My Thoughts on Never Sleep Again: The Extras

Now that you know my thoughts on the Elm Street Legacy feature I think it would also be great to touch base with the special features because the second disc is full of them. What I first want to get into is list of extra interviews that they didn’t use for each of the sections and I loved every minute of them. They were more trivial and added more information to some of the segments that only diehard fans would ever want to hear like: this is what the ‘soul chest’ was made out of. However, one extra in particular made me get all teary again and that’s when Kim Myers (who played Lisa) was reunited with Mark Patton (who played Jesse) for the first time in 20 plus years. They hugged for about 5 minutes and both of them were so emotional. It’s stuff like this that makes Nightmare On Elm Street differ from some of the horror movies. In a way, I too was reunited with the cast and crew from the films.

On a deep personal level, one of my favorite extras was the interview with James Rolfe, creator of Cinemassacre and the Angry Video Game Nerd. To us AVGN fans he made one of the best video game reviews of the NOES game. He shared with us his personal experience with the Nightmare movies and he brought up a really good point about Freddy; a point that I always bring up to my friends. He stated that what made Freddy so unique was that he had a face when all the other killers wore a mask, and that Robert Englund stuck with the films all the way until Freddy vs. Jason whereas most of the masked killers were played by various people. I had what some would call a ‘geekgasm’ when the AVGN was interviewed with one of the best documentaries about one of the best horror film series.

They included an entire segment dedicated to the soundtrack for the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and if anybody that knows me… you’ll know that I am a huge soundtrack geek. They got into the gory details as to what was going on in Charles Bernstein’s head and how he came up with the original score. They talked to other composers and they even brought in Dokken to talk about how they came up with the idea for ‘Dream Warriors.’ Bernstein brought up some points about the score that I never even thought about so in a way I was learning a little something about soundtrack composition.

One person on the special features collected Nightmare on Elm Street props and he had a massive collection of wardrobes, props, Freddy masks and the infamous ‘lost glove’ from the first movie. There was a science to figuring out whether or not it was real and it peaked my interest. One of the best segments was dedicated to the glove of Freddy Krueger and how it became a cultural icon both in the horror realm and in general. They talked about how it has always been associated with evil and the metaphoric symbol it stands for. They tapped into Robert’s take on the glove and had a special segment that showcased people and websites that make real Freddy gloves from K4 Gloves to Boiler Room Creations all the way down to KrueGear.

Probably one of the most captivating and entertaining segments of all was the locations featurette. They took us on a tour of all the locations from the first movie throughout California and told what scene it was from and how it was executed. They showed us the interior of the high school and the host told us how Wes tricked and faked the scene to make it look like the corridors were structured in a fluid way when the reality of it was geographically incorrect. What made this segment even more memorable was that they brought back some of the cast members to the locations and to see them, now, act out the scenes was really fun. However, when they brought Heather back to her ‘home’ it struck a cord and you can see her eyes light up as she stared at it. It was truly awe-inspiring.

There is so much more that I didn’t tackle from the costuming, to the poster work all the way down to the video games and the stuff that they slapped the Freddy Krueger name to. Most documentaries will only have a few leftover interviews but The Elm Street Legacy goes beyond that and pampers us Fred Heads with mini features for us to indulge in. It tells you everything and if you can’t find it on the feature, I’m sure you’ll find it on the extras. As I stated with the review of the feature, this is a must buy DVD for any horror or film fan… it’s documentary filmmaking at it’s best.

Hats off to everybody that worked on it.

My Thoughts on Never Sleep Again: The Feature

I’m going to start off by stating that this is going to be a two-part post. The first part will be about the feature documentary The Elm Street Legacy and the second half will be about the extra features. So, without further adieu… let’s get started.

Nightmare on Elm Street has been very close to me and ranks number 3 on my favorite horror films of all time. I would always remember my thought process into checking out from the library since it was right after I saw The Thing and The Blob, I figured nothing could scare me like those movies… and I was wrong. Nightmare On Elm Street is probably the most watched horror film that I ever saw and even as a kid there was some kind of numinous connection that I had with the movie. I guess it’s because I had insomnia as a kid so this film was sort of how I felt and it kept me entertained all those sleepless nights. I grew attached to the movie. Well, finally, after all these years I was brought back to Elm Street to relive my childhood memories.

