Original subtitles

In 1984,

a movie came along that lulled everyone into…

a lifelong phobia about going to bed.

And that movie…

Nightmare on Elm Street.

You could say it to anybody, and they've heard of it.

Of course, they have. Because once you see Freddy Krueger…

I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy.

…you can't really unsee him.

It's so horrible.

But getting to see this movie in the first place…

We're, like, totally gonna die.

…well, that was the biggest nightmare of all.

The company was in financial trouble.

But slashed budgets…

You work without pay for a week.

…didn't frighten this movie's director.

Wes was a philosopher and a mad scientist.

But Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't just Wes Craven's baby.

It was Bob Shaye's product, ultimately.

This movie gave birth to a studio…

Everything was riding on this movie.

…and a creative tussle…

There were arguments.

…that got pretty icky.

Wes did not want those stairs. Bob was gonna have those stairs.

Really?

Well, one thing's for sure, Nightmare on Elm Street is…

So cheap and so awful.

No, it's one of the most iconic…

They loved it.

…terrifying…

I remember a lot of screaming.

I think they said, "Run!" …gory…

It's gushing, you know, more blood, more blood.

…sleep disorder inducing movies ever made.

This film is fucked, but that was the most fun I've had in a long time.

These are The Movies That…

Made... Made Us?

Why's it stopped?

Well, while we have pause... It's going again.

It's worth mentioning that many of the movies that did make us

are all thanks to this contraption:

the humble VCR.

And not only did it greatly impact our lives…

but it also impacted the movie business itself.

And one genre in particular.

What I find fascinating about the '80s was how

these horror films got made because the video cassette market arrived,

and suddenly there was a new marketplace.

A new marketplace that became very saturated, very quickly.

By 1983, the slasher film was… getting a little bit long in the tooth.

People were kind of seeing the same thing over and over.

It was just a matter of taking, you know, character X against, you know,

whatever villain you had and whatever weapon they wielded.

It was all becoming very formulaic.

That is until Nightmare on Elm Street.

This horrific tale…

…about four pals…

I had a hard-on this morning when I woke up.

…who were relentlessly hunted by Freddy Krueger…

Come to Freddy.

…a mattress dwelling… No!

…knitwear loving burns victim,

who viciously hunts the teens in the ultimate nightmare scenario…

He's after us in our dreams.

…whilst having a terrific time along the way.

There's a guy who likes his work.

But Freddy meets his match in the form of Nancy Thompson…

Screw sleep!

…who lures him into the real world,

where she brings the hammer down…

…on Freddy's now quite sensitive tum-tum,

and puts this incredibly bad bad guy

to bed for good.

Only kidding. He's unkillable.

The end. Or, is it?

Well, for us and the story of The Nightmare on Elm Street,

it's just the beginning.

A feeling shared by wannabe producer and bigwig Bob Shaye,

who was just starting out in his film career.

But he wouldn't be wannabe for long.

Well, I mean, there was this part of him that looked kind of like a fast-talking

kind of a New York businessman.

But at this point in the mid '70s, looks could be deceiving.

Bob started by distributing Reefer Madness.

He discovered that the copyright was off on Reefer Madness.

But if church-funded anti-marijuana movies weren't your thing,

why, don't worry, Bob had you covered.

He would have a trunk full of B and C movies.

He'd take 'em around and rent them to the colleges for the weekend,

and it just seemed like he was, you know, the kind of watch salesman in New York

who would open his coat and have a bunch of watches.

He was, like, that guy.

But with the inside of his coat filled with heavy 16-millimeter prints,

Bob Shaye needed help.

So, I applied for the job

and I said that I was a little more experienced than I was,

and he said, "Good, I wanna get into production,

so you can run it."

So, leaving Sara to work out how to run it,

we now need to talk about Nightmare on Elm Street's

other most important figure,

Wes Craven.

Wes was, to me, like a combination of a college professor,

a philosopher, and a mad scientist.

And this young combination would soon change everything.

Sorry, young-ish.

Wes Craven's career began later in life, you know.

He was in his thirties when he decided to move to New York City

to get in the film industry.

The new normal was struggling as an editor,

working on oddball movies,

and then aligning himself with Sean Cunningham,

when they did scandalous pictures.

