Wes Craven Does Live Commentary For His Original "Nightmare," reported by Ben Kenber

Famed horror director Wes Craven made a special appearance last Sunday (March 29, 2009) at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica for a special showing of the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” This horror classic is now at its 25^th anniversary, having been released back in 1984 by then fledging distributor New Line Cinema. Still, this particular showing brought a sell out crowd to the small theater which has previously done Q&A sessions with filmmakers like John Carpenter and Savage Steve Holland. This showing was different though. Wes ended up doing a live commentary of the film as it showed on the screen, and it was moderated by Mick Garris, another horror film director who did many of the Stephen King miniseries including “The Stand,” and who later created “Masters of Horror” (which has since morphed into “Fear Itself”).

Mick started off the live commentary by saying what everyone says these days:

“I hate those people who talk through the movie!”

Even though many of us have gotten so used to watching a movie on DVD with the commentary on, this was rather disorienting an experience at first because we had a hard time dividing our attention between what Wes and Mick were saying, and of the movie itself. Further compounding this problem was the fact that the print of the movie was in astonishingly pristine condition. Even Wes and Mick were blown away at the quality of the print and of the fact that there was not a single scratch on it. Their compliments to the house for getting this spectacular print were echoed by the applause of the sold out audience.

Mick started off with the question that Wes must get every other day when he is shopping for groceries:

“Where did you get the idea for this movie?”

Laughingly, Mr. Craven said that the idea for “A Nightmare on Elm Street” came about when he was watching late night television, and a story came on regarding a young man who had recently died after experiencing some horrible nightmares. This led to a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times regarding the case, and of how the boy told everyone that there was a man inside of his dream who was trying to kill him. His father, also a doctor, kept giving him sleeping pills to help him rest more easily. When police found the boy’s lifeless body, they found underneath his bed all the sleeping pills his father had given him. He never took a single one.

Wes said that it was also inspired by a dream sequence he did in the original “Last House On The Left.” The character of Weasel has this nightmare where he is strapped down on an operating table with the parents of one of the victims hovering right above him in hospital gowns. The husband ends up taking a hammer and a chisel, and he places the chisel right on Weasel’s front teeth. The hammer comes down with a thrashing blow, and Weasel suddenly wakes up and realizes it was all a dream. Craven said that when people talk to him about this movie, it is always that scene they bring up which astonishes him. Turns out it stayed with him to the point where someone suggested he make a movie out of a dream. Guess what happened next?

Wes also made it clear to an audience member that his movie was not at all inspired by any specific episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

With “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes said that he was trying to establish the world of dreams as he finds them (as we all do) endlessly fascinating. Throughout the movie, he discussed the subject of dreams at length and talked about how they had no rules to them. Dreams seem to revolve around the violence and darkness we experience in the world either through the news or firsthand, and Wes talked about how they seep into our subconscious all the time. Wes soon remarked:

“If we were ever fully conscious of all the bad things that were happening to us, it would be too painful for us to handle.”

Wes said that when he took his script for the movie to every studio in Hollywood, they all rejected it because they sounded ridiculous. But even as he got more and more broke, Wes kept shopping it around until he met Robert Shaye, the head of New Line Cinema, at a party in New York. Back then, New Line Cinema basically existed as a storefront in downtown New York, and it would have gone bankrupt had this movie not been so successful. Indeed, New Line Cinema was forever known as the house Freddy built.

Craven later talked about how he didn’t know much about signing contracts at the time when he signed with Bob Shaye to make the movie with New Line Cinema. Since he was already so broke and filled with doubt of what he could do, he felt he had no choice but to sign the contract given to him. What he thought would be a 50-50 situation turned out to not be the case, and from that point on, New Line Cinema owned the movie and Freddy Krueger. I had read somewhere in the paper once that while the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies had made over $200 million dollars, Wes Craven himself had only made about $200,000 off of the whole thing. The realization of this brought forth many hisses from the audience, and it now seems that Shaye and his partners at New Line got some karmic justice when their studio went belly up and was absorbed by its owner, Warner Brothers.

However, Wes did point out that when he was asked to make another “Nightmare” movie (which turned out to be “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”), he asked that he be allowed some profit participation in the franchise that he did not previously have. Robert Shaye later told Wes that he agreed that he was not treated fairly, and the deal between him and New Line was eventually restructured to where Bob finally did right by him. Justice did indeed finally prevail for Mr. Craven!

Mick Garris said that this movie had an “amazing cast for a genre film,” and he asked Wes how he went about casting the film. With “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes said he went about looking for actors who didn’t have a lot of acting credits to their name in the hope of getting people who acted more naturally. This was actually Johnny Depp’s very first movie, and Craven recalled how exceedingly nervous Depp was throughout the shoot. At one point during the making of the film, Depp managed to get his friend at the time to help him out, and his friend eventually got cast as one of the coroners who are brought in to recover the corpse of Depp’s character, Glynn.

