A Nightmare on Elm Street

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Hey, everybody.

It's Rhys Witherspoon here.

I've written a new novel with number one best-selling author, Harlan Coben.

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Hello, dear listeners.

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All right, that's enough housekeeping.

Without further ado, let's dive into A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone the stuff of nightmares.

Sort of, arguably not scary at all, but very fun.

I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris,

what does Freddie have for us today?

The most annoying sound sound effect.

That's just nails on the chalkboard.

Came from one of the actors, as we will learn.

We are discussing the 1984 slasher classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that violates one of the last places we believed to be safe,

our dreams or our nightmares, which was a very inventive conceit and I would argue a quantum leap forward for the genre.

But Lizzie, before we get into all of that, I have to ask, had you seen A Nightmare on Elm Street before?

And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

So, this is one where I'm very familiar with all of the imagery, very familiar with Johnny Depp being eaten by the bed.

You know, I'd seen all of these scenes and pieces I had never.

Spoilers.

Sorry, spoilers for a if it came out more than 30 or 40 years ago, then it's fine.

But I had not seen the whole thing in toto.

And you know what?

Really enjoyed it.

It's, it It is not,

at least by today's standards, it's not at all scary.

It is very fun and the practical effects are just great.

And I can't wait to hear how they did a lot of this stuff.

I was really,

really impressed,

particularly by the first sort of time we see one of the nightmare attacks happening to Tina, 45-year-old high school student Tina,

when she's sort of flipping around and what they did with, you know, I'm imagining reversing some of the sets.

It's very, very cool.

It's very inventive.

It looks great.

I mean,

the blood looks like house paint, but it does overall look really good.

I have one other hot take from this.

Johnny Depp is not who I would have

expected to be a breakout star out of this.

Well, yeah,

we will get into his involvement and his relative experience as an actor.

Is it none?

Because that's what it looks like.

We'll get there.

Who would you have picked as the breakout star of this film?

Just in terms of whose performance did you feel was strongest?

I think Nancy's really pretty good.

I think the lead, Nancy, is Heather Langenka.

Yes, I think she's pretty great.

And then,

not gonna lie, I'm sort of surprised that Rod didn't

have a stronger turn after this.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think for my money, 24-year-old Tina, Amanda Wiss,

very rudely.

60-year-old high schooler.

I think she has the strongest performance.

She's also in the shortest amount of, you know, she has the least screen time of all the actors, so it's condensed.

But before we get there,

I had seen this film growing up.

You and I are more children of the Scream iteration of Meta Slashers.

Scream, I know what you did last summer,

Urban Legend,

Final Destination.

I love Final Destination.

It's great.

Every time I see a semi-truck carrying logs,

do not stay on the bottom.

I'm forever scarred.

So the slashers of the 70s and 80s always to me felt a little bit stale by comparison.

And by the time you and I were going to the video store, we were on to Halloween 6 and Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and Dream Warriors.

And although some of them are really fun and campy,

we had already explored the frame around the movies, you know, by the time we were kids.

But I will say, Freddy, of all of those villains, right?

You have Jason Voorhees eventually, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy scared me the most of those villains growing up.

I don't know why, but my theory is that it's because you can see his eyes, whereas with all of these other villains, you can't see their eyes.

There's a deadness there.

Whereas with Freddy, there's some personality to it.

And we'll get to the the decision that led to that but uh for me it was always Freddy and the face hugger from alien they very much scared me and I agree Lizzie this movie is very campy.

It's very hokey.

The dialogue is clunky to say the least in many instances

But I would argue that it has some well you did mention this some really inventive set pieces

and

and some surprisingly horrifying imagery.

And I for my money, I do think Tina's death at the end of the first reel is both very unexpected because they kind of set her up as the protagonist.

Yes.

Right.

She has the most screen time in the first 15 minutes.

You think, oh, perhaps this is going to be the final girl.

And Heather Langenkamp's Nancy is going to be the supporting character.

And then Tina is killed in a really shocking, big set piece moment as she's...

thrown through the room.

Yeah, Scream is definitely ripping from this with, you know, Drew Barrymore, 100%, which I didn't realize.

Scream rips in so many interesting ways from this movie.

And Skeet Ulrich's character is such a riff.

It's like a combination of Rod and Glenn, I feel like, in so many ways.

And even the way he climbs the trestle to get into her bedroom and all those things.

Two other things.

One is the fact that Johnny Deppe as Glenn is supposed to be a jock.

That got the biggest surprise from me in the entire movie was when she's like,

because all of a sudden she's like, well, you're the jock.

And I was like, he's very slim.

And also, just the number of moms in this who were just drunk on the couch.

The subtitle of this movie should really just be Nightmare on Elm Street.

Moms Need Some Sleep.

Like, that's all this was, is drunk moms being like, oh, she'd have a little nap, sweetheart.

It's very much a latchkey kid generation film.

And

there was more

thought than you might expect put behind those decisions to make the parents drunks that we'll get into in terms of the lore.

One other thing I have to mention, because I believe that they share an actor, you know, when you mentioned like, and I've mentioned these movies, some of these slashers don't necessarily hold up as much for people of our generation.

There's one that does, and it's one of the earliest ones.

And I think Black Christmas does.

And there's a different quality to it that's not

that I don't think you see in something like this, maybe because the genre actually, I could be wrong, but I think was relatively established prior to this movie coming out.

So that's the one thing I would say is like, this doesn't necessarily feel as inventive as some of the earlier slashers, nor does it feel as scary as some of the ones that we grew up with.

So it's in like a bit of a weird middle place.

I think for me,

that may be true, but I think that the hook is really strong.

Yeah.

And that is that Freddy can invade your dreams.

Now,

Does the logic as played out on screen fully make sense in many of these scenes?

scenes?

I have no idea.

I could not follow at least two or three of the kills, and we will get to the ending, which is wonky by admission, by all involved.

But one other thing I really love about this movie is that, like you said, you can see so many elements here that...

are more fully realized in Wes Craven's later works.

And you mentioned Scream.

Scream is a big one.

And obviously, Kevin Williamson is playing within the genre.

But I think in a lot of ways, Craven is starting to learn how to color outside the lines and he wants to find ways to work more humor into the story and he's still figuring that out.

And I think that he very much comes into his own by the early 90s and this is very much a forerunner to that.

Okay, let's talk details because this story is fascinating and this was a nightmare of a shoot.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 horror film written and directed by Wes Craven.

It was produced by Robert Shea or Bob Shea, who is going to be our co-protagonist alongside Wes Craven, along with Sarah Rischer, John H.

Burroughs, and more.

It was distributed, importantly, by New Line Cinema.

Quick disclosure: I did make a movie with New Line Cinema a few years ago.

None of the people that worked on this movie were at New Line Cinema when I worked with them.

I had a lovely time.

The folks at New Line Cinema are fantastic.

If you get the opportunity to work with them, you should.

It stars Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson, Robert Englund as Freddy Kruger, John Saxon as absent father Lieutenant Donald Thompson, Ronnie Blakely as drunk mother Marge Thompson, Johnny Depp in his first on-screen appearance as Glenn Lance, and Amanda Wiss as Tina Gray, and Jesu Garcia as Rod.

As always, the IMDb log line reads, Teenager Nancy Thompson must uncover the dark truth concealed by her parents after she and her friends become targets of the spirit of a serial killer with a bladed glove in their dreams, in which if they die, it kills them in real life.

Sorry, that's my other favorite part about this movie: it starts with a little arts and crafts.

I like Dr.

He's on Etsy.

He's making his own products.

Good for Freddy.

I do think that what this movie may have been missing is the Dr.

Loomis expository character

who is helping explore the mystery behind why Freddy exists, as opposed to the just complete exposition dump at the end of Act Two by Nancy's mother that comes completely out of the world.

Your mother is like, hey, come here, sweetheart, come look in this boiler room downstairs, come look at the ashes.

I burned him alive.

And you're like, whoa, what?

He killed 20 children.

And she's never heard of it.

I know.

Yeah, I guess so.

No internet.

No internet.

Sources for today's episode, which were found largely on the internet, include, but are not limited to, Freddy Lives, An Oral History of a Nightmare on Elm Street by Vulture, Don't Fall Asleep, The Oral History of a Nightmare on Elm Street by The Ringer, Screams and Nightmares, The Films of West Craven by Brian Robb, Welcome to Primetime, the documentary, Never Sleep Again, The Making of a Nightmare on Elm Street, the documentary, and Never Sleep Again, The Elm Street Legacy by Tommy Hudson, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film.

Now, Lizzie, the story of a nightmare on Elm Street is really a story of dreams, and how sometimes the only way to realize our dreams is to embrace our nightmares.

Now,

let's talk a little bit about sleep.

You're a new parent.

You're probably pretty short on sleep, I would imagine.

Recently, you said that you came across a photo of me shortly after my daughter was born, and it actually was inspiring to you because I believe you said I looked so bad in that picture

that the fact that i look

even average now is uh a miracle aspirational inspirational aspirational there we go well for some people the problem is he isn't falling asleep it's waking up are you familiar with sleep paralysis yes i am

A well-documented phenomenon, not one I've personally experienced, the inability to move or speak while being fully aware of one's surroundings.

There are documentaries about this phenomenon.

It has spawned often terrifying myths in many cultures.

A couple of examples.

The Caribbean myth of the kokma, the souls of unbaptized babies smother slumberers, or the karabasan in Turkey, in which sufferers are visited by a wicked supernatural entity wearing a wide-brimmed hat and strangled.

The Babaduk, anybody?

Oh, gay icon Babaduk.

