Pick Six Movies

Hello there, podcast listeners, and welcome to the spookiest time of all, early November.

The store aisles are filled with Christmas decorations, even though you haven't settled on the least objectionable family members to spend Thanksgiving with, and there's that nip in the air that says you'll probably be fantasizing about drinking while the kids tell you all about how much money you'll be spending at Christmas.

It's a veritable November wonderland, a Novemberland.

But while your soul withers inside your body, we offer a way to fight back against the encroaching existential darkness, a podcast we call Pick Six Movies.

And how does this podcast serve as a balm to the soul?

Well, clock this.

Every season, we pick six movies based on a central theme, and then we spin a yarn and then make fun of it.

The whole thing only takes about two hours, and we find it offers at least one moment each episode where you can feel superior to your host, Chad, my old pal, and Bo, that's me.

This season is season 22, and we call it Deja-U.

We're doing a six pack of inferior remakes to classic horror films, and this one may be the inferiorest of all, 2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street.

There's bad makeup, bad CGI, sleepy acting, and lots of reminders that the original was really good while slogging through this hapless retread.

So kick back and relax, remind yourself that you're a valuable member of human society, and while away another couple of hours with your old pals.

So Chad, let's do this.

All right, we are back in the studio with Garrett, the intern.

And Garrett, we are recording this introduction on Halloween day.

Can you believe you have to work on Halloween day, Garrett, the intern?

Such a big day for people like you, big horror movie fans, all that spooky stuff going on around your world there, Garrett.

Garrett, you got big plans for Halloween later tonight, Garrett?

For what?

Your neighbors are cool with that?

Oh, you live in an apartment, okay.

You think the cops are gonna be cool with it?

Well, you know, this episode won't come out until after Halloween, so I will look forward to hearing about your tricks and treats when we meet up again after you get out of jail for doing all of that stuff.

All right, we are recording the intro to A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Quick, Garrett, who wins in a bare-knuckle knife fight, Wolverine or Freddy Krueger?

Come on, Garrett.

No, I did not know that there was an epic rap battle between Freddy Krueger and Wolverine on YouTube, Garrett.

Thank you for sharing that with me.

You know what I'm gonna do, Garrett, after we finish recording this introduction?

That's right, Garrett, I'm not gonna go watch that epic rap battle between Freddy Krueger and Wolverine.

You're getting my vibe now.

Let me ask you this, Garrett.

Did you know that the Cambodian genocide was responsible for the creation of Freddy Krueger?

Ha ha ha ha!

Finally, something Garrett the Intern, who knows everything about horror movies, doesn't know about this horror movie.

Garrett, lay down some appropriate music for me to share how Freddy Krueger came to be a horror movie icon.

From 1975 to 1979, Marxist dictator Pol Pot ruled Cambodia in an attempt to create a master race that led to the deaths of over 2 million people in Cambodia.

Many people were executed because they weren't down with Pol Pot's means of running the country or they die from starvation or disease.

Roland Joppie's Oscar award-winning film, The Killing Fields, told the story of this time period and it's based on the experiences of two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and American Sydney Schoenberg.

Pol Pot's rise to power was rooted in a communist insurgency that took hold during the 1960s when the country was still ruled by a monarchy.

The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that was an armed extension of the communist party in Cambodia.

A military coup in the 70s kicked out the monarch and then the Khmer Rouge hooked up with the deposed leader of the monarch in an effort to bolster support from the people of Cambodia.

This led to a five-year civil war with the military fighting the Khmer Rouge, who eventually won the war, but decided not to restore power to the deposed prince.

Who gave them all their street cred earlier and instead turned power over to the aforementioned Pol Pot.

First order of business was to rename Cambodia to Campuchia and set up a communist agricultural utopia, joining the rural farms with the urban cities.

Pol Pot also reset the calendar to year zero and he isolated the country from the rest of planet earth.

What could possibly go right with this plan?

Next, Pol Pot resettled thousands of people who lived in the cities to farming communes and he outlawed money and ownership of private property and religion.

And this went about as well as you'd expect.

All these city folk working on farms started dying due to being overworked and having a lack of food.

Enemies of the state were executed, including intellectuals or potential leaders of a revolution.

Now, supposedly they killed people that even appeared to be intellectuals, including folks who wore glasses or could speak more than one language.