"Scandalous" meaning exceptionally well-made adult movies,

such as 1975's classic, Fireworks Woman,

which Wes Craven wrote and starred in.

Well, not like that.

Just this fetching cameo as Abe Snake,

which is far from what his religiously conservative parents

had in mind for young Abe.

Sorry. Wes.

He had grown up in the Midwest

in a very religious house,

and not only couldn't he go see horror movies,

but he couldn't go see any movies.

And he was very intellectual,

and looked very much like a conservative pastor.

But then when you'd read what he wrote…

you'd realize he had quite an imagination.

An imagination that was very much on display

in The Last House on the Left, which he wrote and directed.

It's a very mean film. Torture and rape, and eventually murder.

You guys gotta be crazy, man.

And the next movie he made, it wasn't much better.

A cannibal family that lives in the hills.

I'll eat the brains of your kid's kids.

Wes was definitely living another life through his writing, that's for sure.

Is that a baby? You be a good dog, you'll get some.

While his first films came straight from Wes's dark imagination…

his next movie would come from nightmares.

Specifically other people's.

Who?

There was an article in the L.A. Times

about this Cambodian situation

where they could actually foresee their death

or die in their dreams.

A situation concerning a group of young Cambodians

who fled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

And they were sponsored…

by religious groups in the Midwest of America.

And Cambodians, if they have a nightmare,

they often wake up in the night and write it down, or even paint it.

And they purge the nightmare that way.

Uncomfortable with that huge cultural shift,

they were unable to wake up and purge themselves of the nightmares

and some of them were dying in their sleep.

And this mysterious, dark story…

Literally dying from their nightmares.

…awakened an idea.

What if somebody was killing people in their sleep?

And that's where Freddy Krueger was… born.

Filled with nightmarish inspiration,

Wes began fleshing out this new character.

But as it turned out, most of his ideas were not so new after all.

When he was a child, he saw a man that was horribly burned,

and that image terrified him forever.

As did Freddy's hat.

It was the hat of a drunk walking down the street that scared me as a kid.

Even the name Freddy Krueger…

It was as a schoolyard bully named Fred Krueger

that used to torment Wes as a child.

Freddy used to beat me up quite frequently.

Wes straight-up named him Freddy Krueger.

Even has his name written in it.

Like, you know, "You asshole, I'm getting you back."

And with his revenge tale committed to paper,

esteemed up-and-coming auteur of horror cinema

had his script ready to roll straight into production.

I guess, you know, in a way, it was a little bit ahead of its time.

And, unfortunately, Wes's nightmare wasn't coming true.

No studio would touch it.

And even his friend and collaborator Sean Cunningham had his reservations.

Like most people reading the script, I was very concerned

if an audience was willing to go along with the premise…

Don't fall asleep in there.

…that dreams could interact in the real world.

But as time passed on,

Wes was getting a taste of the real world himself.

Wes had been shopping the script for years,

and nobody wanted to do it except Bob.

"Bob"? Bob Shaye.

Yes, Bob, who was still looking for a movie to make.

He absolutely adored the script.

Nobody had seen the potential in it that Bob did.

And for Bob, who was looking to make the switch from film dealer…

Try one of these.

…to film producer,

Nightmare on Elm Street had the potential to grow his budding operation.

Well, New Line was an independent company.

Bob put his own money into things, and the company was struggling.

But Bob was hooked. He wanted to make movies.

So, Bob and his fledgling company

agreed to fund Wes Craven's nightmare for just a little over a million dollars.

The only thing Bob needed now was just a little over a million dollars.

Bob had to get the money together, and this was the hard part.

Bob put the company on the line,

and really, his life on the line for this film.

And that was terrifying.

We met at my apartment, up in the Hollywood Hills.

Wes and Bob.

Bob was saying, "If this film doesn't go, New Line is over."

"This is a make-or-break situation."

"I'm counting on you guys to pull this off."

I said, "You got it, Bob. We're gonna do it."

And they'd do it for free, at least for the time being.

I was keeping Wes aboard,

while we could not pay him any money to stay on board.

So, it was a matter of just making sure Wes and his agent were confident

that we were gonna make this movie while we put the money together.

