Trivia for
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

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• Director Wes Craven claims to have named Freddy Krueger after a kid who bullied him in school and to have based his appearance on a disfigured hobo who scared him as a youth.
  
  
• The movie Nancy watches to stay awake is The Evil Dead (1981). She isn't watching a random clip, but rather the theatrical trailer.
  
  
• There is a ripped poster of The Evil Dead (1981).
  
  

• Wes Craven's original concept for Freddy Krueger was considerably more gruesome, with teeth showing through the flesh over the jaw, pus running from the sores, and a part of the skull showing through the head. Make-up artist David B. Miller argued that an actor couldn't be convincingly made up that way and a puppet would be hard to film and wouldn't blend well with live actors, so these ideas were eventually abandoned.
  
  
• The poster above Johnny Depp's bed in the scene where he is killed is the Grace Under Pressure album cover by Canadian rock trio Rush.
  
  
• Johnny Depp accompanied friend Jackie Earle Haley to the auditions, where he was spotted by director Wes Craven, who asked him if he'd like to read for the part.
  
  
• Wes Craven cast Joseph Whipp, who plays the inept sidekick of John Saxon's Lt. Thompson in this film, as the sheriff who endures David Arquette's inept Deputy Dewey in Scream (1996/I).
  
  
• In the end scene, the top to the convertible came down faster and harder than expected. The expression from the actors is real.
  
  
• Nancy's bathtub was constructed over a tank built into the floor of the set with a cutout bathtub sealed down to it. Actress Heather Langenkamp spent 12 hours in it during filming, accompanied at least some of the time by special effects man Jim Doyle who was wearing the Freddy glove.
  
  
• Wes Craven wrote the script and presented it in 1981, but no one wanted it. He said that "It just flew around" until New Line Cinema picked it up.
  
  
• This was the first real movie by New Line Cinema. Before that, they were just a distribution company for college campuses.
  
  
• This movie was almost never made. About halfway through filming, New Line lost its deal with the distribution company. As a direct result, they couldn't pay the cast or crew for two whole weeks until they found another distribution company. They didn't lose one crew member.
  
  
• Freddy Kruger was designed by Wes Craven to be the typical "silent" serial killer such as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. But in the sequels Freddy developed a cheeky persona that enabled him to be the black humored villain
  
  
• The original glove was also used in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) but then the glove went missing. The original glove was used in 1986 for Evil Dead II (1987) (according to the DVD.)
  
  
• New Line Cinema was saved from bankruptcy by the success of the film, and was jokingly nicknamed "the house that Freddy built".
  
  
• In her room after almost getting killed in the tub, Nancy looks at herself in a mirror and says, "Oh God, I look 20 years old." Many viewers find this humorous, thinking that Heather Langenkamp was 20 years old at the time of the movie. However, on the DVD audio commentary, she's quoted as saying, "I was 18 or I was 19. I can't remember."
  
  
• Over 500 gallons of fake blood were used during the making of the film.
  
  
• For the famous blood geyser sequence, the film makers used the same revolving room set that was used for Tina's death. They put the set so that it was upside down and attached the camera so that it looked like the room was right side up, then they poured gallons of red water into the room. (The normal movie blood wasn't able to create the right effect for the geyser.)
  
  
• The only times you see the words "Elm Street" are during the opening and closing credits. The words "Elm Street" are not mentioned at all during the movie.
  
  
• When Freddy is chasing Tina, Freddy's long arms were marrionetted.
  
  
• Johnny Depp's first film
  
  
• The sequence was shot by turning the entire room upside-down on a gyro set and sending the blood down through the bed. Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund, in costume, were on hand to watch the filming. The room itself was to be turned as the blood flowed, but it was turned in the wrong direction, and blood began to squirt prematurely. A door to the room opened, and the fake blood gushed onto exposed wires, creating a real hazard for the crew. Fortunately, Englund pulled Langenkamp away to safety before anything serious would have happened, and the sequence was somehow salvaged. This incident is described by Englund in a booklet in the commemorative boxed set.
  