With life in Cambodia being so awful, people did what you'd expect them to do.

They left.

And among those leaving Cambodia, many of them found themselves immigrants in the United States, including not only people fleeing Cambodia, but also Laos and Vietnam, who had their own troubles going on at the time.

And once in the United States, something unexpected happened to some of these immigrants.

Reports of Asian refugees dying in their sleep began to increase.

At the time, the medical community dubbed the condition as Asian Death Syndrome, and it mostly impacted men from their early 20s to their late 50s.

That pretty much covers most men.

Anyway, researchers did what they do.

They researched and they figured out that the cause of these men showing up dead in the morning after falling asleep was caused by Bregatta Syndrome, a condition where the electrical activity of the heart gets all out of sorts and causes sudden cardiac death, oftentimes when the body is at rest.

It's a genetic condition that is more prominent in Asian men, which received more attention due to the increased immigration stemming from the genocide in Cambodia that Pol Pot built.

This rise in death from this mysterious condition showed up in a few small articles in the Los Angeles Times and they caught the eye of a rising filmmaker named Wes Craven and inspiration took root.

Wes Craven started out teaching humanities in upstate New York.

He wrote fiction and tried to get his work published, but that didn't go anywhere.

Craven moved to New York and he got a job working with Sean Cunningham.

Please see episode 2 of this season to hear more on Mr.

Cunningham's career and how he was the guy that brought us Friday the 13th.

Wes Craven worked with Cunningham on some low budget films and they were able to get enough financial backing for Craven to make the film Last House on the Left, a horror movie that Garrett the Intern has seen multiple times because he's a lovable weirdo according to the t-shirt that he's wearing right now.

And no, Garrett, please don't order me one.

I'd be so embarrassed if we both wore that to work on the same day.

Wes Craven got to make a second movie, The Hills Have Eyes, and he got some positive feedback.

He did some work in television, then he directed the film Swamp Thing.

And you can listen to season 5, episode 2 for more on that movie's sequel, but in the introduction, we talk a lot about Wes Craven and Swamp Thing.

Now, Swamp Thing is a delightful adaptation of the DC Comics character, and it's this low-budget movie that made no money.

And since it made no money, Craven was out on his ass and couldn't get work for three years.

What did he do to fill that time?

Well, Wes Craven smoked weed, and he did cocaine.

Then eventually, he decided to get his shit together, and he wrote a new movie script based on some newspaper articles he read in the Los Angeles Times.

In an interview with vulture.com, Craven recounted how he read about this family that escaped the killing fields of Cambodia and made their way to the United States.

One of the sons in the family started having nightmares, and he was afraid that if he fell asleep, that something chasing him in his dreams would catch him and kill him.

All the grownups dismissed his worries.

The son struggled to stay awake for days at a time, but he eventually fell asleep, and the family heard him screaming at night.

They rushed in to see what was going on, and he was dead.

A young man having nightmares, dying in his sleep, hey, that's a great idea for a screenplay.

It kind of writes itself.

Well, actually, Wes Craven kind of writes it himself.

At the time, New Line Cinemas was a distributor of movies to college campuses after finding success in introducing the movie Reefer Madness to undergraduates at universities across the United States who were very interested in smoking marijuana.

New Line decided to start making their own low-budget horror movies.

Bob Shane was the owner of New Line Cinemas, and Wes Craven pitched his idea for a movie to Shane, who loved it, even though every other studio in Hollywood had rejected the idea of a movie about a killer attacking people while they slept.

Craven got an initial budget of $700,000, but that escalated to a whopping $1.1 million.

Investors one by one backed out during pre-production of the film with half the money coming from a Yugoslavian investor who just wanted his girlfriend to be a movie star.

Don't we all?

Craven's story would differentiate itself from the hulking slashers of the day.

You're Jason Voorhees's.

You're Michael Myers's.

You're Leatherface's.

This new villain, Freddy Krueger, as he would be named, would stalk and threaten his victims, having more in common with Dracula than the lumberjack and lumbering Frankenstein's is.

To play this new character, Wes Craven cast an up-and-coming actor named Robert England.

England had gained notoriety as an alien in the NBC miniseries V, which was picked up for a full series.