So, with Bob in the Big Apple looking for funding,

Sara joined Wes in L.A. to begin casting.

Wes felt very strongly

that he wanted to hire an actor to play Freddy Krueger.

He didn't want the bad guy that just were, like, stuntmen.

For something more than your run-of-the-mill masked murderer,

Craven went above and… beyond when he cast this man.

My name is Robert Englund,

and I portrayed the dream demon Freddy Krueger.

But before he was Freddy, he was…

Willie! …Willie.

I was the comedy relief alien on a show,

that became the number one miniseries of all time, called V.

Get outta the way, damn stupid alien.

And overnight, I was international.

An overnight international sensation.

Yes!

Robert Englund was not well-known at the time.

I don't know who he is.

Okay, well, at least someone was recognized in this arrangement.

I hear Wes Craven's name and that lights me up a bit.

That and two other words.

Makeup. That's actually one word.

Not one to shy away from putting on a face…

Well, you know, I have a strange face, anyway.

All day long, I've been seeing that guy's weird face.

…it was the perfect canvas for Freddy Krueger.

And at his audition,

Robert was looking to smoke the competition.

I'd even put a little bit of cigarette ash with my saliva under my eyes,

to sink my eyes a little bit,

and with my hair greased back,

I actually used the dipstick under the hood of my car.

I think there was just something they saw they could work with.

And, as if cigarette ash and dipstick smearings weren't enough…

Halfway through listening to him, I played a trick, I tried not to blink.

I just played the staring game with Wes, and I think that might've helped.

Robert's greasy, ash-spattered, unblinking stare

must've cast some kind of magical spell.

Because he was scary, that's why.

By the time I got home, there was a message.

And they wanted him for more than one movie.

He was a very distinctive character,

and we wanted to sign him for several, in case the series took off.

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves,

because there was another lead character that needed casting.

Who the hell is that?

Someone less grimy and more inspired

by the putrid swamp waters of Wes Craven's 1982 movie, Swamp Thing.

When Wes Craven's daughter watched Swamp Thing,

she said to her dad…

"Dad, why do women always have to fall down?"

"We women aren't that stupid or clumsy."

And so, henceforth…

Not only does he not have the women slip and fall when the monster's pursuing them,

they actually stand up and fight back.

So, thanks to Wes Craven's daughter,

struggling 19-year-old actress Heather Langenkamp

was about to get a really good role, which in turn was thanks to her dad.

My dad had lent me $5,000

to kinda see how long it would last for me to kind of live in L.A.

I knew it was running out,

so I was willing to do pretty much anything.

Well, maybe not anything, but…

So you can imagine Heather's relief

when she was called in to audition for the lead role of Nancy.

And then Amanda Wyss…

Yes. …had been brought in with me.

And they told her to read the part of Tina,

and it was a really nice scene of a girl with her best friend.

It didn't seem at all like a horror movie.

That's amazing, you saying that.

The four of us kids were called back together,

and we all liked each other instantly.

After we were done, Wes said, "Congratulations, you got the part."

Good.

Of course, Johnny was adorable. Whoo!

That would be young, aspiring musician, Johnny Depp.

I felt like I can pretend to be his girlfriend, you know.

But for the final seal of approval…

Wes Craven's daughter got one look at him

and said, "Dad, I'm gonna run away from home if you don't cast him."

And rightly so. He's, you know, lovely.

And as for Nancy's lovely parents…

Hello to you too, Donald.

Marge.

They were able to convince Ronee Blakley and John Saxon to take those roles.

Call me if you need anything, okay?

Ronee had gotten an Academy Award nomination for Nashville.

Thank you. All right.

John was John.

But this Enter the Dragon heavy hitter

was something of a horror icon in his own right…

having already starred in numerous cult films.

Blood Beach.

When you thought it was safe to go in the water, you can't get to it.

And with that, the film had its top billing.

And speaking of the bill,

Bob Shaye had finally found someone to foot it.

From a partner in, um, home video.

And…

So, at least enough to get going.

…and another couple of equity partners.

So with a crazy-low budget, Bob kept hiring accordingly.

Like Jim Doyle here.

He was a little bit crazy, we thought.

And I was cheap.

Jim's low-paying job

would be to turn Wes Craven's vision into a practical reality.

