How Freddy Krueger Saved New Line and Helped Pave the Way for the MCU

How did Freddy Krueger help revitalize a struggling Marvel and pave the way for the MCU as we know it? It starts with 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, written and directed by the master of horror, Wes Craven. That film single-handedly saved New Line Cinema from the brink of bankruptcy. The studio's survival led it to Blade, which helped revitalize a struggling Marvel. And it did all this on a tiny budget, with practical effects that for the most part still hold up.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is still one of my favorites, and in my opinion it's a must rewatch every time spooky season rolls around. When I was in high school, I hosted horror movie marathons at my house for my friends: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Hellraiser, all the classics. The first one I ever did was the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I'm a huge horror fan, but I especially love 80s horror because the filmmakers had to do a ton of practical effects with small budgets, and that meant they had to get very creative. In my opinion, the 1984 film is one of the most influential horror movies of all time, with an enduring legacy that more than earned its place in horror history.

New Line Cinema was a small distributor before Wes Craven arrived

New Line Cinema was founded by producer Robert Shaye in 1967. It was primarily a distribution company, meaning it didn't make films. It acquired the rights to films and distributed them to places like college campuses and prisons, including cult movies like Reefer Madness and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In 1977 it produced its first feature, Stunts. Up until 1984, New Line distributed and produced a few films, but it was far from being considered a successful company.

Then along came Wes Craven, a young writer and director who only had two films under his belt: 1972's The Last House on the Left and 1977's The Hills Have Eyes. Before pivoting to filmmaking, Craven was a humanities professor, and his newest script, A Nightmare on Elm Street, explored the human condition in terrifying ways. The script bounced around Hollywood for a while, but no major studio was willing to make it. Shaye, an avid movie lover, became interested. After failing to find someone to make it for him, he decided New Line would handle both the production and the distribution.

A Nightmare on Elm Street had a $1.1 million budget and grossed $57.1 million

The film was shot in just 32 days. There were 80 effects shots in the 90 minute movie, and it had a budget of just $1.1 million. When it came out, it grossed $57.1 million. New Line officially had a hit, and more than 40 years later the company is still known as the House That Freddy Built. That movie and its sequels saved New Line from bankruptcy and obscurity.

The film also kicked off Craven's career. He went on to do a ton of work, including directing the first four Scream films. It kicked off the career of a young Johnny Depp, too. Shaye cast his sister Lin Shaye in a small role as a teacher, and yes, I'm talking about the iconic scream queen from the Insidious movies. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, one of my personal favorites, starred Patricia Arquette, who went on to have a very prolific career and is currently doing great work on Severance. The legacy of this film and its sequels is enormous.

Shaye and Craven disagreed over how Nancy's story should end

The movie follows a group of teenagers, Tina, Glen, Nancy and Rod, who are all being terrorized in their dreams by the same man. He wears a dirty red and green sweater and a homemade glove with blades attached to the fingers, and he has a horribly burned face. When the teens start dying for real in the middle of these nightmares, it's revealed that the man is child murderer Fred Krueger. Years before, he killed a bunch of neighborhood children and got off on a technicality when caught by police. So a group of parents formed a mob and burned him alive. Now he's back to get revenge on their teenage children in their dreams.

The parents admit none of this at first, choosing to ignore their kids' questions and fears until the truth comes out. Tina, Rod and Glen are all killed in gruesome ways. Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, eventually defeats Freddy by taking back control and deciding she won't participate in fear.

Shaye and Craven disagreed on the ending. Craven wanted Nancy happily going off into the daylight with everything set right, including her friends and her mom being alive again. Shaye had an eye toward sequels and wanted one last scare that would leave the door open for Freddy to come back. They ultimately shot three or four different endings. The one in the final cut shows Nancy saying goodbye to her mom and getting in the car with her friends, who are no longer dead. Freddy takes control of the car, trapping them inside, and Nancy sees her mom grabbed and dragged back into the house at 1428 Elm Street. It's left ambiguous which parts were real and which were dreams.

Craven built Freddy from a news article, the Bible and distrust of adults

Craven came up with the idea after reading an article about young men dying in their sleep in the middle of nightmares. From that germ of an idea, he started thinking about what or who could be causing the deaths. The original concept was that Freddy would be a child molester, but there was a very high profile national news case at the time about a series of sex crimes against children, so Craven made Freddy a child murderer instead. The 2010 reboot starring Jackie Earle Haley changed him back, so many people in pop culture remember Freddy that way. In this first film, though, he was purely a child murderer.

