricks all underneath my chin.

"Want to suck face?" "No."

When I said, "No,"

he came dovm and his dentures flew out of his mouth,

he was like this close, straight into my mouth.

And it was like saliva and probably what

he ate that day andjust crud.

I heard that Toy said something about us doing ADR,

looping her lines

because she didn't sound "black" enough.

Renny came up to me and he's like,

"You're going to redo all your lines."

And I was like, "Excuse me?"

And he's like, "Yeah, because you don't sound

like a black girl and this is not how a black gin is."

And it kind of pissed me off, to be quite frank.

And so I confronted him on it.

And, it didn't go so well.

I don't remember this. I'm from Finland.

What do I know?

I would deny it, too. Hell. (laughing)

if that's true, that must have come from somebody else.

it sounds like Bob Sh aye.

When it finally came out, Rennywalked up to me

and he put his arm around me and

he's like, "I didn't know any better. I'm really sorry," you know.

"You're getting some really good reviews

and thank you for challenging me on that."

"Rick, Alice's brother, is shimmying out of an

upper floor window and with surprising grace,

he maneuvers to the ground and lands

smiling in front of the girls."

First, Lisa and I were twins and then I was, I think,

I was supposed to live.

And then there was this very elaborate, cool death scene.

Originally what happened is he went into the elevator

and it was a nightmare elevator

and the elevator started falling apart and the walls came off

and he's like falling through space, darkness.

That was, literally, a scene mmere we ran out

of money. And nobody knewmmat to do,

how was he going to be killed and what's going to happen.

We were working with an unfinished script

that we were finishing while we were doing it.

Somebody said, "Look, why does he have to die at all?

Let's just not even have the scene."

And then, well, we already shot the funeral scene,

he is dead, he's in the coffin.

And I said, "Well, he should die in some kind of

martial ans scene, because we've already set that up."

We have no money to build any kind of a set,

so all we could do was hang these fabrics

and make it look like it's like Japanese or something.

One of the epic fails, I think, of the sequences in

"Nightmare 4" is when Rick fights invisible Freddy.

The only death scene probably in any "Nightmare on Elm

Street" where Freddy is not actually there.

And I worked really hard for about two and a half, three weeks

just to get some basic skills dovm.

And then I got on the set and they pretty much said,

"No, no, no, we don't want that," you know.

It was just, they wanted all big roundhouse punches.

That's not karate at all, it's full-on John Wayne bullshit.

So cheaply done, and so kind of cheesy.

I mean, massively lame.

I'd had an appendix operation.

I ended up like

tearing my scars doing that scene and

had to go to the hospital for that.

I love the cockroach scene. That's great.

Youve got "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where you go,

"lndy's frightened of snakes," right.

Okay, so what happens later on in the film?

He gets thrown in the snake pit.

So we have this character who's frightened of bu gs, right,

so what do you expect? You expect the same thing, you know, she's

gonna be taken over by tons of cockroaches. And, you know,

what we did was we completely turned it around and

we had her tum into a cockroach.

"Debbie Stevens, is one well put together item.

A tough but smart gin from the wrong side of the tracks."

I was working with Screaming Mad George,

who was the makeup artist

who did all of my cockroach stuff, and he

was just fabulous.

I don't even know why he's called

Screaming Mad George.

I think hejust came up with that,

you know, it's kind of crazy.

(giggling)

The makeup was in credibly challenging.

Sitting in the seat for probably about

three and a half hours getting all of the

prosthetics put on and all of the makeup and

all of the blood

and all the guts that they had to attach.

And then I had these huge arms.

It was all very visceral, you know,

you had like tons of stretchy chunks of flesh stuff

covered in slime

and covered in blood.

I remember doing it and feeling like,

"Oh my God, this is going to look so goofy,"

'cause the arms

were floppy and flipping and flopping

this and that way and nothing seemed to quite work.

When my arms break and fall off

it's only my head.

So I'm in a box, I'm like low in a box like that,

and on top is this big fake body that

I had to do a bodycast for.

So theyve got me all glued in, I'm all in this thing.

I sat in that box for

five hours and I finally was like,

"I have to pee." (giggling)

And they're like handing me a styrofoam cup.

I don't have a penis! I can't pee in the cup!

Can't do it, won't do it! Gotta get me out.

By building the set in a very specific way, making

it sort of a forced perspective set

and all that,

it actually sort of ended up being

kind of scary and surreal and weird.

I'm in goo in a cockroach

cast and they're paying me to do this.

I love, my favorite shot is Freddy looks

into the roach motel and it's his eye looking into it.

Ohhhhh, you know, in the roach motel

and, "Splat!"

Working on the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies are a

complete hoot because you don't just get to rip people apart,

you get to do things that are

imaginative and fun and surrealistic and it is an artist's dream.

The Rialto Cinema sequence is my

favorite scene in the movie. It was very hard to

accomplish the mmole sequence.

We built pan of the balcony

seaflng

sideways, so that she was actually hanging from the chair.

They mounted the camera on that balcony

and that mmole balcony turned

so it became vertical.

And I wanted it to sort of build slowiy with, you know,

things starting to fly toward the screen

and the popcorn starts flying

and the drink goes.

'And, of course, the hardest part was were'

she actually hits the screen and kind of blends

and becomes pan of the movie.

You actually see her hit the screen and

go from a 3-dimensional person to a

Z-dimen sional movie and

that had never been done.

To me, it was like a movie lover's sequence and kind of

a homage to

cinema in general.

PlayingAlice - the one who never got married

(laughing) and never left the restaurant, old Alice -

we tried old-age makeup

and Renny didn't like it. So then, I think

we finally ended up using a prosthetic.

Thick, rubbery stuff glued on

to really get me looking old.

I came up with the idea of

the faces in the pizza.

We did the horror pizza,

the soul food.

"Rick, you little meatball."

We ordered from Domino's,

we took pictures of him

and did a clay press out of it. Sculpted all these

individual little meatball

heads.

And then we did a full-scale pizza with

the real actors' faces in it.

And we made them all move around, "Aaahhhh."

You know, doing weird things.

(laughing) I remember when

he puts the fork into his

face and it just kind of goes like that,

it just worked so well.

My favorite sequence of all the

"Nightmare on Elm Street" films

is in "Part 4" when

Lisa Wilcox leaves The Crave Inn. Get it, The Crave Inn?

"Come on, we have to hurry!" "What's going on?"

I remember coming up with this idea of a loop in the scene

where it keeps repeating itself and

that's how they figured out they were in a dream.

By the second time I'm in

the loop, I have an upset stomach

because I kn ow something bad's gonna happen.

"Come on, we have to hurry!" "What's going on?"

And that's just such a brilliant realization of a dream, to me.

When we sat down to think about the ending

and how to kill Freddy,

we, literally, said, "Okay, well, how do monsters

get killed in movies?" You can

chop them up,

you can shoot them,

you can bum them,

you can blow them up.

But what all those ways have in common is that

it's always a force coming fl'om outside

that destroys the evil.

I brought in a picture of

"The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,"

which is this Bernini sculpture.

The expression on her face is of divine ecstasy,

of having seen God. And so there's a scene

she's supposedly defeated

and she looks up at these

little children who are like angels. And what we wanted

was the idea that in that moment,

God is filling her with ecstatic grace.

Then she could see him for what he was,

mmich was just evil and,

"just look at yourself, look how low you are."

That's howwe created the mmole idea of

these souls trapped inside Freddy and that

they're gonna be set free and they are from inside out.

They're gonna rip him apart and destroy him.

"1, 2, S!"

We actually did all these little radio-controlled faces that

kind of (shrieking) and moved around

and screamed and stuff.

(laughing) I remember the little stubby hands coming in

and grabbing stuff and grabbing his head and

it was so goofy and looked so silly when we were doing it.

Steve Johnson built this enormous,

gigantic Freddy Krueger chest and all these

nude people were all painted up and pressing through

this dental dam chest, and I just thought

thatwas so cool.

You go on the set one day and there's, like,

a bunch of girls walking around topless.

