Writer of "A Nightmare on Elm Street"

(Wesley Strick): A movie like "Nightmare," which is specifically about dreams enables you to take what you...what I already love about movies and movie writing, and sort of exponentially go that much farther with it.  And the other thing I always felt was coolest about the original nightmare that we tried to use is, not so much the original nightmare, but the kind of fake-outs where you don't know whether...you're convinced that the character is dreaming but he's not, or you're convinced that he or she is awake and it turns out that they're dreaming, and they realize too late that they've fallen asleep.  So those are great tricks that you can play to scare the audience.

MakingOf: You had touched on that you had gone back and watched the 1984 version.  Do you as a writer then go back and break it down scene by scene, sequence by sequence, to say 'Well this really worked in that version so I'm going to try and re-create that,' and make it new again?

(WS):No, not really.  Partly because, as I said, my assignment was not to remake the first movie.  In fact, they sort of explicitly said to me, 'You have free reign to do something new.'  The thing was, I thought the first movie worked, by and large, really well.  There's stuff in the structure of that movie that I think is really smart.  For instance you have these two lead characters...you think they're the lead characters...Amanda Wyss, and her boyfriend, I forget his name...and she's very sexy and she looks like a star, as opposed to Heather Langenkamp, who looks like a second banana, who's playing Nancy.  But then you're shocked, you know, it's a little bit like "Psycho," halfway through the film suddenly you're star is murdered, and the co-lead dies shortly thereafter.  And it really throws you and I think it works quite well in the original "Nightmare."  So I thought, 'Let's do that again.'  And the other thing that bothered me in the original was that they said, 'Well he's coming back to take revenge.'  But I thought, 'What Revenge?  He killed all of these kids.  The parents got revenge by forming this posse and hunting him down, but what revenge does he possibly have?'  So I thought, 'Well let's make it so that there's a possibility that Freddy was innocent and that these hysterical parents hunted down the wrong man.'

MO: In that process do you factor in that that may make fans or viewers sympathetically towards his character?  When he is essentially the villain of the story.

(WS): You have to consider that, if only because studio executives are immediately all over you going, 'Wait a minute.  Now it seems like you're apologizing for Freddy, or you're trying to make us feel bad for him, and doesn't that weaken him?'  But what I say is 'No no, hang on.  Stick with it, stay with the story.  Watch how it unfolds.'  It's just more interesting this way.  There's a couple of twists and turns.  And there's dramatic irony, and there's a surprise coming.  Which you didn't have in the original movie, because it was all kind of straight down the middle.  We knew right from the start that he was a monster and we followed it without any opportunity to introduce doubt.