Development A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many biographical elements from director
Wes Craven's childhood. Craven stated, "It was a series of articles in the
LA Times; three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and had died in the middle of nightmares—and the paper never correlated them, never said, 'Hey, we've had another story like this." The 1970s pop song "
Dream Weaver" by
Gary Wright sealed the story for Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to jump off from, but a
synthesizer riff for the movie soundtrack. Craven has also stated that he drew some inspiration for the film from
Eastern religions. Other sources attribute the inspiration for the film to be a 1968 student film project made by Craven's students at
Clarkson University. The student film parodied contemporary horror films, and was filmed along Elm Street in
Potsdam, New York.
Freddy Krueger, the film's villain, is drawn from Craven's early life. One night, a young Craven saw an elderly man walking on the sidepath outside the window of his home. The man stopped to glance at a startled Craven and walked off. This served as the inspiration for Krueger. By Craven's account, his own adolescent experiences led him to the name Freddy Krueger; he had been bullied at school by a child named Fred Krueger. For a time, Craven had considered a
sickle as the weapon of choice for the killer, but around the third or fourth drafts of the script, the iconic glove had become his final choice. Craven declined. New Line Cinema lacked the financial resources for the production themselves and so had to turn to external financiers. They found two investors in
England who each contributed 40% and 30% respectively to the necessary funds; one of the producers of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre contributed 10%, and home video distributor
Media Home Entertainment contributed 20% of the original budget. Four weeks before production began, the English investor who had contributed 40% backed out, but Media Home Entertainment added in another 40% to the budget. Among the backers were also
Heron Communications and Smart Egg Pictures. Make-up tests were done, but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Replacing him was difficult at first.
Kane Hodder, who would later be best known for playing fellow slasher icon
Jason Voorhees, was among those who Wes Craven talked with about the role of Freddy. According to Hodder, "I had a meeting with Wes Craven about playing a character he was developing called Freddy Krueger. At the time, Wes wasn't sure what kind of person he wanted for the role of Freddy, so I had as good a shot as anybody else. He was initially thinking of a big guy for the part, and he was also thinking of somebody who had real burn scars. But obviously, he changed his whole line of thinking and went with
Robert Englund, who's smaller. I would have loved to play the part, but I do think Wes made the right choice". Hodder would in a way eventually play Freddy, as the hand that grabs Jason's mask at the epilogue in
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993). Wes Craven explains that: "I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking", Craven recalled on the film's 30th anniversary. "Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned. [He] wasn't as tall I'd hoped, and he had baby fat on his face, but he impressed me with his willingness to go to the dark places in his mind. Robert understood Freddy." Englund had darkened his lower eyelids with cigarette ash on his way to the audition and slicked his hair back. "I looked strange. I sat there and listened to Wes talk. He was tall and preppy and erudite. I posed a bit, like
Klaus Kinski, and that was the audition," he said later. He took the part because it was the only project that fit his schedule during the hiatus between the
V miniseries and series. Langenkamp, who had appeared in several commercials and a TV film, had taken time off from her studies at
Stanford to continue acting. Eventually she landed the role of Nancy Thompson after an open audition, beating out more than 200 actresses.--> Langenkamp was already known to Anette Benson as she had auditioned for
Night of the Comet and
The Last Starfighter previously, losing out to
Catherine Mary Stewart at both occasions.
Demi Moore,
Courteney Cox,
Tracey Gold, and
Jennifer Grey have all been rumoured to have auditioned for
A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Benson definitely ruled out Moore and Cox while also being unsure of Gold and Grey. Langenkamp returned as Nancy in
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and also played a fictionalized version of herself in ''
Wes Craven's New Nightmare'' (1994). There were no separate auditions for the characters of Tina and Nancy; all actresses who auditioned for one of the two female roles read for the role of Nancy, and upon potentially being called back, were mixed with other actresses trying to find a pair that had chemistry.
Amanda Wyss was among those switched to Tina after a callback. Wes Craven decided immediately upon mixing Wyss and Langenkamp that this was the duo he wanted. Craven then mixed the duo with auditioners for the male teenage roles trying to find actors who had chemistry with Wyss and/or Langenkamp.