He hadn't really thought about

what could be realized within his special effects budget.

Yeah, if you could call it that.

The budget was, like, $57,000.

Which in itself was crazy. So naturally, Jim said…

I'll do it for $57,000.

I needed a job. Understood.

Luckily, Wes Craven's ideas were so crazy, it meant they might just work.

It was surrealism.

Surrealism gives you a lot of room to move.

Which was exactly what Wes Craven was going for.

He said, "We're gonna drift in and out of dreams,

and I don't want the audience to know."

"When we go from real to not…

Reality sucks.

…we don't wanna tell anybody."

Well, here's a reality Bob had to tell everybody.

Although, initially, we had money coming in from people in the VHS world…

The financing fell apart.

Just as we started production.

Despite promises made to Bob, VHS company Smart Egg Pictures,

was suddenly hesitant to crack open the old piggy bank,

leaving Bob and New Line empty-handed.

There was definitely the feeling of desperation.

It might not come together.

Bob has basically mortgaged his life to get this film rolling,

and now the whole thing's about to go in the dumpster.

And with production ramping up, the timing couldn't have been worse.

There was a lot of tension, a lot of pressure.

Bob has a thing about fingernails, and kind of digging at them,

and I looked over, and they were all bloody.

With neither money nor fingernails,

Bob was stuck holding Wes Craven's baby in his, ironically enough, bloody hands.

But the film wasn't the only bundle on the line.

I was pregnant. No.

And soon to be unemployed.

And I remember Bob saying, "Don't worry about that baby."

"I'll take care of you financially and we'll get this movie made."

But it wasn't Sara Bob had to worry about convincing.

Bob said, "We can't pay our crew this week,

and you've got to convince everybody to stay on board."

And while Bob went off to secure new financing,

line producer John Burrows and pregnant producer Sara Risher

were dispatched to reassure a very worried crew.

Everything's gonna be all right.

They said, basically, "Give us two weeks

and we'll see if we can get this film financed."

"To be able to do that, you're gonna work without pay for a week."

That's impossible.

The crew mulled over this less-than-optimal proposal,

the fate of the film in the balance.

So… okay.

Turns out, they were pretty cool with it.

And everybody stayed onboard.

Primarily because…

I think because I was so pregnant.

People were sympathetic.

That didn't make any difference to me. It was Wes.

Well, at any rate, they stayed.

And for the few who couldn't afford to work for free…

John Burrows put up his own money to keep some of the crew there.

It was like $8,000 or $9,000.

And so, thanks to a producer's generosity, as well as…

Because I was pregnant. No.

…other reasons, the show was back on.

And finally, at the first production meeting,

everyone was on board.

Except Wes Craven.

What?

His agent told him not to come,

because we couldn't guarantee the money at that point.

So, we had to go through the entire reading

with the crew, with everybody, without our director.

But Wes Craven could not be separated from his baby for long.

Bob Shaye landed a new deal.

Media Home Entertainment came in last minute.

Not only locking in Wes Craven's commitment to the film,

but fulfilling Bob's commitment to his cast and crew.

We trusted him, and he got it. He got it together.

But after all that drama over raising the money, the film's budget…

Around a million two or something.

It was definitely under 1.5.

Well… It's nothing.

And time was in even shorter supply.

The schedule was really short.

It was shorter than most TV movies I'd done.

Well, springing into action, shooting began in early summer, 1984.

Anne Huntley, we need you on the set.

They needed everyone on the set.

Incidentally, this set in West Hollywood.

So in most movies, when you have exterior locations,

they often cheat where houses are in relationship to each other.

But in this case, my window is right there.

That's where Nancy lived.

Stand by your window so I can see you. You sound a million miles away.

And then Glen lived right over there, literally across the street.

That's much better.

It was just cool to have the actual house proximity that we experienced that night.

Daddy! I did it! Please hurry!

It's a simple house, but those windows make this sort of feeling of eyes.

It's just a great house.

A little piece of the Midwest in West Hollywood.

The challenges were that we were Springwood, Ohio, in L.A.

Complete with picturesque tree-lined streets

and classic Ohio palm trees. Palm trees?

Fail. Epic fail right there.

Well, one place trees wouldn't be a problem

was in Freddy's subterranean lair.