From his upbringing studying the Bible in a fundamentalist Baptist church, Craven knew all about the sins of the parents being visited on their children. A big theme in horror of the time was an inherent mistrust of adults. You can't trust your parents, your teachers or the authorities. Often they're the ones who got you into this, they can't protect you now, and you have to get yourself out of the mess they created. Craven used that theme and also wanted to explore whether vigilante justice is ever justified in the case of terrible atrocities when other avenues are out of reach.

He filled out the story with one last classic 80s horror trope: Tina dies right after having sex with her boyfriend Rod. The 80s were all about punishing teens for promiscuity and reckless behavior. The movie opens on Tina and her nightmare, setting her up as the heroine before killing her halfway through, just like Janet Leigh in Psycho. Nancy, the brainy good girl, is the final girl. For the setting, Craven wanted pure Americana, an everytown USA that was easily recognizable. The picturesque New York school where he used to teach was right off Elm Street, which also happened to be the name of the street in Texas where John F. Kennedy was shot.

Robert Englund broke the mold for movie monsters

Most of the teenagers were relative unknowns. Nancy's boyfriend was played by Johnny Depp in his first acting role ever. Craven said he cast Depp over another actor when his daughter told him it had to be Depp because he was such a dreamboat. Craven himself didn't quite get the appeal. Apparently Depp was so nervous that he showed up every day sweaty and pale with anxiety, and Craven had to keep reassuring him he was doing okay.

Craven said one of the benefits of low budget horror was that you could usually find one ringer, an actor on the downslope of an otherwise impressive career, and convince them to take a role they might not have taken a few years before. Nancy's father was played by film legend John Saxon, who made a name for himself in westerns and movies like Enter the Dragon. The cast and crew were thrilled to work with him, and he gets top billing.

New Line and Craven broke the horror mold by casting Robert Englund as Freddy. Until then, horror villains were typically played by stuntmen with no real speaking lines, as with Michael Myers in Halloween and Jason in the Friday the 13th movies. Englund was a trained actor coming off the success of the V miniseries. Craven initially wanted someone older, but older actors had a softness that made it hard for them to be truly terrifying. He didn't want a monster with an innocence to it, like Frankenstein's monster or Jason. He wanted pure, unfiltered evil, and Englund brought that. Englund said he played Freddy with a mix of the theatricality and movement of Klaus Kinski in 1979's Nosferatu and the gangster swagger of Jimmy Cagney. He instantly made the role iconic. On A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Shaye learned how vital Englund was when he cast a random extra as Freddy in some scenes to save money. The performance was wooden and weak, and Shaye instantly regretted it.

A pepperoni pizza inspired Freddy's face

Villains of the 80s all had a signature look. Makeup effects artist David Miller came up with the idea for Freddy's makeup while playing with a pepperoni pizza at a pizza joint one night, putting the pepperoni behind the cheese to form Freddy's face. Then he looked at photos of actual burn victims to get it right. Application took about four hours every day.

To round out the look, the filmmakers created a glove with blades on the fingertips, which Englund described in the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy as "a junior high school shop project from hell." Craven had seen a scientific article saying red and green was the color combination most unsettling to the human eye, so he chose those colors for the sweater. He wanted every aspect of the character to cause discomfort in the audience, and that extended to the score. Composer Charles Bernstein chose discordant notes to underscore the unnatural danger coming from all angles. The Freddy nursery rhyme sung by creepy children in white outfits became a staple of the series.

The rotating room and a spandex wall made the film's best effects

With a small budget and no regular mainstream use of CGI yet, the crew had to get very creative so the movie would be more than a scary guy in cool makeup lumbering after kids. That meant a ton of practical effects, often figured out on the fly. For Tina's death, they built a rotating room inspired by Fred Astaire's ceiling dance in 1951's Royal Wedding. It wasn't electronic in any way; crew members rotated the heavy thing by hand. Everything was nailed down, and there were no wires when Tina was dragged up the wall and across the ceiling. Amanda Wyss, who played Tina, got vertigo, and when Craven went on set to calm her down, he started to get nauseous and confused himself. It was worth it.

They reused the room for Glen's death to make blood shoot up from the bed to the ceiling. The blood made the room too heavy on one side, so it wobbled wildly and everyone got soaked. It shorted out the lights for a while, so they could only get one take. Again, worth it. When Nancy runs up the stairs and her feet sink into sticky white goo, that was Bisquick left out to get gooey. Shaye pitched it based on a nightmare he thought was fairly common: not being able to run away in a dream.