Yeah.

Also, Freddy.

In 1981, the CDC started tracking a disturbing trend.

Seemingly healthy and relatively young men were failing to wake up at all.

They were literally dying in their sleep.

Most were under 45 years old.

The mean age was 33.

And all were Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia, displaced by the Vietnam War.

Now, many of their families reported that they heard these victims choke, gurgle, gasp for air, and then they suddenly passed away.

The first reported case occurred in 1977, but 81 was the peak.

Lizzie, Lizzy, in 1981, a total of 26 of these young men died in their sleep, almost all between the time of 10 p.m.

and 8 a.m., and nobody knew what was killing them.

There were a lot of theories, stress, maybe exposure to nerve agents during the Vietnam War, or even terror-inducing nightmares.

They were linked to a certain heart issue, but they are still not entirely understood, hence the name sudden, unexplained, nocturnal death.

So the LA Times ran several stories about these night deaths, and one of them caught the eye of an up-and-coming director, Wes Craven.

We were unable to find the specific article that Craven saw, but we do have his recollection of the details, which I'll read.

I happened across a newspaper story of a young man in Los Angeles who had suffered from nightmares in which he was pursued by a monstrous man intent on killing him.

So real were the dreams that this kid decided to stop sleeping.

He stayed awake a day, two days, three, four, until his family worried for his very sanity.

His father, a physician, gave him sleeping pills.

And finally, one evening while watching TV with his family, he at last fell asleep.

His father carried him to his bedroom and tucked him in.

The family went to bed thinking the crisis was finally over.

Then, in the middle of the night, they heard him screaming.

They rushed to his room to see him thrashing on his bed.

Before they got to him, he fell still and was dead.

An autopsy found no physical harm.

His father discovered uningested sleeping pills.

His mother found a long extension cord that led to a coffee maker in the boy's closet full of hot black coffee.

This story haunted Wes Craven because he had suffered nightmares as a child.

And when he asked his mother to protect him, she put him back to bed and told him: sleep is the one place where everyone has to go alone.

What is the scariest nightmare you've ever had?

Ooh, that's a good question.

I don't know about scariest.

When I saw aliens for the first time, the scene where Newt and Ripley are in the medbay and the facehugger is loose, I had nightmares about that scene, the facehugger.

And I had nightmares about the idea of aliens getting to Earth.

Like that concept, once it clicked for me, I thought, oh, the world would just end.

And that's terrifying that we would do something like that.

So

that freaked me out quite a bit.

I don't know.

How about you?

I vividly remember the one that scared me the most.

It was a lucid dream.

So I woke up in my dream.

I was in my bedroom.

I was maybe 10 years old.

And I looked

down my hallway.

And the way my bedroom was situated was you could see straight down the long, dark hallway that led towards the other end of the house.

And

in the hallway, in sort of the shadows underneath a window, there was like something that was crouching in the corner, and I thought it was my dog, Lulu.

Um, and so I called out and said, Lulu, come here.

And she came around the corner and walked past the thing that was in the corner.

And then I realized it wasn't her.

And I remember not being able to move and just staring as this thing sort of slowly started to move closer towards the end of my bed.

And then I woke up.

And it was the Babaduk.

Well, if it was, the Babaduk's kind of friendly.

That's true.

And that's where you got your sense of style.

Well, Well,

Wes Craven,

given his name and the parenting style he grew up under, perhaps it's unsurprising that he found himself working in the horror genre.

But it was surprising to him.

So Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1939.

He was raised in a strict Baptist household.

No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no comic books.

No movies, with the exception of a few Disney films.

So as a result, he spent a lot of time and energy and study on things other than the physical or material reality of this world.

It was a very fundamentalist upbringing.

He was very concerned with good and evil.

His father was terrifying, short-tempered, largely absent.

And despite the strict rules of his house, his childhood was rocky.

His parents divorced when he was four.

His dad died of a heart attack two years later.

And failure didn't just surround him.

It sprouted from inside of him.

So as part of his faith, it was up to him to find Jesus and welcome Jesus into his heart, literally, and he failed to do that.

And so, he said that he had this very dark view of himself, that he felt he had not accomplished the thing that he needed to achieve in his community.

He attended a Christian college, Wheaton, in Chicago.

He studied English and psychology, and this is where he finally gets exposed to the world of film, but specifically arthouse film.

Buniel, Fellini, Bergman, surreal, fantastical movies.

And Craven specifically finds refuge in dreams.

He starts to practice remembering and documenting his dreams.

He gets a master's in writing and philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

And then he falls into academia.

He becomes a teacher.

He gets married.

This is what his parents wanted him to do.

But deep down, he had this dream that nagged at him.

A dream to make movies.

A dream to make a very specific genre of movie.

Any guesses, Lizzie?

Romantic comedies.

Pretty close.

Comedy movies.

Okay.

So in 1968, he's 29 years old.

He is a teacher and he acted as a director of photography for a student film, a 45-minute spoof of Mission Impossible.

But there wasn't really room for his dreams in his professional life.

The chairman of his department sits him down and says, Wes, it's time to get serious.

You either need to get your PhD

or your ass is grass.

We're putting you on the street.

So Wes Craven quit.

He moved to New York.

He was four years married at this point.

I did read that he tried to move to New York twice.

The first time he failed to land a job, he ended up teaching high school for another year, then tried again.

But the point is, his first big break comes by way of future folk superstar Harry Chapin.

You might remember Cats in the Cradle, Lizzie, probably his most famous song.

Sure.

Yeah.

A great father-son song.

Just makes you cry when you hold your boy as you're listening to it.

It doesn't really work in the era of working from home.

When you're coming home, daddy, I've been here the whole time.

Okay, so

Craven was actually friends with Harry's brother, Stephen.

And Harry Shapin was working as a film editor at the time.

He'd actually written and directed 1968's Legendary Champions, an Oscar-nominated documentary about boxers.

So Wes Craven gets a job as his new messenger.

Wes Craven's also sweeping floors, he's driving a cab, but most importantly, by hanging around Shapin, he's learning how to edit.

So he racks up contacts in the industry, starts to find more and more work.

He's managing post-production.

He's syncing dailies.

And he's closer to his dreams than ever before.

He's also maybe getting into psychedelic drugs, but he is broke.

He lost 30 pounds.

He was apparently 6'2 ⁇ , and hovered around 135 pounds.

Wow.

And for reference, I'm 6'1 and pretty gangly, and I weigh 165 pounds.

So I can't imagine just dropping 30.

It's like Christian Bale in The Machinist is a little lighter than that for point of reference.

He didn't just lose weight.

He lost his relationship.

By 1970, he and his first wife, Bonnie, divorced.

She was really worried about the insecurity of his creative pursuits, something that West Craven said she was absolutely justified to be concerned about.

But his big break was just around the corner.

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So, around 1970, he took a job syncing dailies for director Sean Cunningham, who would go on to direct Friday the 13th.

So, Craven pitches in with editing, he's coordinating shooting, he even directs a few scenes, and the company that had financed this feature offers Sean Cunningham $90,000 to make a quote drive-in fodder, no-holds-barred horror film.

Basically, an exploitation film.

So Cunningham turns to Craven and goes, hey, I'll produce.

Why don't you write, direct, and edit it?

Cravens thinks, this is an enormous opportunity.

The only problem, he doesn't know anything about horror.

He'd never written a horror script.

And in fact, in one interview, he claims he'd never even seen a horror movie before.

I don't know if I believe that, but it is what he said.

Cunningham was a very smart producer.

He goes, you were raised as a fundamentalist.

Pull that stuff out of your closet.

Translation, forget the dreams of comedy, tap into your nightmares.

So one weekend, Wes Craven sits down and he comes up with something truly horrific.

It's the story of two teenage girls who were raped and murdered by a sadistic gang of prison escapees.

These killers then unwittingly wind up at the family home of one of their victims.

The victim's parents put two and two together and exact revenge on the men, murdering them in heinous ways.

There's a bitten-off bitten-off penis, chainsaws.

It's grindhouse exploitation at best, borderline snuff film at worst.

But Craven had actually been inspired by the arthouse European cinema he'd first seen at Wheaton because the storyline was very much pulled from Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film, The Virgin Spring.

Have you ever seen The Virgin Spring, Lizzie?

No.

It's a tough watch, but it's an important film.

It was set in medieval Sweden, and it follows a father who realizes that the herders that he's taken in to give shelter for the night are responsible responsible for the rape and murder of his daughter, and then he kills them one by one.

So the structure of the story is very much the same.

Craven called his film Sex Crimes of the Century, but it would eventually be released under a different name.

And I don't know if you've seen this film, Lizzie, but I'm sure you'll recognize the name, The Last House on the Left.

Oh, yeah.

So it is a shocking film, although it feels a little dated if you were to watch it now, and it was remade later with Tony Goldwyn.

But when it was released in 1972, it really shocked and disgusted audiences, but it also entertained.

And it got surprisingly good critical reviews.

Roger Ebert wrote that The Last House on the Left is a tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that's about four times as good as you'd expect.

So all of a sudden, Wes Craven is a bit of an insider in the film business, but this movie made him an outsider in his personal life.

As he later said, people literally wouldn't leave their children alone with me.

They would get up and walk away from the table when I went out to have dinner.

He was frustrated.

He hadn't set out to be a horror director.

He just wanted to direct.

So he tried to make nice movies.

He tried to make comedies and dramas.

But nobody wanted his beauty contest spoof script, which was called American Beauty.

Wow.

Or Mustang, his war thriller following Colonel Anthony Herbert, who'd claimed he witnessed Vietnam war crimes only to be silenced by his commanding officer.

