Nightmare - Murderous Dreams

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Movie
German title Nightmare - Murderous Dreams
Original title A Nightmare on Elm Street
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1984
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Wes Craven
script Wes Craven
production Robert Shaye
music Charles Bernstein
camera Jacques Haitkin
cut Rick Shaine
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
Nightmare II - The Vengeance

Nightmare - Murderous Dreams (Original title: A Nightmare on Elm Street ) is a horror film from 1984 and the first part of the Nightmare series. It became a surprise success and is now considered a cult film of the slasher genre. Freddy Krueger became a horror cult figure alongside Jason Voorhees ( Friday the 13th ) and Michael Myers ( Halloween - The Night of Horror ).

action

It's March 1981. In the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio , fifteen-year-old Tina Gray has a nightmare in which she is chased through a dark boiler room by a figure with knife blades on her right hand. The moment the dark figure reaches her, she wakes up screaming and realizes that she has four long cuts in the front of her nightgown that match exactly what happened in her dream.

The next day she learns from her friend Nancy Thompson, who also lives on Elm Street , that she had exactly the same dream. The following night, Nancy and her boyfriend Glen Lantz stay with Tina to calm them down. Her own friend, Rod Lane, convinces her to sleep with him in her mother's room. Tina has another nightmare that night in which the killer catches her and brutally kills her. In reality, Rod sees his bleeding girlfriend struggling with an invisible person, with the girl, contrary to the laws of nature, rolling up the wall and along the ceiling and squirming until Tina falls slashed to the floor. Rod flees in a panic and is arrested the next day because he was alone in the room with her at the time of death and is therefore suspected of having murdered his girlfriend.

Nancy continues to have violent nightmares in which she is pursued and attacked by the same burn scarred person who attacked Tina. These nightmares lead her to visit Rod in prison, who tells her what he saw in Tina's mother's room. Much to her mother's displeasure, Nancy is increasingly convinced that the person in her dreams is also Tina's killer. She and the skeptical Glen drive to the police late at night to speak to Rod, but find him hanged in his cell by a bed sheet tied together. Everyone except Nancy suspects suicide.

Nancy developed increasingly sleep disorders; her mother Marge therefore takes her to a sleep clinic. In a patient bed, wired to medical exam equipment, Nancy repeatedly experiences a terrible nightmare. This time her arm is injured, but she also brought something from the dream: the attacker's battered hat. This worries Nancy's mother, but it also shows that she is hiding something. Eventually, her daughter's drunken Marge reveals that the hat belongs to a child killer named Freddy Krueger, who killed at least 20 children over ten years ago. Angry and vengeful parents burned Freddy alive in his boiler room after he had been acquitted on the basis of a legal procedural error. Now it seems like Krueger is manipulating her children's dreams in order to relentlessly take revenge from the grave. Marge assures Nancy, however, that Freddy Krueger can no longer hurt anyone, and takes his knife glove from a hiding place. She places it clearly visible on the stove so that Nancy can be reminded that Krueger is really dead.

Nancy tells Glen her plan to catch Freddy like the hat and then drag him over to reality. However, Glen falls asleep on the bed of his teenage room and is killed. Nancy is now alone with Krueger, but manages to pull him into the real world. She runs through her house and lures him into traps that she set beforehand. For example, a sledgehammer tied to the ceiling hits the pit of Freddy's stomach, causing him to fall down the stairs on the first floor. After setting Freddy on fire in her basement using a flammable liquid from a glass bottle, she finally manages to call her father and the rest of the local police to help. Freddy escaped from the basement and left fiery footprints on the stairs to the upper floor. Nancy and her father, the police lieutenant Donald Thompson, follow in the footsteps and watch as Marge Thompson is suffocated by the still burning Krueger. He disappears, leaving only the mother's body behind. When Nancy is alone again, she confronts Freddy and manages to destroy him by turning her back on him, paying no more attention to him and thus running out of fear and desperation the energy he needs.

