A NIGHTMARE IN THE MAKING

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Academy-Award nominated screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s first feature screenplay credit is one most writers would kill for - reviving a horror franchise that has enthralled and terrified audiences for generations. But a director with differing views and shifting studio attitudes gave the then-baby writer a baptism of fire into the world of studio filmmaking.

‘Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the house...

Not a creature was stirring

Except for... a novice screenwriter who’d been handed the opportunity of a lifetime - bringing back a certain razor-gloved serial killer for New Line Cinema, the studio affectionately known as ‘The house that Freddy built’.

“I had been getting some general meetings from an original screenplay I had written,” Eric Heisserer recalled.

“I was a new writer, so my plan was to take every meeting I could. I had a meeting scheduled just before Christmas with New Line; it had been on the books for a couple of months. A few days before the meeting, I got a notification that it was no longer with a junior executive. It was now with two senior executives, and it was going to be taking place in their corporate conference room. My first thought was, ‘What New Line movie have I disparaged on social media? How much trouble am I in?’ When I came in, it wasn’t bad at all; they said they thought I was a promising new voice in horror based on what they’d seen, and they asked if I knew anybody by the name of Freddy Krueger. I said, ‘Is he a director or something?’ And for two seconds, they got very nervous, as I realised now was not the time to be kidding around with New Line. I explained I was kidding and that I had an intense relationship with both the franchise and the icon behind it. “They explained to me that they were in a unique position, and they had to get going pretty much straight away because they were aiming to come out with a remake on the 25th anniversary of the original. “They’d been waiting on a draft from Wesley Strick, and after they got it, they decided they wanted to go in a different direction. As my agent later explained to me, new writers typically get a chance to break into the business when there’s a crisis at the studio. There was a lot of work to be done - because I was starting from page one - but it was an incredible opportunity. So I cancelled my Christmas vacation, stayed home, did a bunch of writing, and by January, I had an initial draft.”

Image courtesy of nightmareonelmstreetfilms.com

Heisserer said he was keen to ensure he retained the elements that made Wes Craven’s original such an enduring classic.

“The first thing I did was write a monologue on the things I felt made the original so inventive and so compelling,” he said.

“I looked at how the pacing could be contemporised without losing those elements. A good example is how, like in ‘Psycho’, Wes Craven really establishes who you think the heroine of the story is, only to kill her off in the first act. Suddenly, you’re following Nancy (Heather Langenkamp in the original) and realising this is her story. I thought that was an inventive way to handle a horror story - have the person who’s been the hero of her own story for so long getting killed off, leaving it to the wallflower to figure out how to survive.”

Except for a couple of fleeting moments, Heisserer’s character of Nancy (Rooney Mara) doesn’t even appear until page 34. Instead, the opening third of the script focuses on Kris (Katie Cassidy) and Jesse (Thomas Dekker), an on-again-off-again teen couple. Both are starting to have unsettling dreams where they’re pursued by a scarred, razor-fingered boogeyman (Jackie Earle Haley) - and they have the sneaking suspicion that the dreams are not just regular nightmares. The focus on the duo - which includes a considerable level of detail around their history - means it’s genuinely shocking when Kris is suddenly killed by Krueger.  Nancy’s only drawn into the story after Jesse is arrested for Kris’ murder and flees police custody. When Kris is killed, the focus shifts to Nancy and Quentin (Kyle Gallner), who try to unravel the mystery and defeat Krueger. Given the many variations from Craven’s original, the story beats accompanying Kris and Jesse’s deaths are remarkably similar to the ‘84 film.

Image courtesy of nightmareonelmstreetfilms.com

“Horror audiences that are familiar with the original tend to come into remakes with the expectation that a lot will have changed,” Heisserer said.

“My hope was that those who knew the original story might not believe we’d go through that again, and that those who were either new to that world or who had forgotten the original could be surprised. I really wanted to make it feel like Nancy and Quentin were the sidekicks, not the leads.”

Given the evolution of the Krueger character throughout six movies in the original series, from malevolent boogeyman to wisecracking slasher, Heisserer said he was keen to adopt the same approach to Krueger as Craven had some decades earlier.

“It’s prevalent in the original - Freddy Krueger is a monster and a villain; he’s not an antihero,” he said.

“He grew into an antihero over the course of the sequels. But there were several arguments among the producers of Freddy we were making.”

These arguments, Heisserer said, mainly focussed on a subplot in the movie where Nancy and Quentin begin to unmask the origins of the man haunting their dreams. The characters remember the allegations of abuse, but not the abuse itself. Both Nancy and Quentin fear that the angry lynch mob of parents who burned Krueger alive were acting on a lie - and that Krueger himself was an innocent man.