And now,

It's possible that the transition I'm about to describe occurred earlier and that this timeline's more porous than I'm presenting.

Wes Craven ventured, it seems by necessity, into adult films.

So, produced by Peter Locke, who Craven had met while cutting Peter Locke's You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat, which featured Richard Pryor and Robert Downey Sr., Wes Craven worked on a number of pornographic films in the early 70s.

He's credited as an editor, assistant director, and an actor on the X-rated It Happened in Hollywood.

He cut the R-rated sex comedy Kitty Can't Help It, and he directed under a pseudonym, Abe Snake, The Fireworks Woman, amongst others.

Wow.

What's the plot of that one?

I hope everyone gets to keep their appendages.

You can find it online.

I will say that, but I don't know if you're going to watch it for the plot.

Locke and Craven's work in the adult industry was more necessity, I think, than desire.

Locke would later go on to produce The Brave Little Toaster of all things, a movie I really love, as well as But I'm a Cheerleader, a movie I also really like.

And he kept asking Wes Craven to make another horror movie.

Wes, you know, forget the dreams of comedy.

You're good at horror.

Follow the nightmares.

So Craven finally does.

1977's The Hills Have Eyes.

Lizzie, have you seen everybody's favorite desert mutant family movie, The Hills Have Eyes?

Naturally.

Yeah, also remade.

I kind of like the remake too.

It's considered Craven's breakout film.

So by 1981, there's no question he is a horror director.

He had just come off co-writing and directing Deadly Blessing, which was his first, quote, big budget horror film.

It was big for Craven.

It cost two and a half million dollars more than his first three films combined.

So he takes six months off to write about dreams and how sometimes they can be fatal.

So these were inspired by the articles he read in the New York Times, and he started two scripts, one about a dream lover and another about a dream killer.

Now, Lizzie, the dream killer script had two tentative titles.

One was A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the other one was Dream Skill.

Not Dreams Kill, but actually Dream Skill.

Like they talk about learning skills.

It's a bit of a sure shank redomption situation where there's just too much to think through.

The Scrim Shank Redunction.

Now, Freddy Kruger was inspired both by that LA Times article and Craven's personal life.

So Freddy was the name of one of his childhood bullies.

And Kruger was an extension of Krug, one of the villains from The Last House on the Left.

By making it Kruger, he made it sound, according to Kraven, more like a Nazi, which would get us clearly

on the side opposite of Kruger.

It was also a bit darker.

So in the early version of the script, Kruger was not just a child murderer.

He was also a pedophile or a child molester.

And Kraven envisioned him as an older man in his 60s or 70s who wore the top hat.

He does.

I mean, he seems old in this.

I know he's like burned to a crisp, but you know, he gives off creepy old man vibes.

He does, although he's played by a relatively young actor.

So Krueger was very much pulled from Wes Craven's childhood.

When he was seven years old, he woke to the sound of shuffling outside of his window.

Out on the sidewalk was a man who looked like what we would eventually get with Freddie.

The man looks and turns to look directly at Craven.

Craven's terrified, so he steps back into the shadows, steps back to the window, sure the man must be gone by now.

The man's still standing there, staring at him.

The man then walks to the corner, looking back over his shoulder at this seven-year-old boy, kind of leering at him, and then quickly cuts around the corner, which is toward the entrance of the building.

And Wes thinks, oh God, this guy's going to come in here and murder me.

So he wakes up his whole family, blah, blah, blah.

Nobody finds the man had walked off and was clearly just messing with this boy, but this image stayed with him forever.

So the material is very personal.

Oh, and there is a funny story that I should mention.

He would apparently go, he would write it in a bathrobe and a helmet with the little pike on top, and he just type the pages in his back house all day.

And then he'd go into his house and he would read the pages with his second wife, Mimi, who ends up playing the nurse in the sleep clinic in the final film.

Nice.

And so she said she knew every single line to that script because he would just come inside and they'd read and read and read and then he'd rewrite.

So Sean Cunningham was skeptical that that an audience would buy into the idea that dreams are dangerous, but Wes Craven was confident.

This script is a slam dunk.

I am a successful horror director.

I've got three films under my belt.

So he sends it around town and

everybody passes.

Nobody wants it.

Now, it doesn't help that Swamp Thing, which he released in 1982, bombed.

Now, I will say Swamp Thing became a cult classic.

I loved that movie growing up.

Did really well in home video and cable.

I did read that, according to some sources, Disney was interested in making a nightmare on Elm Street into a kid-friendly movie, which, on the one hand, I can't fully understand.

But on the other hand, something like Time Bandits is actually kind of freaky.

And that was a little bit marketed at kids.

And maybe like an Are You Afraid of the Dark sort of vibe.

By the way, that gave me nightmares.

I had to stop watching Are You Afraid of the Dark?

That episode with the alien eggs in the swimming pool.

That was dark for kids.

This is a good show.

Or the one with the, like, the magical soup.

That's the one I remember.

So

nobody wanted, by the way, Wes Craven says he has no recollection of Disney wanting to make this into a children movie.

Nobody wanted Wes Craven's nightmare, except for a man named Robert Shea.

Now, we have talked about Robert Shea on this podcast.

Lizzie, you may remember him as the man who took maybe the greatest leap of faith in the history of modern cinema by greenlighting Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.

Wow.

But at this time, Bob Shea was a scrappy upstart trying to find footing in Hollywood.

Now, like Wes Craven,

he had been an academic eager to please his parents.

He had dreams of working in entertainment, but they seemed impossibly far away.

He was born in 39, the same year as Craven.

They were born within five months of each other, I believe.

But he was born in Detroit, Michigan.

And as we learned from Sam Raimi, what could be further away from Hollywood than Detroit, Michigan?

So Shea follows the more practical path, the one that actually Raimi kind of eschews.

He studies business at the University of Michigan.

He then attends the Sorbonne in Paris.

He then goes to Columbia Law School and specializes in copyright law.

And then he became a Fulbright scholar and went on to study at the University of Stockholm, Sweden.

Little tie-in to Virgin Spring.

Damn.

He is obviously very, very smart, very shrewd.

But the only courses he did well in were entertainment law related.

He dabbled in writing, directing, and producing, and he was talented.

While he was at Columbia, he made a short film called Image.

You can find it on YouTube, and it tied for first place in the Rosenthal competition.

Lizzie, the other winner, it was a movie called What is a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

And it was directed by a young Martin Scorsese.

Wow.

So by 1967, Bob Shea is done with school.

He's back in New York.

He gets a job at the Museum of Modern Art as the head of the Film Stills Archive.

He meets a man at a party who tells him that distributing films on college campuses is a big business.

This is the era of distribution is not centralized at this point in time.

It's very regional.

Isn't this also how Sam Raimi was getting Evil Dead off the ground too?

It is.

You could sell the rights not just international, domestic, but region by region within the United States, States, campus by campus.

Bob Shea suddenly felt like film wasn't so abstract because his dad had been in the wholesale grocery business.

And he realized, maybe I wasn't meant to make movies.

Maybe I was meant to distribute them.

So roughly a year before Craven arrives in New York, Bob Shea takes his first leap of faith and he founds New Line Cinema.

Wow.

In his words, it began in a five-story walk-up in a rent-controlled apartment on 2nd 2nd Avenue and 15th Street.

It was $109 a month for the office, the bedroom, and my kids' rooms.

Oh, my God.

I hope he held on to it.

Yeah, seriously.

Well, far from the flush Hollywood studios, New Line Cinema was run lean.

Money was tight, and their niche was very narrow.

They started with foreign films.

Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, even Dwarf Started Small, which we discussed on our episode on Fitzcaraldo.

And then they expanded into U.S.

independent film, including a lot of early John Waters works, for example.

But Bob Shea was really shrewd, and he drew on his background in copyright law and started picking up films that had entered the public domain.

He then also took a really generous approach with filmmakers.

He would offer structuring deals for distributions as 50-50 profit-sharing pacts.

So Newline Cinema might not have the marketing muscle or distribution might of a larger competitor, but they could offer better terms.

I do want to be clear though, throughout the research, I don't get the sense that Bob Shea was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, but rather because it was a way for him to stay competitive in a really competitive marketplace where he didn't have a lot of money.

One article that we found described him as a volatile figure at the best of times who frequently clashed with his directors.

So early successes included Pink Flamingos, The Street Fighter.

They did a re-release of 1938's Reefer Madness.

10 years in, they expand into film production.

They release 1977 stunts.

This is like an action-packed murder mystery about stuntmen, and it grosses $2 million against a $200,000 budget.

But just because New Line's having some success doesn't mean that Hollywood's gonna let them in.

In 1978, they distributed a French-Belgian co-production starring Gerard Depardieu called Get Out Your Hankerchiefs that won the Oscar for best foreign film.

Bob Shea got drunk, went around and told everybody, we won the Academy Award, and then got denied entrance to a big after party.

So New Line always had to chase the money, and there was a lot of money in horror.

So they started re-releasing horror films from the early 60s and 70s and then producing their own.

And Lizzie, as you mentioned, they famously distributed Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead.

So in the early 80s, Shay is visiting LA to take general meetings with up-and-coming horror directors, including Toby Hooper, I read, was one of the people that he met with.

So he gets on the phone with Wes Craven.

And they're talking, talking, talking.

And the way Shay describes it is that nobody's really interested in giving him.

their script because their new line is so bottom of the barrel that the only way they're going to go with them is if they've gotten passes from everywhere else.

And so at the end of the phone call, Wes Craven kind of reveals, well, I do have this one thing that could be kind of interesting.