Glen Johnny Depp was another unknown when he was cast, initially accompanying his friend (
Jackie Earle Haley who went on to play Freddy in the 2010 remake) to an audition. According to Depp, the role of Glen was originally written as a "big, blond, beach-jock, football-player guy", far from his own appearance. Depp was initially rejected after bombing his audition and they went on to discuss with other actors for the part, but Wes Craven's daughters picked Depp's headshot from the set he showed them. Depp got his own nod in a cameo role in ''
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare as a man on TV and later in the Freddy vs. Jason intro, in clips from earlier films. Charlie Sheen was considered for the role but allegedly wanted too much money. Other actors like John Cusack, Jon Cryer, Brad Pitt, Kiefer Sutherland, Nicolas Cage, and C. Thomas Howell have been mentioned over the years, but Anette Benson has failed to definitely recall those actors as having been among the auditioners. Though Cage had probably not auditioned for A Nightmare on Elm Street'', he was in fact involved in introducing Johnny Depp to acting, through Cage's own agent who introduced Benson to him, resulting in an audition for the film. The fictional street address of Nancy's house in the film is
1428 Elm Street; in real life, this house is a private home located in Los Angeles at 1428 North Genesee Avenue. The Lantz' family home was at 1419 North Genesee Avenue on the other side of the road. The boiler room scenes and police station interior were shot in the
Lincoln Heights Jail (closed since 1965) building, while the exterior used for the police station was
Cahuenga Branch Library. Rod's burial was filmed at
Evergreen Cemetery. The
American Jewish University on 15600 Mulholland Drive was used for the
Katja Institute for the Study of Sleep Disorders visited by Marge and Nancy. During production, over 500 gallons of fake blood were used for special effects production. For the blood geyser sequence, the filmmakers used the same revolving room set that was used for Tina's death. While filming the scenes, the cameraman and Craven himself were mounted in fixed seats taken from a
Datsun B-210 car while the set rotated. The film crew inverted the set and attached the camera so that it looked like the room was right side up, then they poured the red water into the room. They used dyed water because the special effects blood did not have the right look for a geyser. During filming of this scene, the red water poured out in an unexpected way and caused the rotating room to spin. Much of the water spilled out of the bedroom window covering Craven and Langenkamp. Earth's gravity was also used to film another
take for the TV version in which a skeleton shoots out from the hollowed out bed and smashes into the "ceiling". More work was done for Freddy's boiler room than made it into the film; the film crew constructed a whole sleeping place for Freddy, showing that he was quite a
hobo, an outcast and reject from society, living and sleeping where he worked, and surrounding himself with naked Barbie dolls and other things as a showcase of his fantasies and perversions. This place was supposed to be where he forged his glove and abducted and murdered his victims. The scene where Nancy is attacked by Krueger in her bathtub was accomplished with a special bottomless tub. The tub was put in a bathroom set that was built over a swimming pool. During the underwater sequence, Heather Langenkamp was replaced with a stuntwoman. The melting staircase in Nancy's dream was Robert Shaye's idea based on his own nightmares; it was created using pancake mix. In the scene where Freddy walks through the prison bars to threaten Rod as seen by Nancy, Wes Craven explains that, "we took triangulations of the camera so we knew exactly the height of it from the floor and the angle towards the point where the killer was going to walk through", and then "we put the camera again at the exact height and walked the actor through that space. Then those two images were married and a rotoscope artist went through and matted out the bars so it appeared they were going straight through his body."
Jsu Garcia, who was cast as Rod and credited as Nick Corri, says the production was difficult for him. He was dealing with depression due to recent homelessness by snorting heroin in the bathroom between takes. In 2014, he revealed that he was high on heroin during the scene with Langenkamp in the jail cell. "His eyes were watery and they weren't focused," Langenkamp said. "I thought, 'Wow, he's giving the best performance of his life. Following Tina's death, Nancy repeatedly dreams of an animate corpse of Tina in a translucent body bag. During the scene in which Freddy kills Rod in the prison cell, Nancy witnesses a
centipede crawl out of Tina's mouth. The filmmakers initially attempted to achieve this effect by having Wyss force a rubber centipede out of her mouth; the effect seen in the final film was accomplished by having an actual centipede crawl out of the mouth of a clay sculpture of Wyss's likeness, sculpted by David B. Miller. During filming, the centipede was temporarily lost on set before being found again. About halfway through the film, when Nancy is trying to stay awake, a scene from
Sam Raimi's
The Evil Dead appears on a television. Craven decided to include the scene because Raimi had featured a
Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977) poster in
The Evil Dead. In return, Raimi featured a Freddy Krueger glove in the workshed scene of
Evil Dead II, and later in
Ash vs Evil Dead.
Sean Cunningham, whom Wes Craven had previously worked with while filming
The Last House on the Left (1972), helped Craven at the end of the shooting, heading the second film unit during the filming of some of Nancy's dream scenes. Craven originally planned for the film to have a more evocative ending: Nancy kills Krueger by ceasing to believe in him, then awakens to discover that everything that happened in the film was an elongated nightmare. However, New Line leader Robert Shaye demanded a twist ending, in which Krueger disappears and all seems to have been a dream, only for the audience to discover that it was a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. Though several variants of an end scene were considered and filmed, Heather Langenkamp states that "there always was this sense that Freddy was the car", while according to Sara Risher, "it was always Wes' idea to pan to the little girls' jumping rope". Both a happy ending and a twist ending were filmed, but the final film used the twist ending. As a result, Craven who never wanted the film to be an ongoing franchise, did not work on the first sequel, ''
Freddy's Revenge'' (1985). Filming wrapped at the end of July, and the film was rushed to get ready for its November release. ==Music==