Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy — dvd movie review — early!
Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy is a remarkable documentary chronicling the rise of the Nightmare on Elm Street canon, from rags to riches. Literally born out of serious setbacks — financial woes and competing charisma spurned a rocky yet explosive start. Wes Craven and New Line Cinema CEO Robert Shaye butted heads from beginning to end to ultimately create one of the most successful horror franchises ever made.
Nods to Hitchcock, psychological abstracts (Freddy’s red-green sweater is based on nausea-enducing adjacent color analysis), Wes Craven strove for intelligent intricately interwoven moral strife, stemming from certain autobiographical aspects, i.e.: his childhood bully’s name was Fred, an eerie stranger peering up at his bedroom window on a shadow-filled eve. For better or for worse, then penniless Wes Craven sold the rights in order to make the film, so that would be the last film he would have creative authorship over until New Nightmare, written a full decade later.
The non-stop flow of articulate and truly candid cast and crew interviews in Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy are incredibly entertaining. Stories encircling serendipitous special effects mistakes and triumphs. Truly innovative (and often single-take) special effects ranging from stop motion animation and rotating rooms to rotting porcine carcasses helped fuel the series’ wonderful mixture of sinister brutality and comedy. We learn tasty behind-the-scenes tidbits, like how crew members were accidentally electrocuted for the Johnny Depp death scene in the first installment, and that actress Lezlie Deane (Tracy in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare) was smacked silly by a prop and needed stitches and a tetanus shot.
Other hilarious highlights include the fly-by-the seat-of-his-pants “Finnish perversion” direction of Renny Harlin’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.
Casting surprises also moved the series along. Robert England wasn’t the first choice; he stepped in when the cast actor suddenly dropped the project. The choice for Johnny Depp as a jock was questioned. Brad Pitt and Christian Slater auditioned for the lead role of Jesse Walsh in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, but were bested by Mark Patton, a closeted gay actor at the time. Combined with a gay production designer, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge‘s intentional gay subtext (subtle in script form) ballooned to full-blown homoerotic mania, spawning mass popularity in Europe.
Freddy became a pop icon just as much as external events acted as inspiration. The series was born because Wes Craven read an intriguing article about children in Asia refusing to sleep, and mysteriously dying in their sleep. Socially unacceptable trends in then current events also infused interest: an ongoing child molestation case, abortion, gay pride rallies. The Nightmare on Elm Street series stands as a fragmented testament that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, in our shared realm of misguided morality and justice.
Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy available for wide release on May 4, 2010.
About the Author
Kris Nelson says Freddy Krueger has always been her favorite fright franchise villain: “What can I say? I like a man with a sense of humor”.