You know, it's about kids getting murdered in their nightmares.

And Bob Shea thinks, this is great.

Everybody has nightmares.

This is universal.

Send me the script.

According to one source, Craven did not send him the script and wouldn't send him the script because Newline, he doesn't think has the money to actually make this movie.

As he later put it, they would distribute to army bases, prisons, and colleges.

Those were the three venues.

So I figured this guy is never going to raise the money.

But he underestimated Bob Shea.

So Craven's chasing the studios, and Shea is chasing Craven.

And so finally, the studios have said no, and Craven relents.

And Newline Cinema options a Nightmare on Elm Street for basically $5,000.

And Bob Shea and Wes Craven are in business.

So Wes flies out to New York, summer of 1983, and they start writing together.

They're rewriting the script, polishing the script.

And meanwhile, Bob Shea is taking a crack at raising money because even though A Nightmare on Elm Street is going to be cheap for Hollywood, it's going to be expensive for New Line cinema.

So, Lizzie, initial budget, Bob Shea asserts, was $700,000.

One quarter of what Wes Craven had on his last film.

Yeah, that's not very much.

Especially considering the amount of practical effects and stunts that you're doing in this movie.

Yeah.

According to Shea, it then went up to 1.1 million.

And as he said, all the investors at one time or another backed out out during pre-production.

Half the funding came from a Yugoslavian guy who had a girlfriend he wanted in the movies.

Another source notes that Shea put up some of his own money and he did strike a deal with Smart Egg Productions, who advanced $1 million to start the film.

In the end, Craven says that Shea only really managed to pull together half of what he felt he needed to make the movie, but with Swamp Thing bombing, this was really all he had going.

It's now or never.

So they start casting the movie.

And Lizzie, a big benefit of having no money is you can't afford any stars.

True, don't have to deal with them.

So you don't even waste any time going after it.

In fact, the original plan was to hire a stunt man to play Freddy Krueger.

That makes sense.

Yeah, this was common practice.

Bud Davis as the Phantom in The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Dick Warlock as Michael Myers in Halloween 2.

Steve Dash is Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2.

While Jason is masked, Richard Brooker in Friday the 13th part 3.

So like like, masked roles require precision actions and heavy suits and makeup.

These are perfect for stunt performers with extreme body control.

And also, they're going to light Freddy on fire in this movie, for example.

But Freddy was different.

Craven realized early on he wanted a Shakespearean actor for this part.

And I wonder if part of it is that even though Freddy technically wears a mask and that he's wearing this burned skin, you can see his eyes.

And so you need a performer that can really convey Freddy's depravity

through their expressiveness.

He said he wanted Freddy to convey more depth and personality than the standard wordless villains of slasher films.

And that's another departure.

Freddy talks a lot in this movie.

He is verbose.

At times, I wanted to say,

shut your mouth, Freddy.

Shut up.

Kedon starts slashing.

Cammy.

Freddy's going to get you.

I love when he first starts chasing her and he's running just like a little, he looks like he's a gorilla like just learning how to run

now Craven realized he also needed to age the character down from the Septuagintarian that he'd originally envisioned because older actors Lizzie didn't have that

pizzazz or energy or zest that he was looking for.

He doesn't have a lot of fun.

He doesn't have a lust for life.

He does.

And these older actors were also, according to Craven, too sweet.

There was something about them having seen so much of life that there was a certain tenderness to them.

They couldn't really be evil.

So Wes Craven started looking at actors in their 40s, and there's a rumor that English actor David Warner, who you guys would recognize now from Titanic or Coneheads, my sister's favorite movie, he'd most recently been in Time Bandits, Tron, The Omen.

There's a rumor that he was not only very seriously considered, but makeup artist David B.

Miller said he actually did a makeup test on him.

Now, this is debated, and Shea, Craven, and Warner himself have all denied that he he was considered.

But casting director Annette Benson did say that Craven wanted a David Warner type, meaning a really big monster type.

Remember, Warner's roughly six foot two.

They seriously considered actor Richard Moll, who was six foot eight.

Benson says she's pretty sure that they offered him the role, but he turned it down.

We couldn't find confirmation.

The point is, by the time they bring in character actor Robert England, he couldn't have been further from the really big monster type.

Now, Lizzie, have you seen Robert England outside of his Freddy makeup around the time that Nightmare on Elm Street was released?

No, I'm really only familiar with him as he appears much older, I think.

Let me show you a photo of the

very cute

Robert England.

Very cute.

So he is

cherubic.

I think he looks, if anything, more suited to playing a hobbit.

Very hobbity.

He was 5'9.

He had auditioned for Benson when she was casting National Lampoon's class reunion.

He had mostly done television.

He was a character actor.

And he just started to get noticed for his role as a sweet and socially awkward alien in the sci-fi miniseries V.

Oh, which they remade.

But he was a classically trained theater actor.

He had performed Shakespeare, and Benson knew he had the depth that Craven was looking for.

And he was also available.

His show had gotten greenlit as a series, and during the hiatus, hiatus, the only job he auditioned for that fit his schedule was A Nightmare on Elm Street.

So he goes into the audition, and right before he does, he licks his finger, dips it in the ashtray in his car.

He rubs the ash under his eyes, he greases his hair back, he channels Klaus Kinske from Herzog's Nusferatu, and he makes a point to just stare at Kraven as long as he can without blinking.

And Kraven's sitting there, like, this guy is really young.

He's really cheerful looking.

He's kind of got some baby fat on his face, and he's too short.

And England's looking at Craven thinking,

this guy doesn't look like the master of darkness.

Now, he had actually seen some clips from the Last House on the left in the hills have eyes at these goth bars that he hung around, and he was expecting a goth director.

And have you seen Wes Craven?

He's just like a normal-looking, normal-looking dude.

Yes, a normal man.

Dresses a bit like a dad.

Yeah.

England described him as a young Don Quixote in Ralph Lorraine.

So neither of the men had the look that they expected from the other, but they both had the drive to make something dark.

So Craven was won over by England's willingness to go to the dark places in his own mind.

Here's the full quote: I had found that where actors fail playing evil is that certain people simply are unwilling to admit that it's in them.

In my theory, it's in all of us, and you can tap into it.

And it doesn't mean that that is what you are, but you simply acknowledge that part of you.

So England was very willing to acknowledge there was something dark inside of him, and a new type of monster was born.

Now, Lizzie, you mentioned Heather Langenkamp, Nancy, in this film.

She was a newcomer, especially a newcomer to the horror scene.

She looks pretty young.

She is.

She was from Oklahoma.

She'd actually gotten her SAG card.

This is a funny story.

She got her SAG card because she got a job as an extra on Frances Ford Coppola's Rumblefish.

She'd also been an extra on The Outsiders.

And they randomly threw her a line.

And the line ended up getting cut from the film, but that got her her SAG card.

Nice.

And so that's how she got into film.

She actually got into Stanford.

And then she was taking time off from attending Stanford in order to audition for parts.

She'd lost out on a part in 1984's Night of the Comet, which had been cast by Benson.

She gets brought in to read for Nancy and immediately thinks, oh my God, why did I leave Stanford for this?

She goes into this casting office.

There wasn't any furniture.

She thought, this is so much worse than I thought.

But then the audition went great.

And they called her back.

And she read a scene with Amanda Wis.

Wis had also auditioned for Nancy, but was being considered for Tina.

And Wis's agents were saying, don't do this.

It'll ruin your career.

Nobody does horror.

Now, she was the more experienced of the two.

She'd done some TV stuff.

She'd had a small role on Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

And so they performed the scene where Nancy tells Tina about her nightmare.

And Lizzie, this is where you get your nails on a chalkboard because that's when Langenkamp nervously made the decision to make the claw gesture and the nail screeching sound that you see and hear in the movie.

Wow.

Craven loved it and they had the job.

Wait, so did he not always have his little arts and crafts hand?

He had the arts and crafts hand, but the decision to pantomime that motion and sound was Langenkamp's.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that's such a, you know, vivid image throughout the movie.

I especially love one of the first really cool practical effects is is when she's laying in the bed in the Tina's house and the wall behind her, he sort of presses through the wall behind her and then recedes.

Very clever.

Yeah, you can see a lot of how they make those special effects on YouTube, or if you watch the documentary that I mentioned, I'm going to skip over some of those details because, again, they're more suited for a visual medium, but there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

Also, I do want to mention: did you interpret this when

I believe it's when Tina wakes up and

her gown has been sliced

and the way her mom reacts, did you interpret that as her mom suggesting that she was having a sex dream?

Her mom said basically like...

I didn't.

Her mom said you have to cut your nails.

You have to cut your nails or stop having dreams like those.

I interpreted that as like a weird masturbation joke or comment.

I thought it was more like, wow, her mom must be real drunk a lot of the time if Tina's been waking up with shredded clothes.

And she's like, you just remember stuff having those dreams to cut your nails to to me.

Yeah, I couldn't, I could not figure out a way to square that circle.

Audience members, let us know what you think.

It was like on her chest.

I don't think, I don't know.

I could be totally wrong.

I don't know either.

What I do know is that Johnny Depp was not cast for his acting chops.

So

let's talk about the most famous member of this cast, Johnny Depp, as Nancy's boyfriend, Glenn Lance, noted athlete, craven,

who is just so

not affected by anything happening in this horror movie the entire technique hit Nance you probably calmed down just the whole time also he's the worst at literally everything and this is not Johnny Depp's fault but his only job in this entire movie is don't fall asleep and it's he falls asleep over and over and over again in terms of homages to the love interest who lives across the street and it follows is such an homage to Glenn's character in this film so Craven offered the part to a much better known actor, Charlie Sheen.