  
• In a deleted scene featured on the Laser Disc and VHS from Anchor Bay we learn that Nancy and many of her friends from the neighborhood weren't always only children, but had a brother or sister before they were killed by Freddy (during the scene in the basement just before Nancy's mother reveals she has Freddy's glove.)
  
  
• Wes Craven had helped Sean S. Cunningham by working on a few shots for Friday the 13th (1980), in turn, near the end of the production of this movie, Cunningham directed a few shots when several units were working at once.
  
  
• Heather Langenkamp beat over 200 actresses for the role of Nancy Thompson, some of the other actresses who auditioned for the role of Nancy were Jennifer Grey, Demi Moore, Courteney Cox and Tracey Gold.
  
  
• When Freddy Krueger is chasing Nancy and she runs up the stairs only to find that it's all "goo," what she steps in is actually unknown. According to the DVD commentary, Wes Craven claims "It was just oatmeal," Jacques Haitkin says, "I think it was pancake batter," and Heather Langenkamp says, "It was something rubbery." A definitive answer does not yet exist.
  
  
• In "Just the Ten of Us" (1988), Heather Langenkamp makes reference to a rusty knife stuck in a cutting board "looking like something from 'A Nightmare on Elm Street.'"
  
  
• When Nancy's dreams are "examined", when her hair turns white, the nurse is played by Wes Craven's wife, Mimi Craven.
  
  
• Wes Craven claimed to have drawn inspiration for this movie from 3 separate incidents involving young Cambodians, survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal "purges," all of whom died while apparently in the throes of a horrific nightmare. The story goes that first these young, otherwise healthy people would have a horrible nightmare, then refuse to sleep for as long as possible; when they finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion they awoke with screaming and writhing, then died from a heart attack. In the last incident, the young man used a variety methods to try and stay awake that were incorporated into the film, including a hidden coffee pot. Some of the dialog between Nancy and her parents is based on this young man's attempts to convince his unbelieving parents that going to sleep would kill him.
  
  
• Wes Craven choose the colors red and green for Freddy's sweater because he read that those two colors are the hardest for the eye to process together.
  
  
• In the original Script, Freddy's sweater was red and yellow. In an interview for Hollywoodgothique.com, Craven notes this was an homage to Plastic Man, who, as with Krueger, could change shape; the audience was clued in to Plastic Man's presence by the fact that whenever he assumed an object's form, the object would always be red with a yellow strip. Therefore, whenever Freddy changed form, he would be recognizable due to color pattern.
  
  
• An omen that Johnny Depp's character is about to die occurs as he is laying in bed listening to his radio. The broadcaster announces, "It's midnight and you're listening to station KRGR." KRGR can be interpreted as meaning "Krueger."
  
  
• The vision of Freddy came from a childhood memory of Wes Craven, When he was 10 yrs old he looked out the window of the apartment he lived in and a drunk man dressed similar to Freddy was looking directly at him and continued to stay there looking at the window for several minutes. This scared him so, later on he decided this would be the look for Freddy.
  
  
• John F. Kennedy was killed while traveling on Elm Street in Dallas
  
  
• While struggling to conceptualize what his villain would use for a weapon, Wes Craven saw his house cat unsheathe his retractile claws. This, of course, gave him the inspiration for the knifed fingers. Special-effects supervisor Jim Doyle then designed the actual weapons.
  
  
• During the blood geyser scene, the spinning room turned incorrectly and cause a premature flood of "blood." According to the DVD commentary, the people pouring the "blood" were shocked when the wires were hit with the water and the room began to spin out of control. Wes Craven remarks that it was like the Ferris Wheel from hell. The power on the set went out and Craven said they were all in the dark and covered in blood.
  
  
• One of the main reasons Johnny Depp was chosen was because the producer's daughter thought he was "dreamy."
  
  
• On the DVD audio commentary, Wes Craven says he was told that this was the first film to use a breakaway mirror.
  
  
• This is the only film in the series in which the killer is referred to as "Fred" Kruger. In all of the sequels, he's called "Freddie".
  
  

• SPOILERS: When Nancy is trying to bring Freddy to reality, she tells her dad to break the door down in 20 minutes. At that point, it's 20 minutes until the movie ends.
  
  

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