The boiler room was one of our favorite scenes,

because it was on location at Lincoln Heights Jail.

It had all these creepy pipes

and festering devices and grading. So much texture.

In fact, Lincoln Heights Jail

had even more texture than initially thought.

The place was condemned right after we shot there

because it had asbestos.

So we were all exposed to asbestos.

Okay…

It's fine.

We'd… We, -

You have to die for your art.

Meanwhile, Jim Doyle was learning a thing or two about deadly art,

as he set about designing the most important prop of the film.

The thin direction in the script was a weapon, like knives,

that he had on or was holding in his hand.

And that was about it.

I went to see Wes, and he said the word "fingernails."

And I was like, ""

And I ended up drawing this thing up.

Then I made the first finger, and we made it work and all this.

And then I kinda built the whole thing around that.

And you could put it on, and you could do things with it.

And before long, Jim had created

a very serious health and safety issue.

Razor-sharp knives.

If you put this thing on, I guarantee you'll hurt yourself.

That glove, unbelievably dangerous.

You don't wanna pick your nose.

We put it on him, and he went like that.

And I was like…

Little blood running down, and Robert said, "Ouch."

But while Robert eventually got the hang of it…

I would stab weenies off of the craft service table.

For one of the glove's most iconic moments,

he wasn't the one wearing it.

No. No, no, no.

That task fell upon the only one crazy enough to do it.

I was like, "Well, I can stand in the water all day."

That's Jim Doyle under the water.

But he wasn't down there just blowing bubbles.

That was a breakaway bathtub.

With space enough to hold a full-sized Jim Doyle.

I'm sitting on the bottom and Heather's feet are above my shoulder.

It was kind of like being in a gynecological chair all day long.

But upon further examination,

that was nothing compared to what Amanda Wyss had to endure.

That was a mortifying scene.

And, like, uncomfortable.

Tina! And weird.

Of course, she's talking about her horrific, gory death scene.

No, no. God, no, no, no.

The sex scene.

The sex scene was awkward.

Jungle man fix Jane.

The death scene was…

It was great! It was also unexpected,

which was Wes Craven's plan all along.

Why do you wanna kill the hero girl 11 minutes into the film?

He said, "Because that's how I will then own everybody for the rest of the film."

That was a Shakespeare thing.

But to kill off a main character in the first reel,

she needed a death worthy of the Bard.

"And we have to do it in such a way

that they don't realize we've moved into a dream."

Which is when Jim peacefully woke up to the reality

that he needed to make a room that could go upside down.

It was actually more complicated than it looked.

It was not motorized.

It had to be manually run. So we had to balance this thing.

Equally weighted.

Tons of mass. Top to bottom.

A couch weighs this. A bed weighs this. Side to side.

I had to take the camera rigs into consideration.

The lighting rigs, because lights here, weight over here.

Jim got it dialed in.

And?

Once you got it rolling, you just spun it by hand.

Meaning?

Everything in that room had to be starched, stapled, stuck to the wall,

so that nothing moved.

Well, except for Amanda.

I got disoriented and thought I was falling.

It gave her vertigo.

We had to stop.

I couldn't stand, because I thought we were on the ceiling.

And, technically, she was. We're totally gonna die.

But she didn't really die. Just pretend die.

We worked through that.

That was the first time in the movie I went, "That's gonna be a scary scene."

Jim's spinning room had spun cinematic gold.

So naturally, someone else had to be sacrificed to its centrifugal forces.

Glen?

Got a big investment in this thing.

You can do a lot of things. Let's see what we can do with this.

Wes Craven's direction was clear. He wanted blood.

The Johnny Depp blood scene was sort of an homage

to the elevator scene in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

It's an insane amount of liquid.

And so it was decided,

Nightmare's twist would be a supernatural geyser of blood.

Jim, how do you build a supernatural geyser of blood?

We built this great, big rig

that stood tall in the rotating room with barrels of blood

and a big gate valve, six-inch pipe…

and it pointed at a particular place in the rotating room.

The shot is, we're supposed to rotate this way,

and the blood's supposed to go up the wall

and end up on the floor, which would be upside down.

With so much blood and only one take possible,

no one knew if they'd be able to control the bleeding.

