Freddy helped to pay for the rings
If Wes Craven’s 1984 tale hadn’t made it to cinemas, New Line Cinema wouldn’t have been around to greenlight The Lord of The Rings trilogy, writes James Croot.
You could argue that Freddy Krueger is the single most important character in the history of the New Zealand cinema industry. Without the success of the
Nightmare on Elm Street movie series, New Line Cinema would almost definitely have not been around to greenlight Sir Peter Jackson’s wildly ambitious three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
Now a new episode of the excellent Netflix series The
Movies That Made Us details just how close Wes Craven’s original, seminal 1984 horror film came to not making it into movie theatres.
As with other instalments of this warm and witty show, this takes an irreverent look at the trials and tribulations of film-creation in the days before CGI and sure-bet franchises built on audience recognition for what to expect before the cameras even roll.
Featuring everyone from Krueger and Robert Englund to young star Heather Langenkamp and a cadre of producers and key crew members (unsurprisingly there’s no Johnny Depp, who made his feature debut in the film) we’re taken through how
A Nightmare became reality and writer-director Wes Craven drew on a variety of sources from a newspaper report on Hmong refugees who died in their sleep, to the bully that used to torment him as a child (a young man named Freddy Krueger) to come up with his conceit.
Just as fascinating is the background and behaviour of New Line Cinema boss Bob Shaye (a man who later very publicly crossed swords with Jackson). As revealed here, before getting into the filmmaking business, he distributed B and C-grade movies to college campuses and obtained the rights to the cult 1936 exploitation drama Reefer Madness.
Enraptured by Craven’s proposed spin on the then ubiquitous slasher movie, Shaye was determined to get it made, even though no studio would touch it and financing fell through at least once. He also wasn’t afraid to get his way when it came to certain scenes, even going so far as sabotaging an important screening to ensure the edit was the one he wanted.
But while the insights from the likes of Langenkamp and producer Sara Risher are fascinating, this definitely does not feel definitive.
Necessarily Craven’s input is limited to old DVD extras (he died in 2015), but there’s no mention of the movie’s many subtexts, or some of the censorship issues that surrounded it, in America and across the globe (two minutes was chopped out of it, so it could receive an M, rather than an R18 rating).
However, if you want to simply see how they managed to get a waterbed to swallow Johnny Depp, then this is the show for you.
Season 3 of The Movies That Made Us is now available to stream on Netflix. A Nightmare on Elm Street is available to rent from YouTube, iTunes and GooglePlay.