England auditioned for the movie as an opportunity to get some work while the show was on break, and it fit his schedule.

Craven said he ultimately cast England because he had the ferocity to actually be mean to children.

Now, to fill out the rest of the cast, Craven tapped Heather Lenkincap to play Nancy.

At the time, she was a freshman at Stanford, and she had done some television and commercial work in the past.

Veteran actors John Saxton and Ronnie Blakely played Nancy's parents.

Saxton had a long career in television and film, and Blakely had an Oscar nomination for her part in Robert Altman's film Nashville.

Everybody else were pretty much complete unknowns.

Actor Nick Corey, not his real name, well, at the time, he was homeless, and he was also doing a bunch of heroin, especially during the filming of the movie.

Admittedly, he was high in the scene where he talks with Nancy from the jail cell.

They originally wanted Charlie Sheen, but why would you pay top dollar for a drug addicted actor when you don't have to?

Jeff Levine, who you never heard of, played the coroner in this movie.

Now, why is that important?

Well, it was Levine who went to Wes Craven and said, Hey, I got this friend in town and he's got a band, but he wants to get into the movies.

His name is Johnny Depp.

Never heard of him.

Craven got Depp's headshot, took it home with a bunch of other headshots and showed him to his daughter and her friends and said, Hey, who would you pick?

And they unanimously said, Ah, Johnny Depp.

And this was the first time that Depp would appear in any movie as the love interest of the last girl standing, Nancy.

The plot of Nightmare on Elm Street centers around Freddie Krueger, who was a child murderer and he killed 20 kids in and around the greater Springwood, Ohio area.

The case goes to court, but wouldn't you know it, Freddie Krueger gets off on a technicality.

So all the area moms and dads whip up a fresh batch of mob justice and they burn Freddie Krueger alive until he's dead.

So Freddie Krueger returns in the dreams of the children to kill these kids to get back at the parents who killed Freddie Krueger because he allegedly killed all those other kids.

It's a vicious cycle.

In the movie, most of the kids are pretty well adjusted, well, except for the inexplicable nightmares and the effects that they suffer by a shadow man who wants to kill them.

It's the parents who are a real mess in this movie.

Booze, pills, divorce, lies, screaming, baseless accusations.

There are bars put on the house to keep the teenagers inside at one point.

It sounds like Thanksgiving growing up in my home.

And thematically, the story is really about children paying for the sins of their parents.

Wes Craven said that the original character of Freddie Krueger was to be a child molester, not a child murderer.

However, some high profile cases in Los Angeles at the time dealing with child molestation led to Craven adjusting the villain's backstory.

Craven decked out his original villain in a signature olive green and red sweater because Craven read an article in Scientific American that noted that the pairing of these two particular colors were the most difficult for the human eye to perceive correctly.

This sweater was intended to make audiences consistently feel discomfort when looking at the nightmarish Krueger.

Craven also wanted to distinguish his bad guy from all of the other big screen bad guys killing teenagers left and right.

Machetes, chainsaws, brute force, all of these had been taken by these modern day cinematic monsters.

Craven wanted something more delicate and he thought, hey, how about steak knives, but on a glove?

He went to his special effects guy Jim Doyle, bing bang boom, we got a glove with knives.

The movie was shot in just over a month in the summer of 1984 in Los Angeles, California, which is why you see palm trees appearing in Springwood, Ohio, the city where the movie is supposed to take place.

The filmmakers didn't have much of a budget and the movie improvised and utilized every ounce of creativity to get the movie made.

Craven wanted a fantastic death at the beginning of the movie to hook the audience, so the crew built a rotating room with all of the items nailed down and a cameraman strapped into a seat against the opposite wall.

Crew members rotated the room around, while the actress playing Tina would roll around the rotating room appearing to get dragged across the walls and ceiling to find gravity.

This effect was first used in 1951's Royal Wedding, where Fred Astaire danced from the floor to the walls to the ceiling of a room.

The effect was also famously used in 2001's A Space Odyssey and in Tobey Hooper's Poltergeist.

The filmmakers reused this exact same set for the death of Johnny Depp's character, Glenn.

They flipped the bedroom upside down and decided to pour a flood of red water simulating blood out of a hole cut into the bed.

When it was filmed upside down to look right side up, this produced the effect that blood was exploding out of the bed and pooling on the ceiling.

