Writer/director Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in November 1984, taking the world by storm. Craven changed the face of horror, and made New Line Cinema a true player in Hollywood. Nightmare also catapulted Robert Englund’s razor-gloved dream stalker Freddy Krueger into pop culture icon status overnight. Horror fans everywhere had the rhyme “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you” on their lips, and soon, a franchise was born.
Alongside Freddy, the film’s resourceful heroine, Nancy Thompson, played by then-20-year-old Heather Langenkamp, also changed how female characters were portrayed in these kinds of films. Langenkamp returned for two more Nightmare sequels, 1987’s Dream Warriors, and 1994’s New Nightmare. She and Englund recently reunited and spoke with Nerdist about the original film’s enduring legacy ahead of its re-release on digital and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.
Nerdist: The entire future existence of New Line Cinema was riding on A Nightmare on Elm Street being a success financially for its CEO Bob Shaye. New Line eventually earned the nickname “the House that Freddy built.” Were both of you aware of that fact when you were filming the movie with Wes that so much was riding on this little horror movie you were both making?
Robert Englund: No, I had no idea. Subsequently, I learned that New Line HQ was on Eighth Avenue in New York and they were importing foreign films. I actually did some dubbing for a film there. But no, we didn’t know. And I know that they protected me, and kept some of that from me. Because they were running out of money at the end. They had to sell off the home video rights to the film. But I didn’t know that from the outset that they were really rolling the dice on Nightmare.
Heather Langenkamp: And I didn’t really know much about Bob [Shaye] at all. He always came off as such a smooth operator. He knew exactly what he was doing, and was very self-confident. All I knew was that he distributed Reefer Madness out of the trunk of his car to college campuses for many years. And so I just thought that was so enterprising of him. To have such guts to go from that to making a feature film with so much riding on his own money. It was very daring.
There had already been years of slasher films when you two did the first Nightmare with Wes Craven. But the first film truly changed the slasher genre, mainly because Nancy was so proactive in stopping Freddy. How do you both feel about changing the dynamics of the genre in that way?
Englund: Well, I just have to interject here, and maybe Heather doesn’t remember this. One of the first things I was told on the set, we don’t call this film a slasher film. Wes Craven hated that term. But if I take a swipe at you with this [holds up his hands as if he’s wearing Freddy’s glove], there’s no other verb to use except “I slashed at you.” So that’s rather unfortunate.
Langenkamp: I do think that Wes knew that he wanted to make a different kind of movie that probably was going to not be a typical slasher. I think the relationships that the kids have with each other, the kind of very idyllic suburbia that he creates, and then the fact that it’s in the dream, it’s actually not in the physical world. That really elevated it to a different kind of psychological level. A level that I think separated it from the regular slasher.
Englund: And there’s also a lot of the kills throughout the franchise are very surreal. A girl in a roach motel who’s anthropomorphizing into an insect [ in The Dream Master], that’s not a slasher kill. To me, that’s Kafka, Franz Kafka, that’s absolute surrealism. And many, many of them are that way. Now, occasionally if Freddy’s in a hurry and he has to gut somebody? Sure. But they’re usually very strange surrealistic, dreamscape, nightmare deaths.
There’s a relatively recent photo of the two of you in front of the Elm Street house location in Hollywood. It’s a photo that goes viral all the time on social media. What’s the story behind that picture? Because it seems like such a lovely moment.
Langenkamp: I think it was for Entertainment Tonight? Or Access Hollywood? It was definitely for an interview we did.
Englund: They brought us both there. And it’s funny because the house [located in residential Hollywood] looks just the same. But I was on location for Freddy vs. Jason in Vancouver and they were bringing me out to meet Kelly Rowland from Destiny’s Child, and John Ritter’s son, Jason Ritter, and Monica Keena. So I was going out to the set, and we pulled up in front of the Nightmare house and I turned, I said, “Oh, is the art department around? I want to tell him how great this is. They did such a great job on this house.” And the guy looked at me and he said, “We didn’t do a thing. This is the house. This is the house we found here in Vancouver.” And it’s the same house. This leads me to believe that with that architect, there are probably half a dozen of them.
Langenkamp: Yeah, there’s about half a dozen of that particular architect’s houses in L.A alone.
So many sinister Dutch Colonials! So we’ve had legacy sequels to Halloween, Chucky, Candyman, Scream, and many others. But Nightmare has been left out of this trend. What do fans have to do to see you two together on screen again?
Langenkamp: Well, I mean, I don’t think Robert and I really have anything to do with that. When I always get asked that question, I wish I had the power to call up the head of Warner Brothers and do something.
Englund: We were thinking earlier, that it might be funny for Heather and I to be in an adversarial film, and it could be a dark film where maybe we flip it. Maybe I am a kindly psychiatrist…
Langenkamp: And I’m the evil!
Englund: And maybe Heather is really dark and schizophrenic and a potential serial killer, if she isn’t one already. And so that she would come after me. That would be fun. Totally.
Langenkamp: I mean, a legacy sequel, our fans would be so very excited if that could happen. But we just have to live our lives and be patient, I guess.
Englund: If they ever reboot Dream Warriors, I’d love to be invited to do a cameo as one of the doctors. I think something like The Priscilla Pointer role or something like that. That would be fun because that would be a nice little cameo wink. Because the doctors don’t believe in the collective nightmare, the therapists. And I think that there’s a tradition of that in remakes and sequels, especially within the horror genre, science fiction genre. If you have a cast member from an earlier version, you bring him back for a cameo. That would be fun, I think.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is now available to own on digital as of October 1, and on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 15.