It's very important, symbolically, for this thing

and you're bare, you're naked.

So I got them to take their clothes off

and then I had these girls pressing

themselves against the chest.

And I was like, "This is genius. Every teenage boy

is going to love this."

"Linnea, push out! Push your chest out, Linnea!"

They were shooting this piece

and people are pressing on it, you know,

and pushing through it

and I don't think it was mounted as

stable as they had requested and

up on top was this little Japanese woman, Michiko.

You know something went a little bit wrong and

the whole thing came tumbling dovm.

"Oh no!"

You know, crew members are falling from the rafters.

Here's poor little Michiko crushed by a

giant Freddy Krueger chest.

There was, in general, on the set an aura of panic.

Bob Shaye was sure that he had made the wrong choice,

all through the production, so he would come to the set

and look around and had this really grumpy expression

on his face and this really sort of suspicious look, like,

"This Finnish guy has no idea what he is doing."

No one wants Bob on set.

Renny being the worst. Renny being,

"You take care of it, Rachel! You take care ofhim!" (laughing)

And I would try to work hard and come up with great ideas and

win him over, but I couldn't. He pretty much never

spoke to me during the WhOIE production, except, like,

grunting and looking really unhappy.

Nightmare 4's success would ultimately

be left up to audiences and the response

to the film's release on August 19, 1988

was a surprise to everyone.

Pretty much all I could read was, like,

great reviews.

They found all kinds of hidden meanings in the movie that

I didn't even know the movie had and

I was completely blovm away.

That was the last thing I expected.

It was the biggest

of all of them. It far out-grossed anything.

And then, eventually, the movie made about $50 million

dollars in domestic box office,

which was at the time, the most successful

independent movie ever made.

He delivered a great film, in my opinion,

he did a really good job.

Ren ny Harlin I thought was a very talented director.

It's a tough thing to make fresh and he did.

Bob Sh aye called me

opening day and called me and said,

"You know, I have a habit of taking a limo

and driving around, going to different theaters

and looking at the reactions of the audience.

Would you like to join me?"

And we start driving around going to these theaters

and there's lines around the block.

I said to Bob, I said, "I gotta call my mom."

Because my mom in Finland had been worried

to death now for three years. Most months I didn't

even have money to call my mom and

she didn't knowmmat was going on with me.

And I called his mother and told her in Swedish

what a great guy her son was.

And my mother is like, "I'm talking to the head of

the studio and he's telling that my son is a genius

and he's made the biggest hit of the company."

At the time that "Nightmare 4" came out,

I think it was probably, in a strange way, the hippest,

deconstructed,

kind of MTV film made.

Over that weekend my life changed completely.

And the first phone call I got on Monday in my fleabag hotel,

I thought somebody was pulling a prank on me when

the manager called my room and said,

"I have Mr. Spielberg on the line."

And that was the first call on Monday.

Just a struggling loser like the rest ofus

in Hollywood and within a year he was directing

"Die Hard 2" and hanging out with Sylvester Stallone.

It's one of those crazy things in Hollywood.

You just never know who's gonna become huge.

It wasn't long before other studios tried

to cash in on the Freddy phenomenon.

Even Bollywood got into the act.

By now, there's Johnny Carson jokes,

there's political cartoons of Freddy,

Freddy's in the funny papers,

Tom Hanks is making Freddy jokes in movies.

"It's 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' and that

would make him Freddy Krueger."

Anything that's bad is

"A Nightmare in the National League,"

"ANightmare in the NFL,"

"A Nightmare in the N BA,"

it's "A Nightmare in Iraq."

"When you take a walk down our opposition's memory lane, it starts

to look like "Nightmare on Elm Street." (laughing audience)

We were so pan of the vernacular.

Everything - from the beginning of the fact that it could be

made into a sequel to the merchandising -

were things that never, ever occurred to me.

It was interesting to see all the Freddy stuff,

all the merchandise, you know, 'cause

it was a million toys.

The Freddy gloves, the hat.

The early merchandising

they just thought toys

they just went for kids.

A misconceived idea, incidentally, a Freddy doll.

'(cackling Freddy doll)'

(laughing)

He became kind of

the ultimate cuddly toy to have next to you.

He became cool.

I'm like, "Okay, I made it!"

"I'm an action figure!"

Nobody ever takes them out of

their packages anyway,

so they're all hanging up on people's walls.

"We've got 12 of these Wall O'ffect Freddy Faces,

12 Deluxe Freddy Masks and

12 Screaming Freddy Chests of Souls."

There were watches, jewelry.

Freddy Krueger pillowcases.

At one point,

some company even made Freddy pajamas for little kids,

which, considering Freddy started out as a child molester...

"Kids, go put on your Charles Manson pajamas on

before you go to bed." Kind of the same thing, you know.

The strangest piece of Freddy merchandise was

Valium in St. Petersburg.

It said in Cyrillic, "Take one and he will come for you."

Unlicensed, I'm sure. Tough luck, New Line.

I think there was a point mmere

I thought there was a little bit

too much Freddy out there in pop culture.

It seemed like, for a certain amount of time,

people just couldn't get enough of the character.

One of the nice things is Robert is

a loveable ham and

he was just into all of it.

"I'm Freddy, and this is for you."

(laughing maniacally)

You could see the twinkle

in his eye when he gets underneath

all that makeup and -- be it

rapping with the Fat Boys,

"It's time for Freddy."

or selling his own 900 number,

"Freddy Krueger is just a phone call away."

-- he's having the time of his life.

You suddenly become woven into Americana

then and you become legendary.

When you travel the globe

and you say "Freddy Krueger"

people know who you are talking about.

By the time it got to television, (laughing)

it was so much like, "Ah, they're going to drag this

for every possible venue they can."

We said, "You know,

maybe we can turn this into

a syndicated television show."

The show that wound up being

"Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy's Nightmares."

It was going to really be this novel approach to television.

This was the promise I was told.

That we were gonna be on late at night and

we could be dark and we could really push the envelope.

This show gave a lot of sort of up-and-comers a chance

to, you know, to get a start.

Anybody who wanted to direct one, could direct one, anybody who wanted to be in

one, could be in one, (laughing) anyone who wanted to write one, could write one.

They had a guest star every single week.

Brad Pitt's in there,

Mariska Hargitay.

I got to decapitate Lori Petty.

Not many people have that on their resume

and I'm proud of it.

It was interesting having done a "Friday the 13th"

TV series and then

a "Nightmare on Elm Street" TV series.

Both things really didn't represent

what the movie franchises were.

"Freddy's Nightmares" as a concept

was always anthological

and to have him introduced,

he was the Cryptkeeper,

he was Alfred Hitchcock,

he was Rod Sening.

We were going to call ourselves, like,

a dark, violent "Twilight Zone" with Freddy as a sort of

host and

participant.

I thinkthey basically had him in for, you know,

one day, two days orvmatever,

and did all those things

so he didn't have to go in and out of the makeup.

He was only in the wrap-arounds really to my episode,

but they also asked me to do two of the other wrap-arounds

aside from my show.

And those were getting shot at the same time

you were doing your episodes, so you would, literally,

run to another set, which was not in the same building,

do the stuff with Robert Englund,

and as soon as you yell "Cut!" you ran back and

did your other shot on the other stage.

So, it was crazy. (laughing)

"Freddy's Nightmares" -- certainly a nightmare

in many respects.

In a way it was like film school because I learned

how to really be well prepared when you came on to the set

because you were doomed otherwise. (laughing)

The only thing I could remember about the series

was it was so cheap.

Cheap, cheap, cheap. (laughing)

"No one's perfect, bubble head."

The budgets were quite low and

they went lower as time went on.

I would say by the tenth one they were

pretty miserable and I stopped paying attention.

They really didn't care about the show,

it was just a cash cow, and so we just ran amok.

I mean, we'd do

whatever it was we wanted to do.

"Action! " " B len d-o-m ati c ! ! " (laughing maniacaffy)

All of the early episodes

were originally intended to be

two half hours that were vaguely linked.

And I would say the first five or six episodes

are pretty good.