Oh.

Wes Craven claims that Sheen passed because he and his agent wanted double scale.

All the actors were getting paid scale.

And even though that wasn't very much money, it would have been the difference between about $1,000 a week versus $2,000 a week.

That's a lot, especially back then.

Right.

Well, New Line said, no way.

That's, you know, it's just out of our budget.

Now, Sheen has disputed this, and he said that he just didn't understand the script.

He actually claims that he met with Craven and told him he didn't see a guy wearing a funny hat with a rotted face and a striped sweater and a bunch of clickety-clackety fingers catching on.

He also said, I I didn't want to be eaten by a bed.

And

I believe that, that she just didn't.

I mean, I don't know why he would admit that he didn't get it, you know what I mean, instead of the money thing, but

again, two different accounts.

So Craven goes with an actor who couldn't afford to be so picky.

Johnny Depp is 20 years old.

He's an LA transplant, less than a year into his new life in Tinseltown.

Fresh out of Kentucky, right?

Yep, playing in a band called The Kids, and he's selling pens over the phone in a very Jordan Belfort sort of turn.

He befriended Nicholas Cage, then Coppola, who suggested, hey, man, you get into acting and introduced him to his agent because that's apparently how everything got done back then.

And Benson says that said agent called and pitched Depp, but Wes Craven claims that Depp's bandmate, Jeff Levine, who played the coroner in the film, came to him directly and gave him Depp's headshot.

Either way, Depp comes in and auditions, and lucky for Depp, Wes Craven's 14-year-old daughter and her friend just so happened to be visiting that day.

They took turns reading the part of Nancy during Depp's audition.

And after the read, Depp sets out the headshots of everybody he's considering.

And he goes, You know, who would you pick?

And they both say, Him, Johnny Depp.

And he says, Why?

And they go, He's beautiful.

He's

it's bored enough to make them wonder,

why doesn't he like me more?

Yep.

Craven said he thought he looked like he needed a bass and didn't understand why his daughters were so into him.

Now, Jesu Garcia, aka Nick Corey, landed the final part as Rod Lane, very much a forerunner to Billy Loomis in Scream.

But unlike Dap Lizzy, he'd moved to L.A.

specifically to act when he was 13 years old.

He was the son of Cuban immigrants.

He'd had some success, and then the work dried up for two years.

He also looks like a very tall Latin Michael Jackson of that era.

He's very handsome.

He's got a gold bloom-esque silhouette that he cuts, but he's got a prettier face than, although Goldblum's also a handsome guy.

Now, as I fantasize about Jeff Goldmoon, let's get back to Jesus Garcia.

He was at a low point in his career and his life when he got this job.

He was 19, he was homeless, he was dabbling with drugs, and he landed nightmare.

So, this cast of complete unknowns were, as I mentioned, all paid scale, $1,142 per week, according to Bob Shea.

But they needed a couple of semi-recognizable names.

This was a condition of their deal with Smart Egg Productions.

So, Nancy's parents were played by two accomplished performers.

I don't know if you recognize John Saxon from anything.

I think that is who I recognize.

He's in Black Christmas, isn't he?

Yes, I believe so.

And he'd also been across Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon.

He'd earned a Golden Globe for his role in the Appaloosa opposite Marlon Brando.

And he had been a mainstay in a number of Westerns.

And then Ronnie Blakely,

I don't know if you remember her from Robert Altman's Nashville.

She plays Barbara Jean.

She'd been Oscar-nominated for that term a few years prior.

She was an established musician and recording artist.

So these were definitely both much heavier hitters than any of the kids who had been brought in for this film.

Now, you mentioned the practical effects in this movie, Lizzie, and I think they're as important

as the cast, as important as the story.

Freddy's makeup and his powers are really what define a nightmare on Elm Street.

So his mask, his burned skin, was inspired by

any guesses, a piece of food.

Cheese.

A pepperoni pizza.

Oh, delicious.

Special effects makeup artist David B.

Miller was toying with the cheese on his pizza at a pizza parlor, and he thought, this looks good.

It looks nasty.

So he took the pizza home, and that became his North Star in creating Freddy's face.

And I just love this idea that it's just sitting there

because he's

developing this.

Still there.

He brings Englund out into his studio, which was in his garage.

He sits him in an old barber's chair, shuts the door.

They're completely sealed in.

Cranks the air conditioning.

And Robert Englund is not focused on the itchy glue or the crusty makeup brushes because Miller has given him a medical book.

that he's checked out from the UCLA library full of photographs of burned victims that he's just got sitting on England's lap as he's flipping through and making his makeup for hours on hours.

Oh, God.

Bob Shea and Wes Craven visit the garage.

This is out in the San Fernando Valley, and none of them really understand Miller's vision, but Miller assures them, get on set through the camera.

This is going to look great.

So Freddy's face would be iconic, but it was upstaged, more or less, by one of the most startling kills in Slasher history at this point.

And this is Tina's death as we've discussed Lizzie at Nancy's house.

It's pretty great.

Would you like to describe more or less what happens?

Yeah.

So she obviously is, you know, she's being chased and attacked attacked by Freddy in her dream.

I think that maybe this is where we get the very fun Freddy ripping his own face off moment early on.

Then they get into her bedroom and he starts literally slashing at her with his razor hand.

And

you see from Rod's perspective, you know, awake, that she's being attacked by something invisible, essentially.

So you're seeing invisible claw marks ripped across her, you know, belly and chest.

She's just gushing blood everywhere.

And it's that bright red jaws jaws blood.

She's spinning around.

She's spinning around on the ceiling.

She and, you know, in the same shot as Rod.

It's very clever.

It's done extremely well.

And yeah, she just kind of gets ripped to shreds right in front of him and just is covered in blood by the end of it.

And then she's dead and Rod escapes through the window.

Yeah, especially given the size of the film, this anti-gravity effect that they pull off.

And obviously, it's...

It's really impressive.

It is.

And really quickly, I do want to mention Smile very much references Freddie pulling his own face off.

And obviously this rotatable room

becomes a mainstay in many films and is perhaps most famously done in a hallway and inception with Joseph Gordon Levitt later on.

So Jim Doyle is credited for the mechanical effects on the film.

And this scene is one of his major contributions.

So this set is a massive rotatable room.

And according to Doyle, Craven wanted to scare people so badly at the end of the first reel that they couldn't leave.

And so Doyle's idea was, what if she was in her bedroom and the whole bedroom goes loony tunes and it goes upside down?

And Craven asks, you can do that?

And Doyle says, yeah, I can do it.

I just don't know if you can afford it.

So Doyle makes a deal with the production.

He'll build the room and pay for it, but he gets to keep it.

after the production is complete and use it and rent it out to other movies.

Where are you going to put it?

Well, in a warehouse, I'm sure.

So he hires the crew, builds the room, and quote, basically everything up to installing the set was his responsibility.

It would only pay off if the kill was so good that he could use it for other projects and make some money on it.

It's a bold bet.

And it works.

Tina's death would go down as one of the all-time horror film deaths.

Now, Doyle also designed Freddy's glove.

including the hero version, which we see made at the beginning of the film.

And that hero version was incredibly sharp.

Those knives are real echo stake knives, and according to Doyle, every time someone put it on, they hurt themselves because if you closed your fist, the blades cut your forearms.

Oh, no.

But Doyle wasn't the only one drawing blood because Bob Shea was picking his fingernails until they bled.

Because Bob Shea had a secret.

Smart Egg Productions dropped out.

Oh, no.

Two weeks before production began, they lost their biggest backer, a million dollars gone.

Co-producer Sarah Rischer said that Bob Shea called her, and he told her, the guy who had the home video rights backed out, and that's like a third of our budget.

I'm going to stay in New York and try to raise the money.

Keep going.

In a poetic turn, as Elm Street is falling apart, he gives a speech at an investment conference called, How to Finance Independent Productions.

Back in LA, Sarah Rischer is giving her own speech to the 100-person crew, begging them to stay.

The bad news is we just don't have any money to pay you this week.

But the good news is we're going to be able to.

We know that we will.

You just have to trust me.

We just don't know when.

She told them how wonderful they are.

She looked like she was going to cry.

She's six months pregnant.

She believes that everybody stayed because they couldn't say no to a pregnant woman and they trusted her.

It would end up being two weeks before Newline could pay the crew, but miraculously nobody left.

Production manager John Burroughs' credit card statement would suggest that's because they did get paid in the interim,

apparently people were starting to pack up and he put payroll on his credit card.

Oh man.

Somewhere in the range of $9,000.

That's a lot of money back then.

Would be a lot of money.

Pre-production staggers on.

The cast comes together for a read-through, but one person's missing.

Director Wes Craven.

Oh.

Wes Craven's agent said that attending a read-through when the company didn't have funds to pay the cast and crew was against the rules of the Director's Guild of America.

Is that true?

I believe it is one interpretation.

I don't think he would have gotten nailed necessarily.

This is a very small, independent film, but yes.

So Craven bought a bicycle and pedaled from Santa Monica to Long Beach.

In a state of sadness, he'd lost his savings.

He'd lost another film.

He thought this was over.

Like this movie's done.

We're out of money.

And I'm like, Wes, they're all in the room.

This movie's over.

We're broke.

I'm broke.

Nobody likes swamp thing.

I'm not going to get to make nightmare.

Bob Shea can't even get it made.

And Bob Shea says, not so fucking fast.

At the 11th hour, he makes a deal with Joe Wolf's Media Home Entertainment.

