25 things you didn’t know about your favorite horror movies

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) – The idea came from real-life deadly nightmares

If you’re the type of person who avoids horror movies out of fear of nightmares,A Nightmare on Elm Street is definitely not for you.

The teenagers living on Elm Street start having terrifying nightmares where a clawed killer named Freddy Krueger is trying to kill them. It turns out the badly burned psychopath was a child murderer who got off scot-free and ended up being burned alive by the parents of his victims. His ghost has come back for revenge on the families and is attacking their living children.

When Nancy’s friends start dying in their sleep after battling Krueger in their dreams, she realizes that she can’t fall asleep until she finds a way to defeat this madman. It’s either stay awake and live, or fall asleep and die.

The concept for this movie was actually conceived by writer-director Wes Craven after a series of articles he read in the Los Angeles Times. They were about a group of Southeast Asian refugees who died while having horrific nightmares. After escaping to the U.S., three healthy men died under similar circumstances.

These men would have nightmares, then refused to sleep, and when they finally gave in to exhaustion and passed out, they would eventually wake up screaming before they dropped dead. Their autopsies revealed that they simply died, no heart failure or anything. This phenomenon was dubbed “Asian Death Syndrome.”

As terrifying as Freddy Krueger may be, the original film almost ended very differently. Wes Craven wanted a happy ending, where Nancy manages to kill Krueger by not believing in him. Then she awakes and the whole thing was just a nightmare.

However, producer Robert Shaye wanted to keep the ending open-ended, to entertain the idea of sequels. Craven hated Shaye’s idea, but they ended up filming four different endings anyway. Years later, Craven still thinks the film should’ve ended his way.