In fact, I play significantly in one of them.

If you ever see the Pilot for "Freddy's Nightmares"

you'll knowmmat the show is supposed to be.

The "No More Mr. Nice Guy" episode of

"Freddy's Nightmares" was great because

it was the backstory

of Freddy Kru eger. It's the history of how

Freddy became Freddy.

Tobe Hooper did the Pilot.

He's one of my favorite directors, and people,

in Hollywood.

And Tobe did this dark, wonderful Pilot.

"Springwoorfs nightmares are just beginning."

My daughter at that time was 15 years old, or something like

that, and she had just had a birthday and I got

Robert to wish her "Happy Birthday" on camera.

"Happy Birthday, Robin. What are you, 15?"

She was like the star of her school, you know.

"Bet you wish you had a leamefs permit, or better yet,

a drivers license.

Too bad you're not going to see Sweet 16, bitch!" (evil laugh)

We really crossed the boundaries quite often in terms of

what was acceptable on commercial television.

"Freddy's Nightmares" was very politically incorrect.

That was pan of the fun of it.

"Yes-haw! Ride 'em, cowboy!'

"You got any saddle sores yet?"

You could go places that no other show

would let you go.

There are scenes of relatively

graphic sex and violence.

We did shoot a lot of extra footage,

so to speak, (laughing)

and we'd just go, "Yeah, let's have her naked in this shot,"

or something like that. (laughing)

Knowing full well none of this would wind up in the show.

(laughing) Or we'd have some bloodbath knowing it

was gonna get cut anyway, so we'djust do it.

There was lots of that stuff, I mean,

one of the ones I directed

had like a full Peckinpah

male-on-female

violent sequence.

Because it was syndicated it played at different times

in different markets and each of the stations could

put it on whenever they unwanted to.

But what happened was they put us on at

4 and 5, 6 o'clock in the afternoon in the Bible Belt

and there was all this reaction and complaining.

The network clamps down heavily on censorship issues.

The "Safe Sex" episode, which was the last episode

they bought for the first season,

they said, "Cut out eight minutes."

"'l'lme for the Big Bang, Cherry Bomb!" (kissing)

It really was not great television.

I can't bear to watch them now because

they're just so wracked.

"How 'bout I make you a Bloody Harry?"

(screaming)

It was fun. It was fun to do. (laughing)

It has not stood the test of time.

I blame, to some extent, the quality of the

production that really hastened its demise.

Our crew from "Freddy's Nightmares,"

when we were canceled,

went over and took over "Tales from the Crypt"

and single-handedly brought dovm

the budget of that show

so that it was manageable, or that show

would have been long gone, too.

(laughing)

(laughing)

After the stellar box office success of "Dream Master“

and with the series at the height of its popularity,

New Line Cinema decided the time had come to tackle

deeper, more mature themes.

Freddy would become a father.

The story for "Nightmare 5" was

controversial with some people.

I really think that I came up with the story. (laughing)

Because I was a new mother and I was consumed

by my child who could very possibly have been the devil,

he had "Omen" type qualities. (laughing)

I mean, the target audience was originally teenagers

and to scare the holy bejesus out of them and

that teenage audience was now growing up.

And I remember stressing that during

the whole creation of the script.

In the late '80s, early '90s there was

a minor movement in horror.

This kind of hardcore, unbridled,

rock 'n' roll horror fiction.

We were radical, troublemaking horror writers

who all emerged at right about the same time.

Splatterpunk writing had a direct influence on

how the movie fianchises were going.

Basically, as I understand it with "Nightmare 5,"

there was a

Splatterpunk cattle call, vi/nere every horror writer

who was working in that milieu got contacted

by New Line going, "Pitch us."

Mike DeLuca, then a

development guy at New Line,

called me in to ask me if I'd be interested in writing

and I went in and wrote, gave them a treatment called

"Freddy Rules." It posited the existence of a dream reality

location

called "The Coma Pit." It's the one place Freddy's afraid of.

And I was the only person in Hollywood without

a script in their back pocket, so I did not get the job.

DeLuca was a huge fan of "The Light at the End."

That was the first novel that Craig and I wrote,

which was this punk vampire in the subways

of New York, and he was always a fan of this thing.

And out of all the guys that pitched,

Craig and I were the ones that won.

I thought it needed to have those themes

of abortion and birth and motherhood.

These were the elements all coming together

with Alice dreaming her baby's dreams, seeing

Freddy leak into them and then going into Freddy's dreams,

in the unconscious, to find out what made him a monster.

We wrote what we thought was a pretty solid first drafi.

They said, "Well, you know,

you wrote a "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie like

a Stanley Kubrick would do it." And then we said,

"Yeah, cool, huh?" And they said, "No."

And our ass was out the door.

For "Nightmare 3" I had pitched them Freddy as a baby.

And I went in - one of the executives was pregnant at the time -

and I was, literally, picturing, "Picture the claws clawing their

way out." And, no one liked my idea. (laughing)

So then I got a call for "Nightmare 5" and

when they came to me they said,

"Remember wnen you wanted Freddy to have a baby?

Well, we like that idea now.

What if Alice was the mom?"

Without an approved, finished script in hand and with

a looming release date on the calendar, New Line sought out

the next hungry filmmaker who could deliver

a visually stunning "Nightmare" on budget and on schedule.

Stephen Hopkins, who was our director, was terrific.

He had really come from

the an direction world.

He was just so visual.

I guess they'd been seeing a bunch of different people,

but I did big storyboards, I had a lot of ideas about, you know,

the three different scripts they had sent to me.

And Stephen was telling me some ideas and

he started to doodle,

like a cartoon, like a graphic novel.

It was like, "Well, this guy's great."

Stephen was a big comic book buff.

He has tens of thousands of comic books.

Nice English guy, we got along very well,

we were good friends.

Bob was very determined to make this one,

back to being, you know, more serious and creepy, I think.

The idea was to make Freddy scary again because

at this particular point he was definitely in danger of

turning into like a game show host or a breakfast cereal mascot,

which is, of course, what happened.

I got the job on Valentine's Day

and it was out in 3000 cinemas in August.

I think we only had like 4 weeks prep for this film.

I remember, "Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5"

I can't believe they're gettin,' it's so quick.

I mean, they did rush it.

The script wasn't really a complete script

and in the end, I think, Mike DeLuca and I

sort of just got all the different pages and put them into shape.

Basically it came dovm to

Alice is pregnant and

she's gonna give birth to Freddy,

so how was this going to play.

We had to make up a set of rules

for what he was doing to get himself into the real wand,

which may be a little muddy in the movie,

but it was essentially,

get all four of her friends' souls and then get them

into the baby.

Alice,

well, she was an important figure.

The story certainly wasn't finished in the fourth one.

I felt a lot more confident just from my experience

from doing "4" and doing a feature film.

The fact that they even called me back, I was super happy.

I was like, "Yes! They called me back to do another one?"

And I was like, "Lucky. Phew!"

"Through the sm/ining crowd we see Alice

standing with Yvonne, a very grounded black girl."

I thought it was really interesting when I played this character

because you don't always agree with your friends.

"Why don't you take off?"

Hey, you know, sometimes you tell your friend,

"You're full of shit."

Kelly Jo, she rocked.

She was a real firebrand.

"Mark, good-looking, though considerably off-th e-wall, steps into

shot holding a small sketchpad and a large, excessive lollipop."

I actually would have made the character darker.

I wanted him to be a bit more goth,

I wantedjet black hair and like bone shins,

but I got blond hair instead and

shins that looked better on camera, I guess.

It was hard to find the right actor for Joe's part,

the comic book artist.

The Mark characterwas Stephen's idea,

and it was based on Stephen, I would say.

He's a comic book guy.

It was my job to fall in love with Erika

and that wasn't hard.

"Pan over to Greta and her mother standing

at the edge of the group. Greta is living proof of

what God can create when he's having a good day."

I remember that Stephen Hopkins told me that he

chose me because I wasn't afraid to get really ugly. (laughing)

And I guess a lot of girls were concerned with that

and they didn't really want to go that far,

but I did.