Lizzie, this deal is a literal nightmare.

Media Home Entertainment would buy the home video rights for the amount needed to keep the production on track.

But if Newline Cinema failed to hit certain specific line items, like buying additional prints, opening in a certain number of theaters, et cetera, Media Home Entertainment would take control of the film and New Line would get nothing.

This is an all-or-nothing deal.

Newline is all in.

The company is basically being bet on this movie at this point in time.

That's wild because on the paper, or like on the page, I don't know that this would stand out to me like that.

He's obviously a very smart man.

Oh, I think this is just more necessity than anything else.

At this point, they're just so sunk in.

Shea's not getting the top-notch scripts getting sent to him at this point in time.

Got it, got it.

So, we're climbing into the crevasse.

We are.

Cinematographer Jacques Haitkin said that Bob told him, meaning Bob Shea, and Wes Craven, that the future of the company was riding on a nightmare on Elm Street.

Principal photography began on June 11th, 1984.

Craven said he needed 36 days.

Bob said you can have 30.

They landed at 32.

The shoot spans LA, the Desolute Studios in Culver City, Venice.

You recognize the Venice Canals, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Is this supposed to be like Middle America?

Because it's so

clearly Los Angeles.

There are so many palm trees.

There's a palm tree in every shot of this movie.

I viewed it as, oh, maybe it's

somewhere in Orange County or somewhere, right, like Southern California, generally.

But then turns out, nope, it's Springwood, Ohio.

So, you know, suspension of disbelief.

So all of the boiler room scenes are shot in the Lincoln Heights jail.

Nancy's house is a real home in West Hollywood.

You guys can go drive by.

In fact, a lot of the neighbors were upset, but then they got really curious when they saw England dressed up as Freddy and crowds began to form at night.

Johnny Depp was as nervous as anybody.

but for different reasons.

As we mentioned, Lizzie, he had never acted before.

Now, everybody said he was really polite and visibly terrified.

He would sweat on camera.

His hands would shake.

He looks nervous.

In fact, in the scene where Nancy and Glenn are hanging out with Tina and he's using the boom box to fool his mom,

their laughter is real because he was getting overwhelmed and flustered by the sound cues and working the boom box and the phone, and they were just cracking up.

You can tell, and it works in the scene, but yeah.

That scene works really well.

It really feels natural.

Now, Depp says that when he watched his first dailies, his performance literally made him want to vomit.

That's how bad he thought he was.

Now, equally nauseating was Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger mask, which took three hours to apply every day.

It involved 11 separate elements all glued to his face.

At first, England was terrified that he was going to hurt the mask by being too expressive.

And then across the production, his skin is rubbed raw.

And by the end, he wouldn't even wait for Miller to carefully remove it with solvents.

He would just rip it off at the end of the day.

But he channeled the pain into his performance.

Here's the quote.

Johnny and Heather were sitting there getting makeup on as if they needed it, these two beautiful young kids.

And here I am.

I'm getting basted with a turkey baster full of KY jelly.

I envied them.

I envied their youth.

I envied their beauty.

A light bulb went off.

I could use this as Freddy.

It was a shorthand for me to get angry.

Which is great, because he's supposed to hate the kids in the movie.

Yeah.

Blakely has said for her part, it was really really hard to eat lunch around England with the mask.

Johnny Depp did not seem to have that problem.

He and England went out to a Thai restaurant and England just kept the mask on the whole time.

One of the waiters caught sight of England, drops his tray of food and runs back into the kitchen.

Yeah.

Doesn't know what's going on.

Now, we should mention Amanda Wis

had it arguably the worst.

This is Tina.

She has arguably the least amount of screen time of the four teenagers.

I guess debatable between her and Rod, but she gets run through the ringer.

She's sealed in a body bag, which was terrifying, that is filled with blood.

The snakes at her feet in the mud were real during that one dream sequence.

The rubber centipede that actually comes out of her mouth is fake, but they did make a cast of her head where a live one crawls out.

Makes you have to blow air behind it to get to crawl out.

And then, of course, there's the scene where Doyle is rotating the room and she's flying around inside of it.

Wis said that this felt really dangerous.

Yeah, there's a lot of furniture in that room.

It's all bolted down.

By the way, Jesu Garcia was strapped to the floor, which was in effect the ceiling.

And Wes Craven and the cinematographer were locked into airplane chairs that were bolted to the set just behind him.

And so that's how you get the camera, you know, looking over his shoulder as he's reaching up at a floating or stuck on the ceiling, Amanda Wis in that scene.

Here's what she said: I was pretty scared going into that.

I was afraid for my own physical safety because I kept thinking things were gonna follow me.

I thought I was gonna fall out.

And I believe she means she thought the furniture would fall on her.

Now, Lang and Camp, for her part, who was on set but was not in this scene, has said it's the only scene she's been a part of that was scarier in real life than on screen.

The upside-down set made Wis dizzy and nauseous.

Before takes, Craven would pop his head up through the floor, aka the ceiling, and help her reorient herself.

And of course, that same bedroom set was used for Glenn's bedroom scenes, where they shoot the blood out of the geyser, which was, as everybody I'm sure has put together, inspired by the shining when the blood bursts through the elevator.

They poured out 220 gallons of water mixed with food coloring and poster paint in order to achieve that shot.

Yeah.

It's very red.

Now, thankfully, the most dangerous stunt was performed by a stunt performer.

Freddie's burn, he is set on fire by Nancy, was executed by Anthony Cecier, who had performed a burn in West Craven's swamp thing.

Fun fact, he's self-taught, Lizzie.

He said he taught himself how to do controlled burns by dowsing himself in different chemicals and setting himself on fire near his family's swimming pool.

Chris, we all got to have a passion, you know?

And sometimes that passion can become your career.

Everybody on set was terrified, and they were like, Should we put this guy out?

What do we do?

What do we do?

And he's like, I got it, guys.

I've been doing this by my pool for years.

It's not a problem.

I would be doing this for fun, even if he wasn't paying me.

Even if he obviously don't pay me now, it wasn't just the stunt performers who were getting set on fire or getting heated.

Sean Cunningham later said that Wes Craven was constantly calling him to tell him that they were out of time and out of money.

Sean Cunningham was his director friend.

In fact, Cunningham eventually offered to come in and shoot second-unit pickup shots to help them catch up up because even with 15, 16-hour days, they were not able to accomplish everything on their shot list.

Lang and Kamp cut her foot during one scene and needed stitches.

And Bob Shea said, Do you really need to go to the hospital?

Not because he didn't want to get her medical attention, but because they didn't have a lot of time.

Quick question.

Could we film the sleep clinic scene while you're in the hospital getting stitches?

I mean, this guy over here is setting himself on fire, so I'm just saying, maybe we take one for the team.

Lang and Kamp got the sense that the extra people that she started to notice on set were money people and that they were nervous that they weren't done yet.

This was a little bit perhaps of subterfuge performed by Bob Shea because one of these people was producer Sarah Rischer.

And she asked Shea how she could help.

And Bob said, pace back and forth, look at your watch and sigh.

Yeah.

The crew was nervous.

The cast was nervous.

The producers were nervous.

And to make matters worse, Lizzie, Bob Shea and Wes Craven cannot agree on how to end this movie.

So let's talk about the ending.

Wes Craven wants a happy ending.

He wants Freddy to be banished.

He wants Nancy to say bye to her mother after she's woken up.

And he wants her to drive off to school with her friends.

Bob Shea says, no,

it's a slasher.

The killer has to come back one more time, as Jamie Kennedy says in Scream.

Careful.

This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life for one last scare.

It's an essential beats.

And he says, Freddie should be driving the car.

Also, you can't kill your franchise.

That's the point.

The compromise is the ending we get.

Freddy isn't driving the car, but the car kind of is Freddy because it has his red and green stripes on the top of it.

And then his arm pops through the porthole and yanks a dummy through that window so fast.

The dummies in this movie are so funny.

The dummy of the mother after Freddy has like burned her is

so funny.

It is, it's like a decrepit mannequin they've ripped off of some, you know, spirit Halloween store.

It looks like they used like wire and then glued chicken bones to it and painted them black.

It looks pretty good.

It's really I love that scene so much because the mother like, you know.

The mother's dead and the dad's just kind of like, you can tell he's thinking.

This is going to make custody a lot easier.

Yeah.

He sees

watching the mother of his child disappear.

And he's like, well, you know, she was kind of a drunk.

And then he continues on.

So, funny thing, though, is even though Wes Craven wanted the happy ending, the jump scare of Freddy yanking mom through the porthole was apparently his idea.

So I guess Craven just felt like Freddy driving the car was a bridge too far, but I'm willing to do the, you know, the porthole scare.

I don't know.

But the point is, they did not come to this conclusion in advance, Lizzie.

Yeah, well, that adds up because I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

They filmed every possible version of this ending.

They filmed every version of this ending.

I don't need it to make sense.

I want to be clear.

But if we're going with the logic of the movie, which does fall apart quite a bit towards the end when she's trying to bring him out of the dream.

By the time the Glenn bed scene happens, I feel like we've kind of let go of whatever the original, you know what I mean, threat is.

The Glenn bed scene still works for me because he's falling asleep.

No, no, no.

That part, it's when the blood starts going back out out and his mom is witnessing that that I start to lose.

I don't know what's happening at that point because does Glenn have 220 gallons of blood in his body?

You know what I mean?

Freddy's just in our world at that point.

Right.

Is my is my point.

Yeah, that's true.

I actually think the reason that it's important that Freddy be

Freddy reappear at the end of the film is that that's the only way I can understand the ending of the film, which is she has not woken up.

