How A Nightmare on Elm Street made slashers supernatural 40 years ago

Reinventing an entire genre once is impressive. But the late Wes Craven reinvented the slasher movie genre at least three times, starting with the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 40 years ago. He added an ingenious, supernatural element to the established grammar of a genre built on the likes of Psycho, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Freddy Krueger was a slasher icon unlike the established boogeymen of the genre. Michael Myers, Leatherface, and Jason Voorhees were seemingly unstoppable killers, but they had at least one foot planted firmly in reality during the early days of their respective franchises. In the early 1980s, we were a long way away from sending Jason to space — in fact, by the time Elm Street hit cinemas, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter had "ended" that series.

While the other slasher icons were terrifying for their human brutality, Krueger was scary on an entirely different level. He had the power to drag his victims into a phantasmagorical dream world where he was in charge. The odds were always against the killers' victims in all slasher movies, but Elm Street stacked the deck even more in favour of the dude with knives for fingers.

Craven told horror magazine Cinefantastique in 2008 that he came up with the idea for Elm Street when he read "three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and had died in the middle of nightmares". This got Craven thinking about dreams and, when he needed to come up with a villain to actually wield the blades, he told the magazine that he looked back into his own childhood.

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"The hat was the kind worn by men when I was a kid, and there was a particular man who scared me when I was little," said Craven. "He was a drunk that came down the sidewalk and woke me up when I was sleeping. I went to the window wondering what the hell was there. He just did a mind-f*** on me. He just basically somehow knew I was up there, and he looked right into my eyes."

Craven explained that the man continued to look up at him, until he sent his older brother downstairs with a baseball bat to investigate. "Nobody was there. Probably the guy heard him coming and ran; he was drunk, having a good time," said the filmmaker. "But the idea of an adult who was frightening and enjoyed terrifying a child was the origin of Freddy.”

The character of Freddy was originally supposed to be a child molester, but Craven moved away from this as a result of some very public molestation cases in California around the time he was shooting. He took the name "Fred Krueger" from a school bully who had once tormented him and, after briefly considering a sickle, decided on the bladed glove as Krueger's horrific weaponry.

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Bizarrely, Disney was the first studio to take a liking to the script, though they inevitably wanted it toned down for a family audience. Paramount and Universal both turned it down, with fledgling studio New Line Cinema taking a risk on the movie as the first movie it had produced rather than just distributed.

It was a rocky road money-wise but, when Elm Street became a big success to the tune of $57m (£44m) worldwide, New Line became known as "The House That Freddy Built". Certainly, the studio wouldn't have had the heft and financial clout to make The Lord of the Rings if they hadn't spent a decade or more rolling in Krueger-inspired cash.

The Omen star David Warner was originally cast as Freddy and future Jason Voorhees actor Kane Hodder was considered, but Craven ultimately chose Robert Englund. In Monsterland's Nightmares on Elm Street: The Freddy Krueger Story, Craven said: "His delight with it is that he had been playing nebbishes and good guys and was looking forward to playing somebody older and evil."

While most of the other slasher icons have been played by multiple actors over the years, Freddy has always been Englund — with the sole exception of the 2010 remake in which Jackie Earl Haley played the role. This unique connection between actor and villain makes Freddy a more well-rounded character, with only Englund able to nail the idiosyncratic combination of true malevolence and gleeful comedy.

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The original Elm Street is a movie of unpredictable evil. Given Freddy's mastery of the dream world, it's impossible to trust anything on screen. The genius of the premise is that, on paper, it's easy for the heroes to survive. All they have to do is stay awake, where Freddy has no power. But anybody who has tried to stay awake for more than 24 hours or so knows how hard it is to stave off sleep. Everyone has to sleep, so everyone is vulnerable to Freddy. It doesn't matter if you flee to the other side of the world or lock yourself in an underground bunker. You'll still have to dream eventually. You can't escape.

It's true that, as with every horror franchise, Freddy lost some of his lustre as he was demystified and defanged by the sequels — though 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is an absolute gem. Craven, however, pulled his trick of reinvention with New Nightmare — celebrating its 30th birthday this year. New Nightmare depicts the actors of the original film being menaced by Krueger, who is shown to be a supernatural entity locked within the movies. It's smart, silly, and very scary.

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New Nightmare was essentially a dry run for the self-aware, meta storytelling that Craven would deploy a few years later in Scream — another of his reinventions of the slasher genre. But everything started with Freddy Krueger and a slasher movie so original and so terrifying that it dragged a tiny studio all the way to Middle-earth. Michael Myers could never match up to that.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is back in UK cinemas from 25 October for its 40th anniversary.