Erika was just gorgeous,

she was the funniest one, I think, of the lot.

We didn't really have a bad apple in the bunch.

I think everybody was pretty game for

whatever they could do.

Inspired by the traditions of gothic horror,

the cast and crew of "The Dream Child"

set out to delve even further into the origins of Freddy's evil.

I thinkthe dark, gothic thing was partly me because

I remember Bob Shaye kept on saying, you know,

"Every time he hires Europeans

gargoyles end up on top of buildings,"

and all that kind of stuff. (laughing)

I also had my most thrilling experience on

You were going to see who Freddy's father was

in the asylum and it was Robert Englund without makeup,

with my hair all greased back to show my bald spot.

I play Amanda Krueger,

the nurse who gets locked into the asylum.

It was a dream sequence.

'Hove the sort of Roger German, you know,'

huge,

just the way the asylum looks.

And I got locked in a room and they'd gotten

every performance art actor

where they all got to do their crazy,

psycho snake pit, "Cuckoo's Nest" thing.

What you see is what you get, I mean,

it was a big room.

Hundreds of men walking around, acting crazy.

It got a little hinky, 'cause those actors

they got a little, you know,

it was like a mob.

And when they said, "Roll," on that

I was like, "Oh my gosh."

Yeah, I was really fighting the flow for a while

with those guys, 'cause not all of them were film actors

and they wouldn't hold back.

Like, "This is scary, this is really scary."

But it's a very effective sequence

and it looks like a trillion bucks.

The idea of a thousand maniacs (laughing)

raping a nun, that's always good stuff.

On "Elm Street 5," the changes

on Freddy were to make him a little more

aged

and a little more weathered.

They brought David Miller back because

they wanted to refine the makeup,

make it easier, make it simpler.

I just felt - and I don't knowvimat the limitations were,

maybe it was time, maybe it was money --

that the makeup for "Pan 5" was nowhere as

refined as the one that Kevin Yagher did.

Freddy gets born in that crazy birth sequence, (laughing)

he comes shooting out like the "Alien" out of her vagina

and runs all over the place. (laughing)

But it was quite disgusting, too.

We made a little puppet,

it was a little foam rubber puppet

and it had mechanics in the eyes and mouth.

I got to play with him off set

and I was making him do this.

That was kind of when we were

at the height of the latex prosthetic

monster innovation

period, right in the heartbeat before CGI.

It was a little challenging because

he had to go from being newborn

little baby,

all the way up 'til the final Freddy look.

We actually had a small person

for Freddy to make the set look bigger as the altar

rose out of the thing.

In the church scene

where I encounter Freddy

and I tell him that his birth was the

curse on the mmole of humanity,

"I will not allow it to happen again."

It was also very upsetting as a mother, 'cause Freddy curses.

"We'll see, bitch."

I'm his mom and I just didn't think that was very nice.

There was exactly one line of our dialogue lefi in the film,

"W5 a boy!"

but it's also the one they used

for the poster, so that worked out okay.

"Jacob, a boy of about six or seven years

stands there, watching Alice. He's frail. Other worldly.

Not ghost-like, but possessing a strange, transcendent quality."

The first day, admittedly, I was scared because

Robert's there and he's on set,

automatically looks over

(laughing) and he points at me and he walks

towards me, and I almost took a dump at that point.

The kid is terrific, he'sjust wonderful.

He'd gone through quite a diff cult period

of his life during that film.

My dad passed away in real life.

He was my hero and I loved him and it was really great

to get to work, you know, and kind of forget about it

and be in a real state of imagination,

which is what that set was.

Amid constant script changes and a rushed production

schedule, the cast and crew of "Nightmare 5"

were left to wonder how, or even if, the finished film would play.

Now "Nightmare 5" is shooting,

having gone through all of these other writers,

they bring it back to me --

the movie that I couldn't get hired to write -

they brought it back to me for dialogue polish.

I remember the script was changing

as we were going through it.

We were just racing to do it, and I mean,

I didn't really have much time to miss things that weren't there.

L, eventually, just stopped trying to memorize scenes

because I knew they'd be different the next day.

We would just put together sequences and

solve problems with storyboard ideas

when we couldn't figure out what to do.

He would sit while were doing the scene, literally, and go,

"it'll look like this," you know, and draw the picture.

There wasn't always a lot of direction happening.

Stephen was spread really thin and, he said at one point,

"You're gonna pretty much have to

direct yourself in these scenes."

We were at an old, like I think it was a Spaghetti Factory

or something like that, where they made noodles.

And there were sets

everywhere.

We'd have to shush people because they were

trying to build while we were shooting.

There were all these different levels there

and he'd be running up and down stairs

to all the different locations.

As I'm talking about it, I can't believe we actually did

all this stuff. I mean, I wouldn't even attempt it now.

If someone showed you a schedule to try and attempt to do

all these physical effects or something, you'd just laugh.

"This boy feels the need for speed."

I was the first one to die in

but it was a cool death scene.

They were working with special effects to build

a running motorcycle that looked like it had been beat to hell.

Every time he was getting stabbed by

something from the motorcycle,

it was starting to convert him into the iron man.

And, you know, I took a lot of influence from

Giger, I think, at the time, you know,

and a couple other great artists.

It was pretty fun to work with all that stuff and

make it look the way it did, because even today

people are like, "Wow."

Right on camera it was really good because

you could see the stuff

moving under the skin.

A lot of it was done in reverse,

you know, he had prosthetics put underneath the skin,

which would pull out.

We did tests and tests and tests.

We started with the hypodermics

then we injected this chemical into it.

“Oh, nice.“ "Bkchin." “Cool?

The biggest thing, though,

was of course the suit. We had to

build the suit -- boom -- ground up.

We didn't have time to do castings, molds.

The stunt driver was going to be wearing it.

He came over at least ten times to do fittings

and we actually had Dan wear the head one time for

a close-up of just his eyes.

The end of the scene, they put me inside

a cab of a truck with all this makeup, a thing on my eye

and this whole neck piece and I look just wrecked.

And I have a line where I'm like, "Hey, Alice."

"Want to make babies?"

People were pulling over and then I stepped out

and they're like, "Oh my God." (laughing)

And we're like, "No, it's a movie, it's a movie."

But it looked so real and it was pretty fun.

It was like the best

Halloween costume I've ever had.

I was devastated

when I found out they were cutting it dovm.

I've seen the uncut version and the cut version,

and the cut version is just so truncated.

There's a snake hose thing that comes out

of the exhaust pipe

and it stabs the back of his calf. It's like,

everything is just about to happen

and they cut.

(screaming)

We just had to keep on cutting and cutting and cutting.

We were sending it back and forward to the MPAA,

I don't know, twenty times or so.

They cut out half of everything we did.

(screaming)

Well, every sequence in that went a lot further.

That's about the best way to describe it.

"Open wide!"

My favorite kill would be Greta.

I think Greta's is really cool.

I really do like that one a lot.

Iwent to high school with a girl named Greta

who became a model and was as anorexic as possible.

Then there was the Monty Python

"Meaning of Life" eating scene.

It just became almost like a vomiting food fight,

I mean, it really was gross.

All the people at the dinner party were

all laughing and there was something

clownish and weird about it.

I like Greta's mom.

"Don't talk with your mouth full, dear."

Todd Masters did my makeup and

he was fantastic and the first day that

I went in for a makeup test,

we did everything in three stages.

Spent a lot of time with Todd

just moving my mouth around and my jaw to see

what was the most horrifying way to sell it. (laughing)

And they wouldn't let me eat.

They told me that I had to have everything

through a straw and we had

long days and I got hungry.

And on, like, the third day or something I just said,

"You know, forget it. I'm gonna eat, I don't care."

They served spaghetti with tomato sauce and

all that tomato sauce was living in the pocket of

my chin and I could smell it all day, it was gross.

And I haven't done heavy prosthetics ever since. (laughing)

They actually gave me a copy of Erika's head

that didn't work for them,

and I teased her one time that it was my bath toy

and she kind of freaked out. (laughing)

Greta's death was deemed to be

much too foul.