Right.

Okay.

So that's what I was wondering.

That's what I

that's my interpretation.

And I think that's what Bob Shea was going for.

Is that she's still asleep.

Yeah.

She's still asleep.

She has not defeated him.

She's still in this nightmare.

It's inception.

He's still dreaming, by the way.

That's my take.

That top is not falling over.

So post-production takes place over four or five weeks in New York.

Editor Rick Shane reviews the footage with Bob Shea and Wes Craven.

And Bob Shea goes, do you think there's a film there at all?

They argued endlessly, especially over the ending.

They held a bunch of mini-test screenings to gauge audience reactions, and they struggled about how much of Freddy to show on screen.

Plus, the budget is still tight.

Composer Charles Bernstein, who'd done Cujo the year prior, says, look, I'll just do the score at my house alone to save money.

So they had to cut several seconds of blood splashing to maintain an R rating.

Craven hated this decision.

He thought it was censorship.

Bob Shea, meanwhile, is looking for ways to get creative on the back end and save his company.

The problem is, if they do a theatrical release, they will take all of the risk of this movie not potentially recouping its budget.

So, Shay had gone to law school with a lawyer who had sold Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th to Paramount.

This is Michael Lynn, who would later become the president of New Line.

So, Michael Lynn tells Shay, you can do the same thing.

Set up a screening at Paramount, get them to buy your movie for $2 or $3 million up front, which is nothing for them, but would guarantee you a $900,000 profit.

So even after paying back your investors, New Lines in the Black, the company continues to make movies.

But if they distribute it themselves, there's no guarantee.

If nobody shows up for this movie, they get 50% of nothing and New Line ceases to exist.

So Bob Shea says, let's set the screening up.

They call Paramount.

They get a screening set up for Frank Mancuso.

He is the head of Paramount, the entire Paramount marketing department.

This is it.

This is the make or break moment.

Will Bob Shea die in his sleep or will he wake up from his nightmare?

Screening's going well.

Towards the end, the editor pulls Shea aside and goes, we have the wrong ending.

Oh no.

They had accidentally loaded the final reel of the ending that had tested the worst.

Oh no.

And there's 17 minutes left in the screening.

And Bob Shea goes, get the fucking right one.

And so the editor runs across the street, grabs the right reel, swaps it in.

The right ending screens just in time.

Wow.

And Frank Mancuso says,

we're going to pass.

Why?

Well, Paramount had released Dreamscape shortly before this, which is a movie that pulled liberally from Nightmare on Elm Street.

Remember, West Craven had sent this script to every studio before this, and Dreamscape bombed.

And Macuso says,

I don't really think movies about dreams work.

Dreams are dumb.

I don't really put a lot of faith in it.

I've never had one.

And I'm paraphrasing, he may be a lovely man, but I just like this idea that dreams are a little abstract.

Let's be honest.

He wishes Bob Shea luck, and Bob Shea is going to need it.

He showed the movie to his dad, and his dad goes, What's up with the ending?

And they're in a bar together, apparently.

And Shay's like, Well, I had to compromise with Wes.

And his dad's like, The ending sucks.

You gotta change it.

And Bob Shea, he goes, Well, I can't.

His dad goes, You gotta fuck up this movie.

That's a real quote from Bob Shea.

I love it.

Wes Craven's mom didn't even watch it.

She didn't watch any of his movies.

She always said, Wesley, why can't you make a nice movie?

Wesley couldn't.

So they sold your movie.

He's tried, mom.

He's tried.

A week before the movie's going to open, the film lab calls and they say, we are not giving you the negative until we get paid because they had not been paid.

And I could not figure out how, but Bob Shea pulls some business voodoo magic.

Film Lab releases the negative, and A Nightmare on Elm Street opens wide on November 16th, 1984.

Newline Cinema gets a call, I'm guessing around noon, because John Waters had gone to the 10 a.m.

showing on the opening day in Baltimore.

And he called New Line and said, You've got a hit.

Oh.

And John Waters was right.

The reviews were mixed, but it didn't matter.

In its first week, A Nightmare on Elm Street made $1.45 million.

In its second week, it made just over $2 million.

It ended its run at $25.8 million,

25 times its budget, and netting New Line Cinema maybe

over $10 million more than they would have made if they had sold it to Paramount.

Amazing.

Wow.

A franchise was born, and New Line Cinema became known as the house that Freddy built.

So, thanks to Freddy Krueger, we have Lord of the Rings.

Exactly.

New Line Cinema became a mini-major.

They produced the five sequels that followed, plus the underrated meta-entry, West Craven's New Nightmare, which, if you guys haven't seen, is really inventive.

Is that true to say Freddy versus Jason?

No, that one's not so good.

It's fun, but it's not so good.

Wes Craven's new nightmare takes place in the real world.

Wes Craven plays himself.

Heather Langenkamp plays herself.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, they are making Nightmare on Else, and Freddy enters that world.

If you combine all nine Freddy-related movies, they grossed a total of $370 million.

Now, the franchise hits some lows.

Lizzie, you mentioned Freddy vs.

Jason.

Not the best.

Also, the 2010 remake with Earl Haley and Rooney Mara, I believe, is in that one.

Also didn't quite work.

I believe Kellen Lutz is in that.

That's right.

I like Kellen Lutz.

Craven had little to no involvement outside of the original, with the exception of New Nightmare, which he wrote, directed, and produced.

And again, is a bit of it, it feels like almost a warm-up lap before stream.

Johnny Depp went on to stardom.

We don't need to talk about that.

He left Nightmare far, far behind and entered Tim Burton's world of dreams and nightmares instead.

My question is: how?

And I think I understand.

I think the stepping stone is 21 Jump Street, but

it's still just like

he's the,

you know, I went into this being like, ooh, this is going to be, you know, Johnny Depp's just going to pop off the screen in a way that I'm going to be like, that kid's a star.

And instead of that, he really sits there.

Wow.

He really just sucks the life out of everybody on the scenes with him.

He's got, to be fair, he has a great look.

He just very cute.

You can tell.

You can tell he's never acted.

I mean, he's just, he.

No, he has no idea what he's doing.

And it's, I mean, it kind of works because he's just so disaffected.

You can almost see him looking at Wes Craven off camera.

You can almost see him, like, was that it, Wes?

Did I get it?

Great when he's asleep.

Yeah.

I do love that he would go on to be Edward Scissor Hands, which is the closest cinematic character to Freddy Krueger that we have, technically speaking.

Yes.

And I want to be clear: I think Johnny Depp is an extreme, is a great actor.

It gets funny to see him start here.

Exactly.

The fact that he got good is amazing.

It just

takes practice.

He's not good here.

Yeah.

Now, unlike Johnny Depp, who never returned to the franchise, Robert Englund found the role of a lifetime.

He played Freddie in everything except the 2010 remake.

I love that.

Heather Langenkamp reprised her role as Nancy in the third sequel, and she played Heather playing Nancy in West Craven's New Nightmare.

But her feelings toward the franchise are mixed at best.

And I would like to play a clip about why that may have been.

I have to say that I was more than a little jealous of Robert because, you know,

Robert as Freddy was such a huge global icon very quickly after the second or the third movie.

You know, kids were coming to my door in Freddy costumes.

And I felt very much that the heroine, Nancy, was getting short shrift by the culture.

Like there wasn't a Nancy costume coming to my door.

And I worked really hard with Robert when we were together at these, you know, Comic-Cons and autograph

shows that I kept trying to emphasize, like, well, Nancy's important too.

Like, let's give Nancy credit where it's due.

And so, that effort on my part started maybe five years into it, 10 years into it.

And now I really feel like the fruits of that, discussing Final Girls, getting the Final Girl,

you know, talking about it with fans.

Now, she's using the term Final Girl in that clip.

So, I do want to very quickly explain what that is for anybody who doesn't know.

The term was coined by Carol J.

Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and it really just refers to literally the final girl standing.

So it refers to the protagonist, the last one who is left at the very end of the movie, who is in a one-on-one battle with your villain.

Famous examples would be Lori Strode in Halloween, Ripley and Alien, Gale Weathers and Sidney Prescott in Scream, Jess Bradford in Black Christmas, and even arguably all the way back to Lila Crane in Psycho.

It is interesting because, you know, on the one hand, I totally understand that like in this world, of course, Freddie is going to be the most eye-catching, the most interesting, you know, the easiest to replicate in terms of costumes.

But when you think about final girls and you think about like

people, you know, like iconic performances, and I, I, immediately Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween comes to mind.

I don't know.

I think maybe they just gave her more to do.

Maybe she's a bit more dynamic.

I'm not entirely sure that that's a letdown of the final girl character.

It seems to me like it's something to do with this movie in particular, that it doesn't spend a ton of time making Nancy all that interesting.

Yeah, I have my theory is two-pronged, and I think it...

overlaps a little bit with what you're saying.

Jamie Lucurtis is the obvious one

of an example where the final girl became as synonymous with the franchise as the villain.

Yes.

Sigorne Weaver is Ripley, an alien would be the other example.

100%.

Of course, both of whom would also go on to be massive movie stars.

Absolutely.

And they're candidly maybe a little bit about, like you mentioned, something about their presence or their acting ability.

Let's be honest, Jamie Lee Curtis was more of a sex symbol than

Langenkamp became at this moment in time.

I wonder.

if it is in part because of how much personality Freddie has.

Yeah.

Michael Myers is a a personality-less character.

The Xenomorph is a personality-less character.

Part of what's terrifying is they are machine-like.

Unless you're watching Alien Earth, and then it's kind of cute.

