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In celebration of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s 4K restoration — available on Digital today and on physical 4K Ultra HD on October 15 — living legend Robert Englund spoke to Bloody Disgusting about 40 years of Freddy Krueger and if he has one more performance left in him.
The actor had a feeling that A Nightmare on Elm Street was special during the production in 1984, but he didn’t know if it would reach an audience. “I just wanted people to see it, because I could tell we were onto something good. My girlfriend back then, who discovered several actors who’ve gone on to great success in Hollywood, she saw Johnny Depp for 20 seconds in the hallway the first week, and she said, ‘He’s going to be a star.’”
While he was unsure what kind of advertising budget a then-unknown New Line Cinema could provide for the film, he had faith in writer-director Wes Craven. “I knew that Wes was special, having hung out in a new-wave bar in Hollywood that had clips from The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and on the other end of the bar they had Eraserhead running in a continuous loop. I kind of fused them, after a beer or two, as real equivalent artists: David Lynch and Wes Craven.”
He continues, “I knew Wes was onto something, because he had pitched the whole idea of what the movie meant to him; this suburban malaise and divorce and alcoholism among the parents. This neighborhood had been cursed with this guy, and then they had burned him alive, and he had come back to haunt them for their own suburban American complacency. He had this whole kind of thing going on with it.
“It’s very symbolic. I mean, every town has an Elm Street! Where was John F. Kennedy shot? On Elm Street. There’s a lot going on there. Wes is no fool. He was layering stuff in there. All the adults in all the movies are flawed, and the kids are losing their innocence to this nightmare, this thing that’s telling them that their parents aren’t all goody-goody. It’s almost like a loss of innocence for America, just like the death of Kennedy was a loss of innocence for America.”
It wasn’t long before Englund started to see the impact of Freddy, which he first witnessed while accepting an international award for NBC’s hit sci-fi series V, on which he played the friendly alien Willie. “There were already fans mobbing me in Europe as far back as the end of ’84 or ’85. I literally was there for another project, and all the fans were Freddy fans. I understood what global success meant then and what it meant to be an international actor.”
Freddy’s status as a pop culture icon became undeniable to Englund with the sequels. “I think I knew we really were getting iconic sometime during Part 3 or Part 4. I was on location, and fans got to the set and they were literally rocking the makeup trailer. They followed me home on the freeways of Los Angeles. I actually went past the off-ramp for my own home to lose them. At that moment, I knew there was no turning back.”
Warner Bros’s new 4K remaster of A Nightmare on Elm Street includes an unrated version that restores eight seconds of gore cut from the iconic death scene of Freddy’s first victim, Tina. “I’m anxious to see what they put back in,” says Englund.
“We did a thing in the death of Tina on the ceiling upside down where they wanted a point-of-view shot from the actress, Amanda Wyss. We saw her being dragged on the ceiling, but what she was seeing up there, of course it was Freddy dragging her on the ceiling.
“We actually couldn’t let Amanda operate the camera, because she wasn’t union, but the cinematographer Jacques Haitkin’s wife, Amy, was union. They took her, pulled off her jeans, and put blood on her legs. I grabbed her by her ankles, which were all bloody, and she was handheld shooting a point-of-view — gynecological — between her legs at me pulling her.
“I remember dropping her as if I had been dragging her and she just died of fright. I just dropped the legs, but the coagulated stage blood from all the stuff that they put on her legs got on my glove. I saw that, and I went and I blew her a kiss.”
He adds, “I hope it’s not just my imagination. I think I actually got to see that sequence on a Moviola. Wes, I believe, threatened to use it in the movie as a way of getting other graphic horror bits in the movie that he really needed, strategically, in terms of the shape of the film for a thrill and a shock, even though he wasn’t ever intending on using it.
“Maybe there’s a piece of that, or maybe there’s just another great piece of Amanda up there alone. I don’t know. I’m looking forward to seeing that, because I’ve been telling this story for years,” he chuckles.
In my recent conversation with Heather Langenkamp, the Elm Street final girl said she believes Englund has one more Freddy performance in him. Unfortunately, Englund has to disgree. “I don’t. I literally don’t. I mean, there might be some gimmick thing we could do with a close-up or something, but no, I can’t play him anymore. I’m too old,” he refutes.
“I would love to be invited if they reboot Part 3, Dream Warriors, which I think is the most popular film of the franchise. It would be fun to play one of the doctors. The great Priscilla Pointer, Amy Irving’s mother, was in that film. Maybe I could play her part as a male doctor that’s very cynical. A cameo wink to the audience that I don’t buy that there’s this dream demon that everybody’s having the same dream about. It’s in the tradition of remakes, especially with horror, to give an actor that’s been in the original a little cameo, so I think that would be fun.
“But no, there’s no Freddy left in me. I could possibly voice a really high-end, animated version. That would be nice to be asked to do, but I know I can’t do the fight scenes more than one take now, one angle. I just can’t be snapping my head or anything like that. I’m an old dog! Give me a break,” he smirks.
While his days donning the sweater and glove may be behind him, Englund is pleased that fans can experience his Freddy Krueger debut again for the first time in 4K UHD.
“Several generations of fans discovered this project on video: the rough old tape from the mom-and-pop video store, that bootleg that was passed around dormitories, that old copy that somebody stole off a bookshelf. Those were grainier. They weren’t as true. They weren’t as good. This is gonna be better than the original release,” he extols.
“Jacques Haitkin, our director of photography — really talented guy — I’m sure he worked with the lab and the new technologies. There’s a lot of color work in these movies for when the nightmares begin. When you graduate into that dream world, they did different kinds of lightings. That should be really pronounced in this. It’s just going to be pristine.
“I’m a big fan of this now. Even recently, I just ordered a copy on my big, living room flat-screen of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I saw the original in the movie theaters, and it was better.
“I’m encouraging everybody, because — even though it was a great thing with the family, a cold pizza on the coffee table and a blanket around your shoulders, and your dad’s in the kitchen putting knives on his fingers to scare you — this will look so good. You can turn the lights down and have fun, and maybe bring somebody in to see it that’s never seen it before, experience it that way.”
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