I just know that the scene

was much longer.

Much longer and gorier.

I think Freddy fed herself to herself in the end.

But it just kind of just happened super fast,

the way that it ended up.

I don't think it uvas as good,

it didn't have as much impact.

It's so silly in nature to take it seriously.

I think if we had longer post

we could've fought more about it.

Well, the diving board

scene was complicated because

I had food poisoning.

I was so sick.

I thought I was going to die.

But, you know, the show must go on.

That was, maybe, one of the more complicated ones

because everything about it was stop-motion animation.

We did lots of stop-motion animation in the film.

We had made foam claws, you know,

at the end of the diving board,

that we animated frame by flame.

And then the background was projected.

It was a rear-screen projection.

And that board had to tum into a claw.

And that was a difficult one for Kelly to act

because she had nothing to work with.

I had never done anything with

special effects before.

'Cause it's one thing to see it and you're on the set

and then really come to life and you're seeing it on the film.

There's something, to this day I think,

stop-motion gets that nothing else does.

Digital doesn't really do it

because, in the end, stop-motion just charms you, I think.

I think I was surprised

that that character lived.

(laughing) Freddy did not kill the black girl!

I know that he did in another series,

but he didn't get me.

The ultimate thing that I learned from

this uvhole experience was that

hell is writing for other people.

We had this elaborate sequence

in this artist's loft where all of her artworks came to life

and it uvas really cool. And, eventually, it got turned,

in the subsequent 13 drafts,

into a comic book scene where Freddy's on a skateboard.

'

Obviously, the comic book sequence itself

is preposterous.

I think I put the superhero sequences in

'cause I'm a comic book freak.

'

I love the reinforcement of the nightmare of the boy

falling into his own cartoons.

Mark being sucked into the comic book

was pretty straighfom/ard and

easy, I think. That was pure animation.

The whole set

km my death scene was painted mack and mite..

You would think it uvas

just color taken out of the film, but no.

When they shot those, they made my face really red,

they got really bright

clothes that I was supposed to be in,

then they keyed everything back.

That was an interesting day. That was, you know,

another actor doing the kind of cartoon Freddy in that.

"Black and White Freddy leaps to his feet!

He is now transformed into Super Freddy."

They took Robert Englund's prosthetics

and fit them on my face

and then put other bits and pieces in there,

'cause I have a bigger head than he has.

The design for the Phantom Prowler had the 9 mm.

Th at was the first time I ever shot

a9mm.

Just having it "chbk-click" like that, (gunshot)

that was really fun.

That lightning bolt on my shin wasn't

supposed to be there, but

one of the squibs went off and my shirt caught on fire.

For me, I thought that uvas normal.

It's kind of crazy to think of what

I had to do just for those couple lines.

The interesting thing is my death scene,

I had almost nothing to do with it.

We used a replacement animation series

of cut-outs and I animated it

frame by flame

to finish the action.

That's the one that took the slash.

So, it was all done in the camera, basically,

there was no

opticals involved.

I was, I found out afler it happened,

and I saw

Kelly Jo and Lisa crying and

they were shooting the scene after

I'd died and they said,

"You died last night."

And I went, "Huh? What?"

After we finished, I finish ed the Freddy Krueger stuff,

the next thing you know I was laying in bed with this hot chick.

You see those two bodies at the beginning

when the credits are rolling and they're making love.

That's me.

It was just sort of a supposed, you know,

stylized love sequence we were shooting.

And they said, "So Michael,

what would you think about doing a love scene?"

I said, "As Super Freddy?"

And he's buff, (laughing) he's like Lou Ferrigno buff.

So, it's like, however they made it look,

it made me look good.

Thanks, Michael.

Definitely an experience. I'm like, "Damn, this is Hollywood.

I love it. I want to do this more ofien."

After the loss of Dan and her friends, the stage was now set

for Alice's final showdown with Freddy.

But with the fate of Alice's unbom dream child

hanging in the balance,

the filmmakers were desperate to find

yet another fitting end for Freddy Krueger.

We had no ending to this movie, so

Stephen did some wonderful sketches.

The exorcism sequence is something I wanted to do

'cause I'm a big "Exorcist" fan and I stuck it in.

Stephen had such a vision

for that set. it was just in credible.

There was a certain quiet eeriness about it.

It was mind-bending to work out

because you had to really,

really work out in your head not

the reality of what was going on, but

the unreality. So getting all the angles right and stuff.

I had to hang upside down.

It was the single-most diff cult thing

I had to do, though, in any of the movies.

I mean, the moment they said "Cut" it was

"Guys, come and lift me up."

But, you know, the blood rushes to your head.

There were so many high points in visual effects

and fantasy in the film, trying to beat them all

at the end was pretty tough.

Mostly, what I remember about "Nightmare 5"

was that it gave K.N.B. the opportunity to really go nuts.

We basically handled this transformation sequence

where Lisa turns into Freddy and then splits.

I had to wear the Freddy makeup for a mmole day,

about twelve hours.

It was not comfortable. (laughing)

And in the final stage

it was Lisa's head and Robert's head, you know,

it's a puppet head in like this

and then pulled apart like this.

It was a challenge wnen Freddy's

coming out of me.

There's a paraplegic gentleman there

and she was having to hang onto him.

They took his, you know, legless torso

and kind of harnessed it to Lisa Wilcox's body.

He was on wires, I mean,

it was just endless.

I don't know, in a million years I wouldnt have thought

they would find a legless actor to do that.

Probably no one's seen anything quite like the final battle of

"Nightmare on Elm Street." It came out of desperate

script writing at the end, trying to work out

really how to end it and

how to show this kid's anger with Freddy.

I'd say, "I kill Freddy."

And they'd say, "How?" and I'd go,

"How do I describe that?" I, and literally this is the only way

that a 10- or 11-year-old can describe it,

"I barf on him."

That's what I would say.

I'd say I barf on him and it

goes through him and there's

heads on it.

Having all these creatures

that Freddy had eaten

coming out of his chest on long tendrils

like umbilical chords, which were all

on wires and puppets.

Visually very interesting,

but I think that a lot of those things were

attempts to cover the fact that they had

liposuctioned all the soul and intelligence out of the story.

I don't think you can ever kill Freddy, right?

I mean, you can do what you like,

he doesn't exist, he's a dream.

He was still struggling at the end to get out.

I think it's one of the things about a bad guy:

that is, you can't kill him.

You can make as many as you like.

After four hugely successful "Nightmares",

each one having outperformed the last, "The Dream Child"

was released less than a year after its predecessor

on August 11 , 1989 to generally negative reviews,

becoming the lowest grossing film of the series.

People forget, "Nightmare on Elm Street 5"

was a success - it was even a hit --

it just wasn't a blockbuster.

I think it came out very quickly after "4"

and I'm not sure ifthafs, you know,

it's a little less of an event.

Stephen did a lot of wonderful,

disorienting work on that.

I thought he did a wonderful job,

so I wouldn't blame necessarily any of the people

making the movie.

Maybe it was the fact that Freddy was a little played out.

This was a period mmere, fans will tell you,

the series was in decline.

And I tried to live up to the promise that I made to the fans

that we were not going to make a movie that

we did not think was going to be good,

"5" was arguably lame.

Honestly I wish it was scarier. If it's a series,

you have to work really hard at

keeping it at what it's original roots were

and I think it kind of strayed fiom that.

As an ongoing narrative

of what happens to everybody

on Elm Street,

probably a lesser movie in the canon.

I have to take some of the blame for

"Nightmare 5" not working

since the story was so much a pan of

what I wanted to say.

They touched on some really serious issues.

Abortion. I mean, that's heavy.

I don't think it was the "Pro-choice Nightmare."

I think it was like

controversy for controversy's sake

and if we made a political point, fine.

So it's like the "Juno" of horror movies. (laughing)

I guess she should have aborted him, right?