Directed by Daniel Farrands and Andrew Kasch, The Elm Street Legacy is “a love letter to Nightmare on Elm Street,” says Blood Type Online and that’s the best way to describe this movie. I want to first state that I really enjoyed the claymation just because I’m such a fan of that art and I think it’s an underrated special effect. Seeing a Freddy doll reenact all his famous scenes on a model while the credits rolled really hit a home-run with my inner geek. It made the documentary even more fun.

Lets get right to the meat of the documentary. The film is broken up into parts and is told in segments, each segment pertaining to one of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. They tackled all the films including Freddy vs. Jason and the bookends are how the Nightmare concept started and the legacy it left behind. They brought everybody back and interviewed them from Wes Craven, to the hall monitor from the first movie, to the composers all the way down to puppeteers. For me, it was so nice to see all these people brought back and united because of a movie that wasn’t even supposed to be as big as it became. It was so nice to see how they looked, what there lives are and what their opinions of the movie were after its success.

What was such a breath of fresh air was how honest this documentary was because everybody told why they hated the last two Freddy movies, how pissed Bob Shaye got when he couldn’t get this song, how sexist things got on set, how hair-pulling it was to work with this person band the stress it was to keep everything under control. It was brutally honest and I was shocked how they really felt about certain parts of the films. As one person told me, it also sort of shows how Wes thought of the other sequels and he wasn’t as thrilled or as happy as I thought he would be. It taps into the humorous aspects of the chemistry between the actors the crew and it felt like a family gather of sorts. There were problems, but in the end… everybody loved each other.

The documentary also answered several questions that I had in mind as I watched these films over and over again such as: how did they do the Freddy soul pizza? How was the fountain of blood in the first movie accomplished? How did Charles Bernstein come up with the score? How was this special effect pulled off? What inspired the production designer to make the creature or Dreamworld look like this? There were so many stories of how things malfunctioned and how things worked out when they were expected to have a certain outcome; it was like listening to your grandpa enlighten you his old war stories or his childhood memories. Each scene and each film had a particular memory and it was so nice to hear the cast and crew share that with us.

Personally for me, the best and most tear-inducing part of the whole documentary was the segment entitled The House That Freddy Built because it told of the legacy that Nightmare on Elm Street left behind and the impact it had on it’s cast and crew. I knew that New Line took a gamble with this but I never knew the back-story of the producers or Wes and to see them get so emotional over the film because of what it did for them made me act the same way. To see Renny Harlin, the guy who directed Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, attribute Nightmare on Elm Street 4 as being is breakthrough movie and helping him pay off money sent shivers down my spine. I knew that Nightmare on Elm Street had such a following but I never thought that it had such a huge impact on the people that worked on the series. It was heart wrenching to see these men and women talk about how much this movie, this small, little, independent movie had such meaning to them and I think that’s where this film hits gold. It’s a personal documentary that these people shared with us.

The cast and the crew of the Elm Street movies are like one big close knit family and I feel, as one of the people they appeal to, as though I am a family member as well so it was very personal for me to watch this movie. It brought me back to the first time I laid my eyes on the VHS and how I felt when I popped the tape in to the player. As a amateur filmmaker and a student of the film business, I can relate to many of these problems the crew had and I could see the passion that they had and it just spoke to me. If they could take a film and mold it into a work of art, I can do the same thing. After the movie was done, I sat in my chair and pondered for a while… taking in everything that I heard and smiling. This is a movie made for the fans, it’s a love letter to the films, it’s sincere, it’s awe-inspiring and it’s 4 hours of spine-tingling fun. If you love horror, especially the Nightmare on Elm Street films, or any type of movie for that matter… do yourself a favor and buy it. It’s one of the best documentaries out there.



Official Website
Official Twitter