Of all the young actors in this film, the most experienced of the bunch was Amanda Wyss who played Tina. Amanda also starred in “Better Off Dead” as the girlfriend who thoughtlessly breaks John Cusack’s heart.

In casting Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, the one teenager who fights back at Freddy, Wes said that he chose her because she was basically “solid peasant stock” (the audience was shocked at this description), and that she looked like an “every woman.” This was what Wes wanted for this part, and Heather turned in an excellent performance playing a character that everyone could relate to. Nancy Thompson was also the first of many examples of strong female types Wes would utilize in his movies. Not many films of the time had this kind of heroic female character. This changed significantly after Sigourney Weaver’s Oscar nominated performance in “Aliens” which came out two years later.

Mick Garris later asked how Wes came about creating Fred Krueger, and of where this character came from. Wes said the character came about when he came across this homeless guy with a bowler hat, shuffling his way slowly down the sidewalk, his face a mask of nasty scars. It creeped Craven out a lot, and this stayed with him long after this man had vanished. The name Fred came from a kid who Wes said used to beat him up at school. However, Wes said he later got his revenge on Fred with the help of a bayonet. Krueger was at one time going to based on a janitor Craven remembered from school which frightened him and his classmates. Wes was also adamant that Freddy not have a mask since that had already been done to death in the “Halloween” and “Friday The 13^th” movies.

Krueger was originally envisioned as an older man, but that changed when Robert Englund came in to read for the part. Unlike many other actors who were reluctant to portray such a dark and evil character, Robert was not intimidated by it, and he was willing to be serious with the material. Wes said that Robert took a delight in playing Freddy Krueger, and that Robert soon convinced him that Fred did not have to be an old man in order for the character to work. When an audience member asked if there was some sort of sound device or technique used to make Freddy’s voice sound deeper, Wes replied:

“Robert’s voice was all Robert’s.”

Of course, much was also said about the making of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and this involved a lot of stuff that was previously mentioned in the DVD commentaries. The budget for the movie was around $1.8 million, but a big chunk of the financing fell through two weeks into the shoot, putting the cast and crew in a position to where they would not get paid. But once Bob Shaye explained the situation to them all, not one crew member left the set. When “A Nightmare on Elm Street” did finally open, it earned back its entire $1.8 million budget in one weekend.

Craven also described how \ the special effects were created and what inspired them. During the scene where Nancy falls asleep in her high school English class and sees Tina in her body bag calling out to her, the trail Tina leaves behind her as she is dragged down the hall was inspired by the slime trails left by snails. This brought a rather hilariously disgusted reaction from the audience, but this made sense the more we thought about it.

When Nancy gets stuck on the stairs while trying to escape Freddy, the goo she steps in was actually oatmeal. You could also see the spots on the stairs where her feet were supposed to go. Still, I remembered it being a very terrifying effect when I saw it for the first time while hiding behind the door to the family room while my brother and his friends were watching.

In the scene where that centipede comes out of Tina’s mouth, it apparently got lost on the set and the bug wranglers couldn’t find it. When the crew broke for lunch, none of them came back. Can you blame them?

When Nancy cornered Freddy in the downstairs basement and set him on fire, the man doing the immolated stunt was Craven’s racquetball partner. How Wes got this guy to do the most dangerous of stunts is beyond me. This man must have lost a bet or something, or maybe it was Craven’s revenge for beating him once too often.

Before Nancy fights Krueger for the last time, and we get the montage of her setting up all the traps to take him down, the book she uses to construct these devices was actually a World War II manual on booby trapping.

Wes also brought up the constant fights he had with the conservative vultures that make up the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA). When Tina’s bloody body after being dragged over the ceiling is dropped on the bed, the splash of blood when she landed was quite enormous. This did not please the MPAA who asked him to cut down the scene some in order to avoid an X (now NC-17) rating. Wes recalled these experiences to be both very painful and never ending for him in just about every film he made (“Music Of The Heart” might have been an exception).

This fight with the MPAA continued on when he directed “Scream,” and he was baffled that none of them realized that it was a satire. They suggested that the third act of the movie be completely cut, and this illustrates one of the many horrendously suggestions the MPAA comes up with when they judiciously give ratings. Keep in mind; this is the same body of people who decided to reduce the rating for “Norbit” from an R to PG-13.

One audience member asked Wes why he used teenagers instead of adults in the movie. Wes answered the question very simply:

“Adults would never have watched it.”

Even in this day and age, horror movies generally appeal to teenagers for the most part, and they represented one of the things for kids to embrace that their parents cannot stand.

