The chilling real life story that inspired Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven had read about a young Cambodian man who came to the US after war and genocide and was left with terrifying nightmares.(Picture: Rex/Getty)

Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. It’s a creepy warning taken from A Nightmare on Elm Street, the supernatural slasher film which turned forty this year.

The movie features the iconic Freddy Krueger, the pizza-faced, razor-clawed demon who came back from the dead to avenge his own killing. Played by Robert Englund, Freddy haunted the teenager’s dreams – the kicker being that if he catches them as they sleep, they die in real life. The only option was to stay awake.

Krueger’s character became iconic. Dripping with threat and sarcasm in equal measure, it was the first time in horror that the monster had a personality, and his multi-bladed hand soon became a mainstay of trick or treat costumes. Some viewers reportedly experienced PTSD symptoms after seeing the movie, which darkly inspired 24-year-old murderer Daniel Gonzalez who, in 2004, killed four in frenzied attacks in London and Brighton.

The film, which cost just $1.1million to make in 1984, took an impressive $57million in US box offices alone, but it was a hit across the globe – especially in Japan – and re-wrote the book on how horror movies were made.

Johnny Depp got his start as Glen Lantz in Nightmare on Elm Street (Credits: New Line/The Elm Street Venture/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

Nightmare on Elm Street spawned a franchise of nine further films, a television series, novels, comics, video games and launched the career of Johnny Depp, whose character Glen Lantz suffered a horrific death when his sleeping body is sucked through his bed into a magic slaughter vortex.

The theatrical and outlandish deaths seem almost comical when seen through today’s lens. Indeed, earlier this year, the movie was reclassified in the UK from an 18 to a 15, with the gore, blood and violence now seeming tame in comparison with what children see in video games today.

However, the reality was that the plot for Wes Craven’s movie was inspired by a terrifying phenomenon – the sudden unexplained deaths of young men in 1970s Los Angeles.

Craven had read a newspaper report about a young Cambodian man who came to the US after war and genocide and left him with terrifying nightmares.

Director Wes Craven was inspired by the story of a young man who thought he would die when he slept (Credits: Getty Images)

‘His father was a physician and had given him sleeping pills, and the kid supposedly was taking them. They had come out of Southeast Asia from a camp, so the family just assumed that he had been traumatised. He said: “No, no, it’s different. There’s something stalking me in my dream. I don’t want to sleep.” And he actually kept himself awake,’ Craven told a TV interview at the time. 

He continued: ‘Finally he fell asleep, and the family carried him up to his bed and put him to bed. The family were all relieved and felt like finally he could rest, and they went to their own beds, and then heard screaming and thrashing.

‘They ran into his room, and he was just screaming, kicking in his bed, and then he fell silent, and he was dead. They found in his closet there was a coffee pot that he had hidden in there with black coffee, and they found all the sleeping pills – he hadn’t taken any. It was so dramatic. It was like, holy s***. This guy knew he was going to die if he slept. And you have to sleep, whatever you do. How terrifying.’ 

More terrifying was that the story described wasn’t an isolated incident. Dozens of Southeast Asian refugees in America died for unknown reasons in their sleep at the time, according to reports from the LA Times.

In Nightmare on Elm Street the only way not to die is to stay awake (Credits: Getty Images)

The majority of them were from the Hmong ethnic group who had been forced to flee and relocated to the States after their work fighting for America during the Vietnam War led them to be known as traitors.

Headlines including ‘Mysterious Fatal Malady Striking Hmong Men’ and ‘Night Deaths of Asian Men Unexplained’ appeared in the LA Times, with one article telling the story of a 47-year-old Laotian who had fled a refugee camp and settled in the US, but was found dead in his sleep by his wife.

Investigators could find no medical explanation for the deaths and some Hmong believed they were being punished by the spirits of their ancestors for leaving their homeland. Others asked: were these men literally scared to death by their nightmares? This fear inspired the movie.

The plot for Wes Craven’s movie was inspired by a terrifying phenomenon (Credits: Getty Images)

For Jem Duducu, the idea of being murdered in your sleep is the ultimate violation

According to Jem Duducu, author and presenter of podcast Condensed Histories, the bed-death plotline linked to the way people historically attributed sleep disorders with the supernatural.

‘Sleep paralysis is well-known among psychologists. It doesn’t have any supernatural meaning whatsoever in terms of actual deaths, but there is the element of sleep paralysis that has created these myths across the world, particularly in America, and the idea of a witch sitting on your chest, because you wake up and you can’t move,’ Jem tells Metro.

‘Obviously now we have a scientific explanation, but hundreds of years ago, it was seen as a sign of the Devil or the spirit world interfering with us.’

For Jem, the idea of being brutally murdered in sleep is the ultimate violation – and it plays into childhood fears of monster under the bed, which was one of the reasons why Freddy, who kills in your dreams, made such a successful fiend.

Craven nearly didn’t make the movie. (Picture: New Line/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

‘With traditional monsters, at least you can run away from them,’ he explains. Someone being stabbed by a knife; we’ve seen that a million times in cinema. But a guy who kills you in your dreams takes us into magic. And therefore, there’s so much more you can do with it.

‘You are at your most vulnerable in your bed and your bedroom is a sacred space. So having Freddy killing you and doing it in such a personal place, it is insulting to us at every possible level. And obviously, your bed covers are monster-proof. That is just science when you’re a kid. So there has always been this psychological relationship of vulnerability with the bedroom.’

Surprisingly, Craven nearly didn’t make the movie. He shifted his script across Hollywood only to be met with multiple rejections. But when the film was released it was so successful, people queued around the block to buy a ticket.

Part of its popularity came from the way it manipulated the fears of the 1980s, which was a scary time for teens, Xavier Mendik, organiser of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival, explains.

For Xavier Mendik, the film’s success comes from how it represented the moral panics of the time

‘Much of this presumed threat came from wider political messaging trying to convince the populous that traditional family values were being threatened by a range of social and subcultural practices – ranging from single mothers and satanic cults to rock music and wayward teens,’ Xavier tells Metro.

‘A number of academic studies have considered how Hollywood content of the 1980s shifted to reflect a conservative focus on traditional values under threat that was in the political ether.

‘The brilliance of A Nightmare on Elm Street comes from the fact that moral ambiguities seem to hang over these traditional family representatives as much as they cloud the character of Freddy Krueger.’

The film’s success was also dependent on the home video market, because for the first time, under-18s had the chance to watch it without having to sneak into a movie theatre.

As organiser of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival Daniel Sheppard tells Metro: ‘As far too many Gen-Xers and traumatised millennials know, A Nightmare on Elm Street was once a fixture of sleepovers and unsupervised movie nights, and it’s here that the film largely gained its cult status.

Daniel Sheppard says the original 18 rating that helped get Gen-Xers and millenials hooked

We the audience feel relieved when Nancy triumphs over Freddy (Picture: New Line Cinema/Getty Images)

‘There’s an immediate reason why under 18s were so obsessed with the film — it’s fun to be scared stiff and it’s defiant to watch something certified for adults — but that only scratches the surface.

‘Freddy Krueger is the manifestation of society’s ills, and the nightmares he produces are no less scary than the everyday nightmares of the 1980s: violence, divorce, drugs, unemployment, teen pregnancy, AIDS, prejudice, terrorism.

‘As youth audiences cheer on Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) as she battles against Freddy Krueger, then, her eventual defeat of the bogeyman offers a sense of reassurance.

‘Nancy proves that young people can survive what seems unsurvivable and promises that, despite the prevalence of everyday nightmares in the real world, they will achieve their rites of passage into adulthood.’

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