They had to get this in one shot.

Craven called action, the crew dumped the gallons of water in, it poured down or maybe up depending upon how you were looking in the shot and it immediately began to settle around the light fixtures on the floor or ceiling of the room.

You know what I mean.

And this mixture of water and electricity came together, causing one crew member to actually get electrocuted.

Also, the weight of all of this red water shifted to one side of the room and the crew operating the set lost control.

The room rolled completely over, ripping up cables and ropes and rigging, sending sparks flying into the dark.

The blood water poured out onto the floor, out of the windows, all over the crew who struggled to gain control of the situation.

Now, luckily, nobody was seriously hurt or at least that's what they told their insurance company.

The scene where Nancy is attacked in the bathtub was accomplished by building a bathroom set over a swimming pool.

The melting staircase was done by using pancake mix.

The illusion of Freddy Krueger coming through the walls was done using spandex.

And all of these memorable moments from the movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, were all practical effects.

They were low tech, special effects, and they looked amazing.

Sure, they almost killed a couple of people, but they looked amazing.

Craven included a shot of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead as payback for Raimi featuring the Hills Have Eyes in the movie The Evil Dead.

Then Raimi paid Craven back by featuring the Freddy Krueger glove in the work shed in The Evil Dead 2 as well as in Ash vs.

Evil Dead.

Sean Cunningham came in and helped with some second film unit shooting for some dream sequences, and all of this shows how this group of rising horror movie makers had each other's back to some degree in the effort to make new and innovative scary movies at the time.

The movie hit theaters the same year it was shot, November 9, 1984.

Why wouldn't you release this a couple weeks earlier before Halloween?

That is so weird.

When it came out, critics complimented Wes Craven on creating a brand new monster myth.

Craven was out of his slump with the invention of this new Boogeyman of Your Dreams, and the limitations of their budget actually worked in the favor of the filmmakers as critics and audiences alike felt that the camerawork and practical effects elevated the movie in more technical and imaginative ways.

The ending of the movie was dinged for being a little lackluster, but Wes Craven and his team, they went through quite a few endings to land on a finale for the film.

And this pseudo dream sequence was really the best of the bunch.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street has a 95% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is praised for being original, intelligent and horrifying.

Budget for the film, $1.1 million.

Box office haul, $57 million.

Garrett the Intern, when a movie makes that much money, what happens next?

That's right, Garrett, you get a sequel.

Nightmare on Elm Street put New Line Cinemas on the map.

It was the studio that Freddy Krueger built.

The success of Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels led to the company producing the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

They struck gold again with the Blair Witch Project.

Now, what do all these movies have in common?

Well, the originals are pretty good and all of the sequels, they stunk.

That was especially true for Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Freddy's Revenge.

Wes Craven was not involved in this project and it was rushed into production to hit theaters one year after the original in 1995.

This sequel focuses on a male lead character named Jesse, who moves into Nancy's house from the first movie.

The sequel is described by some commentators as being the most homoerotic film to date when released due in part to scenes where the male hero Jesse meets up with his gym teacher at a fetish club and later sees that same gym teacher tied up naked in the school gym showers where an invisible towel whips the gym teacher's ass while Jesse watches.

Garrett the Intern and horror movie expert is Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Freddy's Revenge, a movie filled with homoerotic subtext.

Garrett says absolutely and I'm going with Garrett on this one.

Robert Englund returned for the sequel, but not because producers wanted to pay him.

They considered just putting some rando in a rubber mask to save a buck or two, but they quickly realized that won't work.

The movie comes out and it's a critical failure, but movie cost, three million bucks, movie made, 30 million bucks.

So we're getting ourselves a part three and the return of Wes Craven.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Dream Warriors, was based on an idea from Wes Craven and fellow writer Bruce Wagner.

This movie takes place in an insane asylum.

Now, Nancy from the original movie, she's an intern therapist.

Now, the movie came out 18 months after part two.

It cost four million bucks to make and pulled in 44 million dollars.

Producers said, let it ride.

Let's get us a part four in the franchise.

And so we got Nightmare on Elm Street, The Dream Master, which hit theaters a year and a half after part three.

This movie was directed by Reddy Harlan, you know, the guy who would go on to direct Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island, all movies featured on this very podcast.