It's gushing. It's gushing. It's gushing. You know, more blood, more blood.

Great! All part of the plan.

We got a room full of blood. And this room starts to bulge.

Yeah, that... that's not part of the plan.

They turned it so that the effect would happen,

but got away from them because the weight of the water was spinning the room.

And then they tried to change the momentum of this massive amount of liquid.

And it got rotated backwards and all that blood…

Rushes out the door of the set.

I don't know if they said "clear." That's what you're supposed to say.

I think they said, "Run!" I remember a lot of screaming.

I had no idea what the hell was going on.

But this shocking scene was about to turn downright electrifying.

There's a light fixture in the room that was electrified.

Electricity went up through the water

into the metal drum that they were using to pour it.

And so they got shocked. Oops.

When the set was finally brought under control,

the director emerged with only one thing to say.

He was like, "This film is fucked,

but that was the most fun I've had in a long time."

But it wasn't always blood floods and crew electrocutions,

especially when the boss was around.

Bob Shaye tried not to step on Wes's toes.

But then he also felt that Wes was there to execute the product,

but that it was Bob Shaye's product, ultimately.

Maybe that was covered at that first production meeting.

You know, the one Wes didn't go to.

I remember very much the argument…

about the oatmeal stairs.

Wasn't that pancake batter?

Whatever it was, Bob Shaye was convinced

the audiences would identify with this classic anxiety-dream scenario,

using an effect achieved with one of these two breakfast-based starches.

The only problem was…

Wes did not want those stairs.

But…

Bob was gonna have those stairs.

It was probably a difference in their sensibilities,

and so Wes let him direct that.

The cinematic results speak for themselves.

They work really well.

The gag, to this day, looks terrible.

He's probably a bacon and eggs man.

And speaking of appetites,

with each death more gruesome than the last…

Help me!

…Freddy's own death would have to top them all.

Which might be hard to do in a basement.

You usually don't do burns and things with wood ceilings.

The fire department was like, "Really?"

So, I was, "No, it'll be fine."

Well, they were about to find out.

I walk down the basement and I grab the gallon of gasoline,

because everyone keeps gasoline in their basement.

Hey!

I throw it down, and then I light the match.

Which then lights the stuntman.

Nancy scooches by and runs up the stairs first, that's the stunt girl.

And then, Freddy on fire, that's Tony Caesar.

This guy is a body burn expert.

Forged in the flames of movies like Swamp Thing,

The Thing, and The Terminator,

when you needed a flaming stuntman, who are you gonna call?

Well, you're gonna call Tony Caesar.

Three. Roast him!

He did Ghostbusters too, so that works.

So when he arrived on the Elm Street set, Tony Caesar was ready to get cooking.

He was supposed to go across the floor to the stairway and drop.

That was it. That's all we needed.

Fucking Tony.

No!

I'm an effects guy. This was a big fire.

We're there with extinguishers following this guy around.

And the signal is you lay down.

You lay down, they put you out.

He didn't lay down.

He turned at the stairway, went up the stairway.

Stopped. And he was done?

Fell back down the stairway on fire.

And then finally, at the bottom of the stairs…

Tony turned around.

Come on.

Started to go back up the stairway and laid down.

And we put him out.

We're like, "God, you okay?" "Yeah, I'm great. How'd it look?"

And Wes was like, "Thank God you're on my movie."

But as they began to run out of time and…

We were starting to run out of money.

It was Wes and Bob who were really feeling the heat.

We were definitely in arguments about how the film should end.

Wes was more conservative. He wanted to just see the kids drive off,

and then he panned to the young kids jumping rope.

And Bob wanted an ending where Freddy was still there.

And for Bob's ending… Like, eight or nine different endings.

Or "endings."

Wes wasn't sure which one he liked best, so we shot a lot of them.

There's an ending where I look over and Freddy's driving the car.

There's one where it slams shut

and you're inside, and you see the Freddy claws are the grips of the convertible.

Bob's like, "What about this? Let's do this."

Just as fast as we could shoot them.

Which was nowhere near fast enough.

Always trying to cut corners.

Always trying to, you know, see if we could speed it up.

But they cut more than corners.

I stepped on a piece of glass and sliced my foot.