Right.

Right.

Well, let's not get into that.

Weird.

I like it.

It's a mess of a show.

So I wonder if

Freddy, by virtue of having such an expressive, weird, campy, fun personality, sucks more of the attention away from Langencamp.

Whereas, again, Myers is so faceless, you

are drawn to Curtis by extension.

I don't think Curtis is given more to do than Langenkamp.

I actually think Langenkamp is given more to do in Nightmare.

She is on the offensive more in the third act of this.

That's true.

She's setting booby traps.

She's got a plan.

More like a Ripley

than Curtis in Halloween.

And I think it maybe has more to do with the dynamic of the villain respective to the final girl.

That's just my theory.

Let us know what you guys guys think.

Now, Langenkamp said doing nightmare didn't really help my career.

She said that people have a stuffy mentality about horror films, which I do think is true, especially women in horror films.

And she said that I kind of feel what a porno actress might feel, trying to tell everyone how great her movie was.

Now, ironically, despite having actually worked in adult films, Wes Craven was freed in a sense by A Nightmare on Elm Street.

He started adding comedy to his films.

The People Under the Stairs, A Vampire in Brooklyn, Scream is very funny.

He redefined the slasher genre.

And Wes Craven finally made a nice movie in 1999, which Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen, I saw it in theaters, Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep.

Yes, I have seen it.

It was the first film of his that his mother ever saw.

Oh.

He passed away in 2015.

New Line Cinema was acquired by the Turner Broadcasting System in 1994, which made Robert Shea more than $100 million in the process.

But he always maintained his outsider perspective.

He placed risky bets on movies that the rest of the town spurned, like Lord of the Rings.

Go listen to our episode.

And I'd like to conclude this episode with a little thesis or thing or theory I've been thinking about.

And Lizzie, we're both millennials, as has sometimes been begrudgingly noted by some of our Gen X listeners, but we appreciate you guys sticking with our limited viewpoint.

And one thing I've always felt as a millennial is we are arguably the first generation, and I know this is not universal, but many of us were told, follow your dreams, follow your passions, right?

In a way that prior generations had not been so privileged to experience.

But as I've gotten older, and as I think about what I want to tell my own kids

in this increasingly complicated world, I've heard a different phrase, which is, don't follow your passion, follow your talent and follow your opportunities.

I think that's very good advice.

Yeah.

And it's something I've struggled with a little bit on a personal level as someone who has been so fortunate to be allowed to follow his passion and be supported in following his passion, and yet

candidly has had maybe more success in unexpectedly podcasting than filmmaking at this point.

I sometimes feel a little distressed at, do I go with my support?

Well, and some of you will be like, you talentless hack, you don't have anything on podcasting to which I say it's all relative uh I'm just saying relatively more on one versus the other but I think what I really appreciate about Craven and England and Bob Shea is that these were three very talented very talented individuals who all

followed their talent and opportunity more than their passions.

Bob Shea

tied in a directing competition technically with Martin Scorsese, and yet the opportunity was in distribution, and that's the direction he went.

Robert Englund was a Shakespearean, classically trained theater actor, but the opportunity was this heightened, campy horror role, and it became the role of a lifetime.

Wes Craven desperately wanted to make dramas and comedies, by the way, which he did prove eventually he was very capable of,

but the opportunity was in horror, and that's the direction he went.

And as a result, you know, they've all forged

unexpectedly,

but, you know, their busts would be in the pantheon of horror,

the Hall of Fame of horror, so to speak.

So I will just leave it at it.

It continues to make me think about

how to approach your career and what the right way.

We on this podcast tend to, I think, glorify what could be a survivorship bias, right?

Which is they were on their last leg.

It was their last audition.

They were going to be done with Hollywood.

And then all of a sudden, the big break came.

And you don't hear the stories of all the people who just had to quit because they did.

And lost all their money.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I'm glad you said that.

I'm a big, big believer in saying yes, in being open to opportunities coming your way that may not be exactly what you want or exactly what you're looking for because you do not know what doors those are going to open.

You don't know where they're going to lead.

And frankly, when you're 19, 20 years old, you don't really know what you like.

At least that's been my experience.

And I think that that is the best advice I could give: say yes, obviously, unless it's, you know, dangerous or against your beliefs, and then feel free to say no.

But in general, saying yes and being open to new opportunities is not going to hurt you, and it may, in fact, surprise you.

Also, Chris is not a talentless hack.

If you have not seen his movies, go give him a watch.

They're very good.

All right.

Lizzie, it's that time.

And I have to ask you, what went right?

Oh, I think the practical effects in this movie are fantastic.

They're great.

I just,

they feel very ahead of their time.

They're very creative.

You know,

looking at them now, I think you can see pretty easily how a lot of them are done, but that's okay.

They feel very inventive.

They feel organic to the format, and they feel sort of groundbreaking for the time.

I loved them.

I just, I loved watching them.

And they're fun, fun riffs on dream logic as well, right?

You can't run very fast.

Your feet are getting sucked into the floor.

His arms can extend.

Yeah, he can push through walls.

He can, you know, all this stuff.

Yeah, I think it's really clever.

I think it looks great.

I think it's really fun to watch.

I very much enjoyed this movie.

I agree.

I'm going to give it to Bob Shea.

I don't know how

you can, this is such a leap

that nobody else was willing to make.

And mortgaging a company's future

You know, and he was not a, he was young, but he was not a young man in the sense that he had responsibilities.

He had employees.

He had children.

I just, I find it impressive.

I continue, as I learn about him, he's, he impresses me and I learn more about his background in this one.

And I think it takes just, again,

a commitment to a vision.

that is not your own,

I find more impressive at times than a commitment to a vision that is your own.

It's rare.

That's the good executive, and those are rare.

And that's why I have so much respect for below-the-line folks as well, because they are also committing to a vision.

Oh, no, they're also contributing to it.

But anyway, so I'll give mine to Bob Shea.

All right, Lizzie, should we tell the folks what we have coming next week?

Absolutely.

Next week, we have a movie that was an absolute disaster, I believe, behind the camera.

And of course, just crystallized its own genre.

It is the Blair Witch Project, aka.

Take your drama mean now, because that camera is shaky.

AKA, is he possessed or peeing in the corner?

Unclear.

And it's terrifying either way.

It's so fun.

I can't wait.

Yeah, it's really, it's great.

And yes, as you mentioned, a originator of the found footage genre.

And I'm very excited to learn more.

And the continued abuse of labor in the the United States by those with capital.

Not true, hard.

That's what we're discussing.

Right.

All right, guys.

If you're enjoying this podcast, there are five easy ways to support us.

Number one, just tell a family member or friend.

Just, you know, drag your nails down the chalkboard next to them and say, do you want to listen to something slightly more pleasant than that?

Number two, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to us on.

Five stars, five stars.

Number three, you can join our...

Patreon.

Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with tear listeners like you.

You can join for free.

You can join for a dollar and vote on films we recover in the future.

You can join for $5 and get an ad-free RSS feed and bonus material, including reviews.

We have got a fun one coming up on Guillermo del Toros, Frankenstein,

Jacob Alordi, the most beautiful Frankenstein yet, as we will find out.

And you can sign up for $50 a month to get a shout out, like one of the ones we'll do in just a second.

But the new way to support this show is if you don't want to join Patreon because you don't like the platform or you don't want to switch platforms or whatever, you can actually now sign up for our special features subscription inside of Apple Podcasts, where you will get access to all of our bonus episodes for $4.99 a month.

We are releasing one bonus episode per month at a minimum.

So if you go to our show page in Apple Podcasts, go to the top.

You'll see an option to subscribe for $4.99 a month to our special features.

And that will give you access to, again, all of our bonus episodes, including we just did a review on Paul Thomas Anderson's one battle after another so if you're interested in that sign up all right now for our $50 patrons we do a fun shout out so we're gonna do some Freddy style shout outs for you guys right now

welcome to my nightmare patrons let me describe to you something so terrifying you'll never wake up imagine a nightmare where you're holding a gun but the gun never works because the gun's actually your penis

Maybe that's just me.

Alright, Adam Moffat, Adrian Pangorea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C.

Grace B, Chris Leal, come to Freddy, Chris Zaka, D.B.

Smith, Dave Friscalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheibel, Ellen Singleton, M.

Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G.

Alright, it's time for a dream so terrifying you'll never wake up.

Imagine your teeth are falling out one after another, tumbling to the floor, but you haven't brushed them in a long time.

So the tooth fairy thinks it's disgusting and starts vomiting in front of you.

And you're so embarrassed, you start vomiting too, and you're vomiting up teeth.

And the whole thing's a metaphor for how you're in love with your mom.

I'm talking about you.

Film it yourself.

Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kids, Grace Potter, Half Grey Greyhound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, Jen Master Marino, JJ Rapido, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Salto, Kay Canaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson.

Alright, it's time for the scariest dream of all.

Imagine you've forgotten that today is the day of the big test, and now you're taking the test, and you don't know how to answer a single question, because it turns out the test is on you, and all you have to do is think of one interesting thing to say about yourself, yourself and you realize that deep down you know there's not a single interesting thing about you.

Wendy Olgish Lager McCoy, Londre Lod Lena, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nathan Knife, Nathan Sentineau,

Rosemary Southward, Rural Jur, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Soman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, and the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

Wow.

Thank you, Freddy.

And just to be clear, those are not my dreams.

Those are just weird things that Freddy came up with on the spot.

All right.

Thanks so much, Chris.

That was a great episode.

Really enjoyed it.

And we will be back next week with the Blair Witch Project.

Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.

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