Maybe it shows abortion's a good thing. (laughing)

After the disappointment of "The Dream Child,"

New Line Cinema found itself at a crossroads with

the future of Freddy Krueger,

prompting their boldest move yet.

Frankly, like with everything in the world,

it's time to move on. I mean, we were

truly running out of good ideas

and I sensed that.

And so they wanted to do, you know,

what could they do to go outwith a bang.

The only way now to revive it after "5"

hadn't been as successful, is let's make sure that

everyone knew it was the last "Nightmare."

So it will be the end of Freddy,

we'll kill off Freddy and it's the end.

There was always multiple drafts going

and I had been a big, big fan of a young

New Zealand filmmaker by the name of Peter Jackson

and I'd been talking him up for a while

and I made the case.

Peter and his -- he had a writing partner at that time

named Danny Mulharen --

the two of them wrote a script.

Peter Jackson, actually, he tu med out a draft of "Elm Street 6."

He was in our offlce typing away at the time.

In his conception Freddy is this kind of.

Tired, decrepit figure. No one takes him

seriously anymore.

In fact, in the ultimate sort of insult,

kids put themselves to sleep with

laughing gas or sleeping pills just so they can go and

kick him and beat on him,

kind of "Clockwork Orange"-style.

That's what the kids of Elm Street do now

'cause he's such a joke.

And at one point, you know, Freddy sort of manages

to kill one of these kids, you know,

just enough to sort of get some energy back.

And there's a cop. He gets involved in

a fire in a house and is sort of

knocked out and ends up in a coma.

And because he's in the coma,

he's permanently in Freddy-world.

When "Nightmare 6" came up I basically said,

"Would you allow me to direct it?"

You've given me these promotions and

they expected me to come back and produce it.

So, Peter and Danny were writing this draft and

DeLuca was also writing a drafi

-- totally different -- and

that draft became "Freddy's Dead."

I said, "We shouldn't call it "Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6,"

we should call it "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare,"

which everyone loved.

When the smoke cleared, everyone decided that

DeLuca's script for Rachel was the way to go.

But, you know, the great benefit of

what Peter and Danny did

is through that process of really working at New Line,

that sort of sealed Peters introduction

to Shaye and really laid the foundation for

what would come mu ch later,

which was "Lord of the Rings."

I was happy to do "6" because of Rachel.

Rachel was getting to direct.

I go way back to Roger Corman days with Rachel.

I was very excited to hear she was

directing one of them,

that's, I thought,

"Wow, that's a great story."

Going from sitting in an office desk

to going up to directing one of the films.

For the first time in Elm Street's history,

the story moved from suburban Springwood -

the now abandoned tov\m that Krueger had all but destroyed -

to an inner city shelterv\mere a young man with no memory,

a group of outcast teens and a woman with a secret,

battled Freddy once and for all.

It was very diff cult making the choice

of Shun Greenblatt.

I know that we had the most difficulty casting that pan

because the pan was, you know,

somebody who doesn't have a memory.

"Close up on an eighteen-year-old named John.

His face betrays a map of anxieties, an expression

better suited to a middle-aged neurotic."

You think I'm Freddy's son, that was the big hook.

You know, Freddy had a child, who was he,

how come I'm still alive

all the other kids are dead in Springwood.

Then using that as a catalyst for the story

and for Freddy's character,

to use me as a catalyst

to get out of Springwood

to torment the rest of the world.

The kids I remember because you fall in love with,

you know, you meet all these really interesting kids.

"Carlos, a 16-year-old deaf boy,

"narrates" like a sports commentator as Tracy

rigorously works out on a punching bag."

I was supposed to play the lead.

I was brought in to play Shun Greenblatfs pan.

When I read the script I just felt

more connected to Carlos.

I immediately clicked with the character

when I read it and that's how I do everything.

I guess you could say, you know,

worked out for me and worked out for him.

Then I got this wonderful actress,

Lezlie Deane, who starred

for me in "976-EVIL"

New evocative of Jodie Foster 'amen she was young..

"Maggie tums and moves toward

two security guards struggling with

a seventeen-year-old gin named Tracy."

Well I think Rachel read the scene with me and

we actually, you know, got up and started fighting.

We got like a little like, "yeah, yeah, yeah."

It got aggressive, I mean, you know

in a safe kind ofway, but it was really,

that was actually one of the

funnest interviews I'd ever done before.

Breckin Meyers an amazing guy.

He's come a long way,

he's got a great career going right now.

He's a good guy. Lezlie Deane's one of my best fiiends.

We all stayed connected, which was really cool.

Me and Ricky and Breckin, I mean,

we were like

three peas in a pod.

You couldn't separate us.

Then we got class actors in there,

like Lisa Zane and

Yaphet Kotto giving it gravitas.

"We see that Maggie's a striking woman,

lucky enough to possess that rare combination

of beauty, strength, and confidence."

She was, you know, somehow innerly compelled

to protect children, not knowing what

her own secret was yet.

Lisa Zane I really liked for the pan

because she had this sort of waif-like feel that

you sometimes thought she was quite lost.

You can't keep your eyes off her on the set.

She's like a cat, she's so feline.

And she would throw you offtrack.

You would never believe that she was

Freddy's daughter in some way.

'They said,'

"You're his daughter and

you get to kill him."

I was like, "Wow, alright.

That sounds pretty good.

Can I get that in m/riting?" (laughing)

If you're going to make a story about Freddy's daughter

then you're talking about the mythology to start with,

so that was basically where we

started with the original story ideas.

Rachel, you know, certainly had

a bit of a stain from her work with John Waters,

you know, she has that sensibility.

Let's not be coy about this.

A lot of the crew members were

John Waters crew members.

Our Prop Master at the time was married to Traci Lords. I mean,

you know, it just doesn't get any better than that. (laughing)

We set out to have fun on that movie and

there's stuff in that movie that I love.

The first scene

in the airplane, the beautiful,

robust actress to my right

was actually a replacement.

The original person who was supposed to do that role was

the great Divine,

who had passed away

right before we started shooting.

We intentionally made a decision, you know,

to kind of do a Warner Bros. cartoon.

It was just after "Twin Peaks" came out and so

there's a huge influence of "Twin Peaks" in it,

which is why I went toward humor, quirky humor

more than horror.

It does have a great sight gag, though,

when Freddy drags out

the big can of spikes.

That image in my mind

is like Bugs Bunny doing it in

some old Bugs Bunny cartoon that I loved.

There's a town just full of adults who are sad

because their children are gone and

seeing that carnival scene

with all the adults wandering

around kind of aimlessly and heartbroken.

The carnival scene was so creepy

because there weren't any kids left but us.

And we wanted it to be chock full of cameos.

We got

Tom and Roseanne in that,

who were like the biggest tabloid couple

in the world at that time.

Obviously they weren't doing it for the money

or anything else; they were doing it

because they were a fan of the series

and they were like wanting to be

a pan of the last one.

They just spent most of theirtime

pawing each other.

Dry humping each other

in the makeup trailer, you know. (laughing)

And I get kissed on the face

by Roseanne. I mean, that was amazing.

Unfortunately, we ended up keeping her

for like the whole day. I think she thought she'd be in

and out in two hours.

I think it was not a good experience for her.

One of the cool things was the kid Carlos

who wore the hearing aid.

"Aaaaahhh, mommy, not my ear!"

The q-tip from hell.

Any child who's ever had an earache

knows what it's like when somebody comes

towards you with a q-tip.

Canes' death, which I think is probably

the most effective death that I did in "Freddy's Dead."

We worked our butts off to do that.

I mean, just the makeup every day,

to put the earpiece on that you saw.

You know, I was in four hours of makeup

before we even started shooting.

We were shooting

in this electric plant

that was like the real deal.

We weren't allowed to get any blood in there,

but we had to blow the kid's head up.

It was sort of a "Scanners" kind of a deal.

And Bob wanted to do something more

interesting and he had this idea that we could

blow the head up like puzzle pieces.

Weird, organic head parts.

And I really now wish that we had done

something like that, that was more visual

and more interesting.