The next morning, in the most beautiful sunshine, Nancy is standing in front of the Thompson family next to her mother. The evil spook seems to have ended and the citizens have returned to normal. Glen and the rest of her friends are waiting for her in the convertible car to drive to school. Only when the top of the car, which has the same colors of dark green and red as Freddy's sweater, closes and Freddy's laughter can be heard, does she realize that she is still trapped in a dream. The car drives off and Nancy yells for her mother, who is being pulled through the front door by a clawed hand.

backgrounds

  • Johnny Depp made his first film appearance in Nightmare . He had accompanied his friend Jackie Earle Haley to Cravens casting, but was discovered there himself. As a coincidence, a quarter of a century later it was announced that Jackie Earle Haley would be playing Freddy Krueger in the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street.
  • When money ran out and time was running out in the past few weeks, Sean S. Cunningham ( Friday the 13th director ) came to the rescue of his friend Wes Craven and helped him finalize. Cunningham took on the role of director on the second filming team for a short time: he staged the final chase scenes.
  • Nightmare - Murderous Dreams was planned by Craven as a so-called one-shot movie with a completed plot.
  • The horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street celebrated its world premiere in 1984 at the Hof International Film Festival in the city of Hof in Bavaria .
  • When actor Robert Englund appeared to audition for the role of Freddy Krueger , he mimicked some of the poses of German actor Klaus Kinski in front of director Wes Craven to demonstrate his acting skills. In 1979, Kinski played the leading role of Count Dracula in the horror film Nosferatu - Phantom of the Night by director Werner Herzog .
  • In addition to his clawed glove, the disfigured face and the red and green striped sweater, the fedora hat is the visual trademark of the horror creature Freddy Krueger .
  • The disfigured face of Freddy Krueger was designed by make-up artist David Miller, who was inspired by photographs of burn victims given to him by the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles , California , in creating this grimace .
  • After Wes Craven offered the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street to various film studios and only received rejections, the Walt Disney Company signaled any interest in the film, provided that Craven converted the script into a version that was less scary and suitable for children and young people circumscribed. But Wes Craven refused. Finally, the independent company New Line Cinema , which was previously only responsible for the distribution of films, agreed to produce the horror film. Since then, the production company New Line Cinema has been known in the film industry for building the iconic horror film character Freddy Krueger and making it famous. New Line Cinema later celebrated great commercial success with the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001.
  • Wes Craven had three completely different end scenarios shot and a selected audience decide which ending the film should have in the cinema in the original version.
  • The name of the character Freddy Krueger goes back to a schoolboy with this name, from whose harassment Wes Craven suffered constantly during his school days. In his earlier film The Last House on the Left from 1972 Wes Craven had already used the latter's name for another character, but shortened it to Krug Stillo , played by actor David Alexander Hess .
  • The soundtrack for the film was written by the composer Charles Bernstein and was first released in 1984 on the Varèse Sarabande record label . However, the lyrics for the Freddy Krueger song Freddy's theme song , which is based on the melody of the English nursery rhyme One, Two, Buckle My Shoe , a counting rhyme sung by children playing jump rope in the Nightmare films, had already been written and Part of the script when composer Charles Bernstein began work on the soundtrack. The melody for Freddy Krueger's signature song was arranged by the musician Alan Pasqua , who later became the husband of the leading actress Heather Langenkamp , who was married to the composer Alan Pasqua from 1984 to 1987. One of the three girls who recorded the vocal part of the Freddy counting rhyme in the recording studio was the 14-year-old daughter of film producer Robert Shaye , the founder of the production company New Line Cinema .
  • For the scene in which the girl Tina Gray , played by actress Amanda Wyss , rolls along the walls and the ceiling, the film crew built a rotating room that could rotate on its own axis in an elaborately manufactured device. This apparatus had no motor and was so ideally balanced that the muscle strength of a single employee was enough to make the room rotate in the frame.
  • The German rock band Böhse Onkelz composed a song called Freddy Krüger , which is on the 1988 album Kneipenterroristen and is about the brand-scarred man with the razor glove. The quartet from Frankfurt am Main only rarely plays this song during concerts .
  • In the 1996 film drama Trainspotting, there is a scene in which leading actor Ewan McGregor plays a drug addict who dips into a dirty toilet bowl in a public toilet. For this scene, the screenwriter John Hodge was inspired by the scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street in which the girl Nancy lies in the bathroom in the tub and is pulled underwater by Freddy Krueger. The hand that suddenly protrudes out of the bathtub water with a razor glove belongs to effects expert Jim Doyle, who stuck in a 2000 liter water tank under the bathtub.
  • The term Elm Street , where the youth afflicted by Freddy Krueger live, translates into German as "Ulmenstrasse". In ancient times , for example in ancient Greece , the elm was a symbol of death and mourning. In addition, was Elm Street in the city of Dallas , Texas , the scene of the assassination of John F. Kennedy .
  • As a tribute to horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Legend , the Canadian gothic rock band The Birthday Massacre released a video clip for their song In The Dark in September 2010 . At the end of the video clip, two arms pull the singer Chibi into the mattress of a bed, in which a hole opens up. In general, some songs in the combo sound similar to the film soundtrack of A Nightmare on Elm Street , for example the pieces on the album Violet from 2005.