One of the funniest moments of the evening was during the scene where Freddy attacks Nancy’s mother, and how her burnt corpse ends up descending into the mattress beneath her. Wes didn’t even try to hide the fact that this was “one of the least successful special effects in the movie.” Regarding John Saxon’s expression in the scene, Wes said:

“John’s not upset that his wife just died, it was the special effects of the scene that tore him up!”

Charles Bernstein, the movie’s composer, was also talked about, and Wes praised the work he did on the score. Bernstein did indeed manage to create one of the most memorable horror film scores with very little money. Wes said that he himself wrote the “1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you” poem made famous by the movie, and Charles put music to the poem and took it from there.

As the evening went on, we got to know Wes Craven more as a person as well as a filmmaker. In regards to his career as a horror film director, Wes told Mick Garris that it was all “a roll of the dice.” When Sean S. Cunningham, who he is good friends with, asked Wes to make “Last House On The Left,” Wes told him:

“I don’t know anything about making a scary movie.”

It turns out that Wes was not actually allowed to see movies when he was very young, and it was not until much later in life that he finally got the nerve to sneak out of his parents’ home to check one out. He credits the movie version of “To Kill A Mockingbird” as the movie that changed his life, and stated that the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” frightened him to death and left him in an unnerved state for months after. But even after he had kids of his own, Wes said that he never really changed as a director or in the kind of films he directed. Even his later movies like “The Serpent and the Rainbow” and “Shocker” among others have an extreme violence in them that makes them more visceral than many other genre movies released at the time.

Also, he said that when a movie his opens up in theaters, he always gets out of town as soon as possible. Life can get very miserable if your movie turns out to really suck, he said. When Mick asked Wes if he ever had a chance to see this movie when it opened with an audience and of how they reacted, Wes made it clear that he HATES watching his movies in a theater because he is usually driven mad by the problems with sound and projection in whatever movie he sees them in.

Throughout the evening, there was never any doubt that Wes Craven came across as an extremely intelligent filmmaker and human being. To hear him talk about the themes embedded in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” as well as the importance of horror movies in today’s society made this live commentary all the more fascinating. Freddy Krueger became so popular with audiences because the bad guys are always more interesting than the good guys. Another way of looking at this is of how the devil is much more interesting than god because he is not bound by any moral obligations, and there is no rule that he is not willing to break.

The way Wes Craven sees it, horror is good for you in that it forces you to deal with the chaotic. While other filmmakers are busy making “torture porn” movies (of which Craven said he is not a fan of), Wes said that he never tries to make horror look cool. Eventually, we all have to deal with the chaos of life, and we cannot spend the rest of our lives hiding away from reality. If you watch the local or national news on television, violence surrounds us all in our everyday lives, and it gets deeply rooted in our subconscious mind. Horror films are affected by current events of the time they were filmed. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was a reflection of sorts on the Vietnam war, and “Night of the Living Dead” took on a bigger meaning when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

One of the best points that Wes made that evening was that if you don’t know what darkness is inside of you and you turn a blind eye to it, then you are in deep trouble. You cannot hide away from your dark side, and you need to be fully aware of what extremes people will go to in order to survive.

In the end, that’s what makes Heather Langenkamp’s character of Nancy Thompson so brave; she is the only in the film dealing with reality. This is in direct contrast to Nancy’s mother, Marge (Ronee Blakley), an alcoholic who hides vodka bottles in various parts of the house. She also becomes overly protective of her daughter by gets metal bars put up on the doors and windows to their house. Her way of dealing with reality is not healthy to say the least, and it is endemic of the other characters as well because that they are all trying to avoid reality except for Nancy. But in the end, the kids need to know that they have allies in their parents, and Nancy manages to find one in her father, even if it is much later in the film when this happens.

“A Nightmare on Elm Street” holds up very well despite the dated styles and special effects. Mick Garris said that he loves how everything continually builds up in the movie, and of how there is an increasing sense of dread in the air throughout. It taps into the terrifying dreams we all had when we were young and scared to death of the monsters we thought were hiding under our beds. This is one of the reasons why this particular horror movie remains strong to this day; it deals with the never ending fascination we have with dreams, and the movie creates a world for them to exist where anything can happen.

Many of Wes Craven’s movies have been inspired by dreams of his (“The People Under The Stairs” was inspired by one of them), but none of them will be able to outdo this one, the mother of all nightmares. While Platinum Dunes production company headed by Michael Bay (the ones behind the bland reboot of “Friday the 13^th”) is getting ready to shoot their unnecessary remake of this movie, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” will remain one of the best of its kind no matter what happens. Made back in a time where genre films were allowed to be imaginative, it continues to put current slate of horror movies to shame.