This movie was mostly well reviewed.

It cost six million bucks and it made 50.

The producers said, hit me, we're making a part five.

Nightmare on Elm Street Five, The Dream Child, landed in theaters on December 20th, 1989, you know, for Christmas.

Five movies in six years, and as popular as they were, audiences were starting to grow less interested in the franchise.

The budget for part five, eight million bucks.

Box office hall, 22 million.

Throughout all of these movies, Robert England's performance of Freddy Krueger rocketed him to superstardom.

He was the biggest horror movie star since Vincent Price.

And starting with part two, Freddy Krueger, he started to workshop a little bit of his stand-up comedy routine, Crackin Wise with puns and wordplay, that would make the crypt keeper roll his eyes back into his skull.

By the time we got to the sixth installment, Freddy's Dead, The Final Nightmare, at this point in the franchise, Freddy Krueger was a wise crackin wise guy.

A personality characteristic that infected another horror icon of this era, the good guy doll turned bad guy doll, Chuckie.

But more on that in a few weeks.

With audiences showing reduced interest in the series, filmmakers said, that's it, Freddy Krueger is retiring, we are done, and we mean it.

This is part six, The Final Nightmare.

Put it in the vault, we are 100% committed, no more Freddy Krueger movies after this.

New Line cinemas went so far as to hold a mock funeral for Freddy Krueger at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which was attended by shock rocker Alice Cooper, as well as much of the cast of the film.

Well, that sounds fun.

The mayor of Los Angeles declared September 13th to be Freddy Krueger Day.

The movie even included a cameo from stand-up comedian, sitcom star and national anthem crooner Roseanne Barr and her then-husband Tom Arnold.

Yeah, remember when they showed up in A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel?

The movie comes out and it had a good opening weekend, but it just tanked after that.

Critics noted that Freddy Krueger, the once terrifying dream reaper, was now just a goofy caricature.

He devolved from horrific phantasm into an annoyingly predictable boogeyman that was actually loved by children in the real world, and they would dress up like him at Halloween and crack their own jokes.

Freddy Krueger was done and done.

Until three years later when Wes Craven said, I got an idea.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was a meta-slasher film written and directed by Craven.

The movie is a standalone film, and it's not directly associated with all of the other Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

It was to be more serious and less comical than all of the sequels, which is not too hard.

The movie was about actual actors in the film industry portraying themselves, including Heather Lenkincap, who, if you've been paying attention, played Nancy in the original and in part three of this movie franchise.

The movie had more to say than any of the other sequels, specifically to the effect of horror movies on those who create it and those who watch it.

Now, some people loved the movie, some people did not love the movie.

Total cost, eight million bucks.

Box office hall, 19.8 million bucks.

Yikes.

But you know what?

That's OK, because this movie was what set Wes Craven on a larger meta exploration of horror films in a little franchise called Scream.

And Wes Craven's Scream really led to the approach where filmmakers were working to understand how horror movies existed across multiple levels, from those that write the films, make the films, star in the films and watch the films.

And horror movies really became more self-aware, as if everybody was in on what was happening when it came to slasher movies and the tropes that they created.

Freddy Krueger would return almost a decade later in Freddy vs.

Jason in 2003, which did well enough, but not so well that more sequels were generated.

At the end of Freddy vs.

Jason, Jason Voorhees decapitates Freddy Krueger and holds up the severed head, which winks and laughs at the end.

See, we're all having a good time, people.

Now is it.

Freddy Krueger left the building, head in one bag, body in another.

Done and done.

But then seven years later, the folks over at Platinum Dunes were injecting revitalization juice into every horror movie franchise from the 80s and 90s.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was in their sights as an opportunity to reboot the franchise with a gritty, dark, new interpretation of this famous, frightening franchise.

Michael Bay and all of the artisans at Platinum Dunes Production Company decided that having a reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror and Friday the 13th, it was time to do the same thing with A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Movie makers had two options when it came to the reboot.

One option would be to try to merge together multiple of the original movies into one movie like they did with Friday the 13th, or base this movie on the original film like they did with The Amityville Horror.

They opted for the latter as filmmakers acknowledged that Freddy Krueger was now a less scary horror movie monster with his incessant puns and sight gags.

They went back to Wes Craven's original source material for inspiration.