When Freddy menaces Tina in the alley and his arms grow long so his knives screech along the fence, it may look basic today, but it was ingenious and terrifying to 1984 audiences. Two crew members used fishing rods and lines attached to puppet arms on Englund. In the scene where Freddy is lit on fire, all in one shot, the stuntman was set on fire, walked up the stairs, rolled down, and walked halfway back up before collapsing. But the most iconic effect was also the cheapest. For Freddy's face and hands pressing out of the wall above Nancy's bed, special effects designer Jim Doyle sawed a hole in the wall, stretched spandex over it and pressed against it. That's Doyle's head, not Englund's. The fabric cost less than a dollar, and the shot has been replicated or paid homage to in films from 1993's Needful Things to 1996's The Frighteners to 2020's The New Mutants. That shot secured the film's spot in the horror hall of fame.

Glen's death is the best kill, and the phone gag is the best line

In my view, the best kill goes to Freddy killing Glen, who gets sucked into his bed right before an enormous amount of blood gushes up to the ceiling. Death by bed. It's brutal. The best one liner is obviously "I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy," with Freddy's tongue coming out of the phone. So gross, so campy, so iconic, like everything in this film. That rubber mouth and tongue was another cheap practical effect. Freddy doesn't have as many quippy one liners here as in the sequels, where he amps up the camp puns, but there are still a few great ones.

The Simpsons, Rick and Morty and Sam Raimi all paid tribute

The film has been lovingly parodied in a ton of shows and movies. The Simpsons did it with Treehouse of Horror VI, one of my personal favorites, where Groundskeeper Willie stands in for Freddy in Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace. Rick and Morty has Scary Terry, who terrorizes people in their dreams and calls everyone a rude name. The original Scream had a janitor named Fred in a Freddy hat and red and green sweater, though that's a cheat since Craven directed Scream and played the janitor himself. Nightmare has been parodied or outright ripped off many times, and there are even sexy Freddy Halloween costumes.

At one point, Nancy has Sam Raimi's 1981 The Evil Dead on TV while trying not to fall asleep. Craven put it in because Raimi included a poster for The Hills Have Eyes in Evil Dead. The two went back and forth like this. In Evil Dead 2, Raimi included Freddy's glove in the tool shed, and after Craven passed away in 2015, Raimi included the glove again in Ash vs Evil Dead in honor of his legacy.

Six Freddy films followed, and New Nightmare paved the way for Scream

Six more Freddy films followed at a very fast pace. 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge did better financially than the first but had mixed reviews, to put it mildly. 1987's Dream Warriors was a solid and popular entry that brought back Craven, Langenkamp and Saxon. Then came 1988's The Dream Master, 1989's The Dream Child, and 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. After that one, with its not very successful 3D element, everyone at New Line thought the franchise was done.

But Shaye reached out to Craven once more. The two put their creative differences behind them, and Shaye gave Craven a much deserved cut of the merchandising, which by then included Freddy mugs, T-shirts, toys and dolls. What Craven came up with was brilliant: 1994's Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a terrifying meta journey that's definitely one of the best and clearly paved the way for 1996's Scream. Craven is still considered one of the most influential creators in horror. He inspired countless others and jumpstarted the careers of writers, directors, actors and even studio heads.

The sequels also added to Freddy's mythos. Dream Warriors reveals he was the result of a horrifying assault: his mother, a nun named Amanda Krueger, was accidentally locked in an asylum and assaulted by the patients. The sequels also gave Freddy a family. Before he died, he was married and had a daughter, and when his wife discovered evidence of his crimes, he killed her in a rage.

The House That Freddy Built took the risk on Blade

New Line used the success of the Nightmare movies to bring more investors on board, increase its bank loans, work out a groundbreaking home video deal with RCA and make more movies. It became known as the studio willing to take chances where others weren't. One of those chances was a comic book movie, at a time when those were far from a sure thing. Even riskier, the comic was from Marvel, which hadn't been doing well with movies, and the lead was a Black superhero. When Blade was announced, many studios thought New Line was nuts. Not only was the Blade trilogy a huge success for New Line, it helped revitalize a struggling Marvel, and we all know how that turned out.

New Line also took the Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman film Se7en as is, while other studios wanted the bleak ending changed, and it became one of the most darkly iconic endings in film history. It got the rights to Friday the 13th, which gave us Freddy vs. Jason, a film that has no right being that good. It took 10 years to develop and made over $80 million. New Line also got the rights to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which it had once distributed to small venues, and produced the Final Destination films. When Freddy's Dead was in development, a young Peter Jackson wrote what was considered a very solid draft. New Line used another script, but years later, when Jackson wanted to make The Lord of the Rings, a project many studios considered unmakeable, New Line was happy to partner with him. Because of Nightmare on Elm Street and Peter Jackson's relationship with New Line, we got The Lord of the Rings.

Over the years New Line also made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Conjuring movies, Mortal Kombat, Elf and many others, and some risks paid off better than others. In 2008 it became a subsidiary of Warner Bros., and it's still making films, including the 2025 horror hit Weapons, which is all thanks to A Nightmare on Elm Street.