"Nice hearing from you, Canes." (laughing)

When Breckin did the whole

video game and got sucked into

the TV, and to see that mmole thing on set,

was, you know, was really cool.

Some of the scripts, the writers will indict

a particular teen fad and

Freddy kind of throws it back

at 'em, you know.

I mean, "Nightmare 6" when he says,

"Great graphics,"

you know, is like

one of the first gamerjokes ever.

Before the Wii,

Nintendo had this Power Glove

it didn't work at all, but

was this totally groovy looking glove,

and you sort of moved it around like the Wii and said,

"Now I'm playing with power."

And we wanted to use the Power Glove

and Nintendo said, "No." And Bob said,

"I don't care that they said no, I'm going to do it anyway."

"Now I'm playing with power."

I really want to do this and it's really a great line, but I think it's

really risky. Bob said, "I don't care," you know, "whatever."

And we used it and it's great and it sold more Power Gloves

and Nintendo never sued. (laughing)

But that's the kind of maverick Bob story that I absolutely love.

One of the more disturbing scenes in the movie

deals with child molestation.

It was really interesting whenever I shot

the scene with my father. I thought to myself,

"God this scene's coming really easy to me,

I don't have to go prepare for it or anything.

And I was like, that's cool in a way because it wasn't

really hard work. And then, maybe three weeks later

after that, I started getting flashes

of being molested. It was weird how

it just sort of pulled that scar back.

Ultimately, in her dream, she sort of realizes her fantasy

and she beats the crap out of this guy

that's been abusing her.

That scene actually changed my life.

It set me on a journey in life

of dealing with things and

dealing with my own fears.

So that scene right there was very poignant.

I think all that father-daughter stufiis nasty and cool

and no one could've come up with that but Rachel.

We were doing the fighting scene

and he went back like that to hit me

with his glove and he actually

hit me.

I had to go to the hospital, get stitches,

get a tetanus shot. So, I have a scar.

So that scar on me I get to look at every day

in the mirror and be reminded of Robert Englund.

Why does Lezlie Deane survive

in that movie? She has no business

surviving in that movie.

Way too many people survive in that movie.

It's ridiculous.

It was important to me to

come up with things that

expanded the mythology.

And I think that was important in order to kill Freddy,

that you had to understand more about his backstory.

And in the original script,

there was this sequence that was described as

"a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride through his psyche,"

and that sounded wild.

I thought it was a really clever way of

making you feel a little sorry for him or

vulnerable for a split second.

I get offers all the time to play villains in

certain things and, at that point, when they said

to play Freddy's father, I said, "Well,

as long as I don't have to look like Alice Cooper.

If I can look like a hayseed,

really degenerate, old drunk."

I thought I'd play the most disgusting

father I can play.

The coolest thing ever (laughing)

was getting Alice Cooper and

the most excited I'd ever seen the crew.

I mean, the crews excited to see

Johnny Depp and all that,

but, the crew having Alice Cooper on set

was like, "Aaaahhhh!"

I always knew they'd find a way

to blame me for Freddy. (laughing)

I got blamed for the Vietnam War, for everything else.

That was very cooLA lot of people wanted

to killAlice Cooper, you know, early on in his career,

and I got to.

Tobe Sexton, who played young Freddy,

really had it dovm.

To play the young version of Freddy Krueger

was something I really took seriously and

something I really took time to, like, work on.

And, actually, I met up with Robert Englund and

found out about the character, how he did the voice,

where he kind of brought it from.

'Cause I thinkthafs kind of the essence of Freddy.

And he really did play it well.

He really had the eyes down on the mmole thing.

There was a secondary scene there

where he goes after me with a blade,

but maybe it was too heavy.

"Go inside honey."

You see Freddy and his daughter,

you see her as a little girl in that creepy backyard.

Working on this film as a little girl, was a really

terrifying experience, to say the least. (laughing)

This is supposed to be my father and he's,

you know, brutally murdering

my mother, banging her head against the

house. And seeing that, the tears just kind of

started to flow.

You know, I just went with it and tried

to imagine that that uvas really happening.

For Kruegefis last stand, New Line Cinema tried

to live up to the promise to save the best for last,

employing a gimmick that would make

Freddy's finale trulyjump off the screen.

There's the great thing that Rachel came up with

and for me, it's that wonderful 3-D sequence.

The 3-D element was, again, a gimmick

that we thought could revive the series.

This idea of doing the last ten minutes in 3-D,

which was a tremendously complex technology at that point.

I don't kn ow if the 3-D was really all that effective.

The audience didn't know when

to put on the glasses, they weren't sure

when they were supposed to do it.

When Maggie in the film puts on her 3-D glasses

that's wnen you put on yours, at the very end

"You're going to need these 3-D

glasses to navigate the dreamscape.

Put 'em on now."

It was funny to watch people, like, that didn't know,

were going, "What's wrong with the screen."

They're like, "You're supposed to put on the glasses."

They're like, "Oh, okay."

How about Freddy Kru eger

in IMAX in 3-D like "Avatar"? (laughing)

We actually did some groundbreaking work

at that point on the technology,

but a lot of it didn't work.

She just had mejut some things

toward camera

in an unnatural wvay a few times.

This camera was like huge and

it was like a million dollar camera.

You had to be so precise

in hitting your marks,

otherwise the whole gag wouldn't work.

Rachel was really on the cutting edge and,

you know, the little dream

demons that she wanted in there

they were all CGI

in a time where nobody did CGI.

PM was into he'

beginning of the computer technology because

they were working with, they had been working

with Jim Cameron on "Terminator 2." And at one point -

and they'll kill me for telling this story -

they sent us a clip from "Terminator 2"

with our footage of Arnold on the bike.

Jim Cameron would never, like that would be

the end of our career forever, if he ever knew

that one piece of his footage got out by mistake.

I'm like, "I'm cutting this into my film." (laughing)

I love the fight, the big fight to the death, though.

That was my favorite.

It wasn't clearly

imagined, in terms of what awful things

they'd be doing to each other,

so, a lot of it was sort of

invented there on the set.

And I'm having to hold this, like, pipe bomb

with the sparkles coming out.

And we're gonna blow up Freddy

and his, you know, snot, blood and

bones is gonna be all over your lap.

We blew the shit out of him.

And in Freddy's case I would argue,

at some level, his death

in "The Dream Master" and

in "Dream Warriors" are

more fitting final deaths

than the death he gets in

Given the fact that we've done

several others alter--

Freddy didn't really die -- it makes

that one look a little more

facetious, I guess, in its execution.

On September 13, 1991, fans swarmed

to the final "Nightmare" and the film delivered

a box office take that showed even in death,

there might still be some life left in Freddy.

As one of the publicity stunts for the film,

they created Freddy's funeral.

Freddy's funeral was held

at the Hollywood Forever Cemetary

kind of to put a cap on the whole

wand of Freddy Krueger.

They brought the press in and

we all had to stand over a fake coffin

with Freddy's stuff all around it.

And I had to go and look mournful.

There was a bunch of other cast members from other

movies of the "Elm Street" series there.

It was like a big reunion.

It was like a burial, like a real burial deal.

It was a really clever way, once again,

of them promoting the film, of going,

"Guys, this is it.

This is the last one. He's dead and gone."

Freddy's really dead this time. Not.

I remember seeing on Fifth Avenue a bus rolls by and

there was the poster "Freddy is Dead," and I said,

"Well, it must mean that they've milked the

cow as much as they could," you know. (laughing)

it wasn't standing very tall itself and then,

so after that, we realized that

we were at the end of the line.

We jumped the shark a little. I'm not going to denythat.

But we wanted to. We wanted to do the movie we made.

"I'll get you, my pretty!"

"And you're little dog, too!"

But it may have been a mistake

to take it so humorous. I think

we shouldve gone from the humor into something

that was more scary.

I think because we thought it was gonna be

the last one, I think it was okay to kind of deconstruct

and self-destruct.

I told everyone it was going to be the last one, of course,

but I didn't know. (laughing)

"Freddy's dead."

"Is there any chance he's going to be coming back?"

No.

No, no, no.

No, no, no.