Cut versions

The US theatrical version had to be cut by two bloody shots of Tina's death compared to the German theatrical version in order to receive an R rating from the MPAA . The latter is therefore sometimes advertised as an " unrated version". Versions that contain these two scenes in full are still officially available on VHS or as DVD bootlegs. On June 26, 1992, the unrated version ran once on the then private broadcaster RTLplus, but some plot elements were missing here.

The German theatrical version originally received an age rating of 18 and over from the FSK and was indexed . The index was unindexed on December 6, 1989, but the film was re-indexed as early as February 28, 1990. Therefore, a version shortened by roughly seven minutes was created, which was approved for ages 16 and over and was also allowed to be shown on free TV.

On July 31, 2007, the indexing was finally lifted and the film was approved for ages 16 and over after a re-examination by the FSK. It is unclear whether this release refers to the R-rated or the unrated version. Since the 2003 amendment to the Youth Protection Act , an age rating protects the film from being re-indexed.

reception

Reviews

The lexicon of international films praised the fact that the film was "very cleverly staged" and offered "some original ideas".

The film magazine Cinema called the film a "gruesome classic of horror cinema".

Awards

Gross profit

The film, which was released on November 9, 1984, grossed about $ 26 million in North America. In its visual and sound language, the horror film uses a number of motifs that were established in artistic film design in the 1970s by various horror films such as Halloween - The Night of Horror by director John Carpenter or the works of Italian director Dario Argento .

Remake

In 2008 it was announced that Wes Craven was reissuing his horror film. In 2009, Jackie Earle Haley was announced as the new Freddy Krueger . Robert Englund stated in an interview that he had not been asked for the role, and that he also thinks it is right to break new ground with a remake and to hire a new actor accordingly. According to Cinema .de, he should have gotten a cameo . Filming for the remake Platinum Dunes began on May 5, 2009 in Chicago . The film was released in American cinemas on April 30, 2010. The scriptwriters are Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer .

literature

  • Katharina Rein: Disturbed film. Wes Cravens "A Nightmare on Elm Street" . Büchner, Darmstadt 2012. ISBN 978-3-941310-32-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Nightmare - Murderous Dreams . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2007 (PDF; test number: 55 561 DVD).
  2. ↑ 50 years Hof Film Festival: The good ones from yesterday by Wolfgang Höbel on the homepage of the news magazine Der Spiegel , www.spiegel.de, October 25, 2016, accessed on May 15, 2020
  3. ↑ Video clip The rotating room including an interview with special effects artist Lou Carlucci, 2 minutes, in English, included in the bonus material of the DVD Nightmare on Elm Street - Murderous Dreams , DVD 1 of the seven-part collector's box “The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection “, 1999, Warner Home Video Germany, Hamburg. The DVD box also comes with a booklet in which actor Robert Englund talks about the rotating room in his foreword "The Blood Bath".
  4. ↑ Video interview with screenwriter John Hodge , February 2003, 8 min., Included in the bonus material on the DVD Trainspotting , 2009, Universal Pictures Germany , Hamburg
  5. ↑ Seven-part DVD box "The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection", 1999, Warner Home Video Germany, Hamburg. The DVD box comes with a booklet with background information and highlighted Freddy facts.
  6. ↑ Udo Becker: Lexicon of symbols . Nikol Verlag (licensed by Herder Verlag ), Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-86820-139-0 , p. 316 .
  7. ↑ Comparison between the R-rated version and the unrated version on schnittberichte.com
  8. ↑ http://www.ofdb.de/film/93,Nightmare---M%C3%B6rderische-Tr%C3%A4ume
  9. ↑ http://www.ofdb.de/view.php?page=fass&fid=93&vid=3436
  10. ↑ Comparison between the R-rated version and the FSK-16 version on schnittberichte.com
  11. ↑ Nightmare 1 receives after re-examination FSK 16 schnittberichte.com from August 8, 2007 (accessed on August 6, 2011)
  12. ↑ Nightmare - Murderous Dreams. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  13. ↑ Cinema.de: film review
  14. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/awards?ref_=tt_ql_op_1
  15. ↑ A Nightmare on Elm Street. Retrieved May 13, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Information on bloody-disgusting.com
  17. ^ "Nightmare on Elm Street" remake is coming. (No longer available online.) In: www.space-view.de. December 13, 2008, archived from the original on February 26, 2009 ; Retrieved July 6, 2013 .
  18. ↑ Remake of "Nightmare on Elm Street" - Freddy Krueger is back on cinema.de