And Bob was like, "Think you could just do one more take?"

And I'm like, "I think I need to go to the hospital."

I'm going to get her some help.

Limping to the end of production,

Bob and Wes called for backup.

We had five units going,

and we'd leapfrog from one set to the other.

Wes even asked his old friend and Friday the 13th director

Sean Cunningham to shoot a few scenes.

We had a shorthand and he could tell me shots he needed or would like to get.

And I'd go out and try to get 'em and grab 'em.

Sean came in and bailed him out.

Then just check it off the list and do whatever was next.

Next was one more ending.

Then there's the one with Mom.

Freddy grabs her and sucks her through the door.

Now, how that was gonna happen? I had no idea.

Jim?

Okay, we could, um…

I've got this dummy.

What if we dressed it as Marge, and Freddy punches through the window,

grabs her and pulls her back through the window? It looked so stupid.

It was hysterical. Looked so cheap and so awful.

And when the director saw it… Wes did not like this.

Well, eventually, they had to put an end to the endings.

Of course, because you never wanna stop shooting.

Only when you're dropping dead.

Then you're done. Well, asbestos or otherwise.

Well, you have to die for your art.

And bursting to life was editor Rick Shaine…

who very quickly felt that life drain straight out of him,

as he realized exactly what he'd walked into.

Bob and Wes were competitive on the film.

Two very strong personalities that had their own point of view.

And their own ideas about how the movie should end.

I think Bob just wore him down

and he finally said, "I'll put in whichever one you want."

So, they agreed that Bob would get the ending he wanted.

But there was just one problem.

He hadn't told me that.

Yes, and there's no way that's going to come back to haunt them.

Well, as the team continued in post-production,

Sara's other production went into post-natal.

The day I had my child.

I had a boy named Nicholas, and he was seven pounds…

Sorry. Bob's on the line.

Bob called me on my birthing bed and he said…

Congratulations?

… "We have a problem." What?

"Congratulations on the baby, but I need you to do something for me."

I've got a crazy favor to ask you.

The guy who we had hired as our music supervisor,

and we gave him all our money, he was then supposed to pay the composer.

It turned out that he had been in an automobile accident where someone died.

He was afraid that he was gonna be charged for manslaughter.

He disappeared.

Along with all the money that was meant to go to this guy.

Hi, I'm Charles Bernstein.

I wrote the music for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Actually, not only that.

I played all the music, I sang all the parts.

It was budgetary.

But, you know, limitation breeds creativity.

Now, Sara had to creatively tell him to be even more creative.

Bob said, "Can you call him?

"Tell him what happened and tell him he's gotta trust us."

"We have to have the music, all of it, delivered in the next couple of days."

"And tell him he will get paid. Assure him that he will."

So, Sara, who thought she was done laboring for the day,

picked up the phone.

I called him up on my birthing bed.

He will never forget it either, but he said he trusted me.

Trust us.

Okay.

But with Charles, the latest person to be working off IOU's,

New Line's costs were adding up.

The company was in financial trouble.

There was still a lot of money to be paid back,

and there were still debts to pay.

As the film neared completion,

Bob had the chance to make all that money back in one sitting.

Bob had organized the big screening for Paramount.

He wanted to sell the film.

There was a tremendous amount riding on this for New Line.

Because if they could pull Paramount in,

Bob and New Line would finally be out of the red.

And what ensued

was one of the more hair-raising episodes of my editing career.

With Paramount executives in the audience,

including the CEO, Frank Mancuso,

the projector rolled on the most important screening

of Bob Shaye's career.

And his editor Rick had a back-row seat.

I was mixing the film in the back of the theater, and the phone rings.

And it was Bob from the projection booth, "Which ending do you have in?"

I don't know.

And I said, "The one where they drive off after the top comes down."

"No, no, no! I told Frank about the ending where she gets pulled through the door,

and he loved it."

And I said, "What do you want me to do?" And he says, "We gotta have that ending."

With the screening well underway,

Rick got on the phone with his assistant.

She had the different endings.

I said, "Get a cab and get over here as fast as you can."

By now, the film had just 40 minutes to run.

It was gonna take her 20 minutes at least.

And I remember Bob having conniptions.