No.

'(Freddys evil laughter)'

'(Freddys evil laughter)'

Now that Freddy was dead and buried

and with the tenth anniversary of

the original "Elm Street" approaching,

the inevitable question was raised:

Could everyone's favorite boogeyman be resurrected again?

The answer to that question would

come from Wes Craven himself,

who conceived a radical new approach to the story.

Most people say their sequels are the last sequels

that are going to be made and then they make ten more.

We didn't know that we were going

to be able to work with Wes again.

And the way "New Nightmare" happened was

I got a call from Bob Shaye out of the blue.

And, to his credit, he said,

"I've heard some interviews with you saying you felt you

didn't get a fair shake and I'd like to try to make that better."

And he did. He went back

and gave me retroactive cuts in sequels and he

also gave me a little bit of the merchandising, and so forth.

Wes and I had ironed out our differences

and I was anxious to do something with Wes.

And he said, "Look,

we killed Freddy, we admit it. We said he was dead forever,

but we thought maybe there's one more film there."

Wes has to come back and answer his critics

and finally put the nail in the coffin, and

apologize a little bit for "Freddy's Dead."

I went off and looked at all the other films and said,

I don't know how I can make any sense of it.

And then it kind of jumped the shark and thought,

I'll do it about all the different people who

participated in the first one.

There was the idea, well, Robert's not Freddy, you know,

Freddy is Freddy. Freddy is an entity unto itself,

that is now out of control and, once again,

it is allowed to be terrifying.

"Miss me?"

Because there was no place else logically

to go that was original and suddenly it was like,

"Wait a minute. We can do this

and make some interesting comments."

Bringing a menace into the real world

from your imagination and having

that menace not go away,

is a terrific idea.

It was so special and unique that it was

worth reviving the whole series.

I was very consciously taking the reality of the first film

and bringing it over into "real life" in a way

that it was always quoting the original.

(screaming)

Well, it was really cool to see my name in a script.

But then after I digested the uvhole idea, then I thought,

"Well, you know, average people are going to think that this is

really about me and this is my story or something like that."

Heather had gone on and done a television series,

"Just the Ten of Us,"

which was very, very sort of mom-and-apple-pie-ish.

Just by coincidence -- and it wasn't planned

on the pan of the producers or anything -

three of us had been on

"Nightmare on Elm Street" movies.

So it was definitely a running inside joke on the set.

This looks like something out of "Nightmare on Elm Street"

I still get all of these letters from people

with this fascination of the Lubbock babes from

"Just the Ten of Us" all being Freddy Krueger

you know, victims.

As it turns out, a stalker that had started, you know,

calling Heather at all odd hours and

threatening her life,

turned out to be a fan who was ticked off

because the series had been stopped.

And, as a result, I ended up moving to London

for a couple, maybe five months just getting axnray from it all.

And it struck me as such an incredible irony

that everybody had been telling me

my mmole career that, "What you're writing is bad

and it's going to make people want

to go out and kill somebody."

And it was afan of this

very bland show that actually

tumed out to be threatening.

And so this idea,

I think it was maybe some food

for Wes' thought process.

Wes came to me and said he had been

talking to Heather a little bit about how

if he can delve into her private life

and put some of it on the screen

and would I mind if he screwed around

with me a little bit.

There was a theme of how this actual movie

we had all participated in had kind of

haunted our lives and, in a sense, made it

like we could not be something

totally different from that film ever.

So I said, "Yeah, count me in,"

you know, "I'm on board."

And then I saw the script and I loved it.

I pitched that to Bob and

I remember just thinking and saying,

"And Bob, you'll have a big scene."

(laughing) He says, "Ah, I kind of like that."

I don't think I did a particularly good job,

but it was okay.

"Oh come on, Heather, kids love horror."

It was kind of like a valentine to

the fans.

And, at the sametime,

it was a great reunion for us.

And also I think we all got to go,

"What have we done?"

It was like everybody that worked on the first one

had come back and it was just

interesting to see how they'd grown

and how their careers had changed.

Coming back to work with Wes is always a treat.

I came back, not as a teacher, but as a nurse,

so, but, it was still one of those generic public servants.

(laughing)

John Saxon had renaissanced, yet again.

This guy's the guy that's worked with

everybody from Elvis to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Redford

and Bruce Lee and Freddy Krueger and everybody else.

I suppose I imagined it might be the last.

It sounded like a fin ale.

All the other directors had been first-timers

and they had to be

helped through a little bit, but

Wes was, by then, the master.

It was a very pleasant film. I remember

how fun it was and what a sense of

love there was on the set.

Not to be mushy, but just everybody

really liked each other and was having

a great time.

'(practical joke, laughter on set)'

Heather Langenkamp

playing herself was so

smart and one of her best performances ever.

And she was, you know, a young mother

at the time and so finding all those

elements from her own reality, that she

could bring into the movie, worked so beautifully.

Some of the things that Wes kind of brought in

that were similar, is that I'm married to a makeup artist.

"Chase Porter, good-looking, early 30s, tweaks the levers of a

remote control device."

I was playing Heather's real life husband, David, who was

Wes' special effects guy, who didn't want to play himself

because it would be a curse.

So, I was more concerned about the curse.

When lwent in and met all the real

special effects team that were doing the movie

and I met David, I realized, like, lwasthe least

non-special effects looking guy on the planet. They're like

blue-collar, hardworking,

beard. They all had heavy metal T-shins on,

they all looked like they hadn't slept in about nine years.

I'm like the dorkiest special effects guy ever.

"Behind them, at the edge of the set, Chase's wife,

Heather Langenkamp, 30, dressed in woman's pajamas,

and his son Dylan, 5,

watch from their ch airs."

I remember having a blast on this film.

This was, every day was an adventure.

Who doesn't want to be chased around

by Freddy when they're 7, like, for real.

We got along, you know,

just like mom and son.

And I was, of course, very protective ofhim.

He had some scenes where

he had to really go through

difficult emotional things.

And there was a time when his parents came to me and said,

"We have a way to make him cry and we don't like to do it

too often, but we'll do it." I said, "Okay, fine." And so

the mother lefi the set and the father Whispered in his ear

and said, "OK, your mothers dead." (laughing)

And after he'd go through some hellacious scene,

his reward was a Happy Meal.

I don't think horror movies or being a kid

in a horror movie is inherently bad or going to do any

psychological damage or anything like that.

All little kids do anyway is play pretend,

so if you can do it professionally, rock it.

"Heather opens the door to Julie, a direct, open-faced

young woman."

Even though most of the people in the film

had been in the original film, I didn't feel at all

like I wasn't a pan of the group

or pan of the ensemble.

In the original script that I read,

Julie, the babysitter, was a pawn of Freddy's.

Julie was the stalker, Julie was the one

harrassing them. Julie, yeah,

she was all those things.

Wes said to all of us that, "You might be the one

that's causing this," and so, but none of us really,

we didn't really need to know that in order to play the part.

I had done a number of films with David Cronenberg:

"Scanners," "Videodrome," The Dead Zone," "The Fly."

But Wes has a very narrow mind,

in the sense of this is what's going to scare people

and a broad mind to extract.

There's something that goes on in the

making of a horror film where you're dealing with these things

that in real life are terrifying

and sometimes morbid and horrible,

but by acting it out

you release some sort of childish laughter,

which is totally

contradictory from what you would expect, but it just

makes for a very tight-knit

crew and cast.

As pan ofWes Craven's darker reality-based "Nightmare,"

Freddy himself would undergo a major reinvention.

It was discussions with Wes

that Freddy was not to be the kind of

wisecracker that he had become.

I wanted it to be something that

was not quite what was in the movie.

He wanted it to be something different,

something new, more bulky, more muscular.

Everything on it was different.

It was supposed to be the real Freddy.

I felt it looked great to have him look that, kind of German,

sleek.

He's not really burned in that one, like, his skin

is split, like you'd see in a real anatomy book.

This was an actual, real hand and

real blades that grew out of his fingertips.

It was a whole different design and

I thought it was kind of an interesting look.