With his fingernails long gone…

He was actually chewing gum,

and I remember, at one point, he almost gagged on the gum.

Finally, Rick's assistant arrived with the ending.

I got the ending that he wanted.

But I said, "Bob, I'm not gonna make it by a couple of minutes."

"You still want me to do this?" And he said, "Yes."

And Bob, at that point, went out and made an announcement

that we were going to be down for a couple of minutes.

But even as Rick raced to attach the ending,

that two-minute pause pulled a Freddy. It killed the momentum.

Goddamn you!

It happened at a really bad place, in terms of tension.

So, even though Bob got the ending he wanted from the film,

he didn't from the screening.

We found out the next day that Paramount had passed on the movie.

And Bob was very disappointed.

Without the backing of the major studio,

New Line would flatline.

But there was one last spark of hope.

But it would mean going back into the madness of the past…

They were mostly a distribution company.

…and distributing the movie themselves.

If it didn't work, the company was not gonna work.

Well, someone who was going to have to do a lot of work…

Was Sue Salter, one of the top PR people in New York.

And she did a lot of press.

And there was rumors and there was a lot of word of mouth.

Just enough interest to get them in a few theaters.

One was in Times Square.

And thanks to a peppering of Sue Salter magic…

When we opened the film…

…the line was around the block to go see it.

And just like that…

Our head of distribution was getting calls for bookings all over the place.

It continued to play, and play out, and roll out across the country.

And then around the world.

They started selling it foreign and getting really good reactions.

And when, six months later, A Nightmare on Elm Street came to VHS,

surprise, surprise…

It was a big success then.

I think that was the moment we realized that we had had a big success.

This low-budget horror flick grossed $57 million.

It was huge.

And after betting his company on A Nightmare on Elm Street,

for Bob Shaye, his nightmares were over.

But for the rest of us, they were just beginning.

In the long run, it ended up becoming the major franchise

for New Line for years and years and put them on the map.

Or another way to put it…

New Line Cinema became the house that Freddy built.

Because even while the film was still in theaters,

a sequel was in the works.

Followed by a third, a fourth…

and a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth,

grossing a cumulative $472 million.

Bob took the money and reinvested it, and kind of built the company, right,

that became kind of this maverick studio on the fringe of Hollywood.

And from within this house, built by this guy…

Who? Me? …many other dreams also came to life.

New Line Cinema was primarily responsible

for hiring so many young independent filmmakers.

People who wanted to make movies differently, or had something to say,

or wanted to make people laugh at things that parents didn't want them laughing at.

Yeah, baby, yeah.

It seemed like they were making every interesting film.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

These movies would not have been made

without the success of Nightmare on Elm Street.

New Line is definitely the house that Freddy built.

Definitely metaphorically. These are not the hands of a bricklayer.

Hang on. Whoa!

I see. Did we put the wrong ending on?

Well, it happens to the best of them.

Just, um, yeah, pick it up at the hands bit, will you?

Spool it back a little bit. Yep.

New Line is definitely the house that Freddy built.

But all houses are built brick by brick.

And what Bob and his team of builders created

was nothing, if not a good investment.

I'll tell you something, for the money, it's amazing what we accomplished.

Very proud of that.

With relentless dedication…

I like the challenge of not always having a big budget.

It makes things more passionate.

And a whole lot of trust.

We did ultimately get our full budget, which was tiny.

And good communication skills.

And I get a Christmas card from him every year.

He's such a good guy.

This movie built momentum.

Until now, it's almost something else entirely.

You could say A Nightmare on Elm Street to anybody, and they've heard of it.

You're associated with something that's like that important.

Here's the happy accident of my career, and I'm so grateful for it.

Because from Freddy's hat… He has become such a cultural icon.

…to the glove that fit like a glove…

We had no idea this prop was gonna be as famous as the ruby slipper.

…Freddy Krueger found his way into homes and hearts in a good way.

When you take a walk down your opposition's memory lane,

it starts to look like Nightmare on Elm Street.

It's been in the zeitgeist for 35 years.

When it comes to endings,

for everyone who worked on this terrifying movie,

this really is the right ending.

It was quite a joyful experience, to be honest.

It was family always working for the same conclusion

of making a great movie,

and I'm very proud of it.