“There was a chapter in development where we were leaning into the idea of Freddy Krueger as a kind of horror John Wick,” Heisserer said.

“One of the producers said that if it was an innocent man who’d been wronged, you’d want to see him go after the parents who burned him alive, not the children. His view was that it made no sense, and he couldn’t be swayed from that. We had a number of arguments about why the children should be paying the price for the adults’ crime. My thinking was that’s what happens in reality. The kids are often left paying the bill that the parents skipped out on, both as a society and individually. But that didn’t stick with everybody. Ultimately, the most votes were cast for us to make him purely evil and let the question of whether he’s innocent linger until the third act, which gets us to the line ‘He’s not after us because we lied, he’s after us because we told.’ I’m a lover of ambiguity in scary movies. The more questions, doubt and dread I’m left with at the end of the film, the longer it sticks with me, and the more I appreciate it letting me live in this Schroedinger’s Cat space. But at the time, I was told I was trying to have it both ways, and I should get to writing instead.”

The decision to retain the premise of Kruger as pure evil led to Heisserer reinstating something unmentioned in Craven’s finished film.

“In Craven’s original screenplay, he made it explicit that these kids had suffered abuse and that Freddy was a pedophile,” he said.

“But there was a tragic incident in the news, I think, about six months before the film was released where someone in a middle school admin had been abusing children at the school. The studio, I imagine rightly so, felt they couldn’t release a movie that hit those notes. So we got the chance to go back to what Craven’s original intentions were and see if we could somehow carry that torch.”

Another idea that surfaced in Heisserer’s research gave him a new ‘ticking clock’ element missing from the original.

“There’s an odd lack of Freddy Kruger for around 20 minutes in the back half of the original, where Nancy’s managed to stay awake, knows she is about to collapse and starts to Kevin McAllister her home, so she can run him around and lure him into all these traps she’s made,” he said.

“I thought the audience for horror has evolved since then, and the lack of a villain at a time when they’d expect his presence to be the most intense would be a bit of a misstep. So it led me to this wild swing. Through my research, I’d come across the idea of micronaps. It was a gift laid out at our feet; you can introduce cameos of the thing that’s going to kill you and deliver some really inventive setpieces.”

In Heisserer’s draft, both Nancy and Quentin are conscious of the time because they know that after 70 hours of no sleep, micronaps will kick in every eight to ten minutes. Heisserer admitted he ran wild when coming up with the ambitious setpieces where the characters alternated between the sleeping and waking worlds.

“When you’re a baby writer, it’s drilled into you that - as a new voice - you’re likely to be one of many names, and there’ll be heavy-hitting writers who’ll come in and sort of ‘bless’ the movie for the studio,” he said.

“And it’s very possible that very little of the writing you do will make it across the finish line into the final cut. So I went for broke and let someone else tell me ‘no’. I was much more of a mind to seek forgiveness than permission when it came to spending the studio’s money. “I thought that by the time they needed to reduce the budget, I’d be long gone and that somebody else would be doing the rewrites. So when I got the call during production to say, ‘Eric, we need to shave x-millions dollars off this thing. How can we make these four locations into one location?’ I thought, ‘Well, aren’t I the fool now?’”

Once director Samuel Bayer came on board, Heisserer said things started to change. “He had a very specific set of ideas on how to commit that character to film,” he said.

“It’s the old chestnut; once a director’s on board, you’re giving up your script for adoption, and they carry that on to the next chapter. As a baby writer, I often had less than one vote in the room, and I didn’t really have anything to stand on other than my writing. I could passionately and fervently defend things that I felt were load-bearing walls in the structure of the script and, most of the time, I felt listened to. As often happens when you have a director with a very specific vision, it’s nigh impossible to get them to change their mind and set their sights on something else. The best thing you can do is try to bend and reshape whatever story you have so they get what they want out of it, and it’s not sacrificing too much in the process.”

But Heisserer said he only realised the full extent of the divergence when he arrived on set as the shooting was underway. “It was the first night I was there for the shoot. We were a few weeks into the shoot at this point, and the location wasn’t one that I’d written into the screenplay,” he said.

“It was an abandoned church the director found on a location scout, and he’d invented a set piece there. I think that scene ended up getting discarded; he never did find a home for that location. It was my first set and my first real production, so I wasn’t really aware of what was a red flag and what was just normal process. I’ve heard about a number of movies that went through troubled productions. Half of them ended up being bombs, the other half are hits, and it’s a tough thing to figure out which version you’re in when you’re on the inside looking out. It’s hard to speak about it without sounding a bit precious or entitled, but sometimes there’s dialogue you’ve written, and there’s a specific reason why it’s there - it’s at a certain point in a character’s arc, or it’s dialogue that’s a callback to something that was set up earlier or vice versa. It can be heartbreaking when they keep the dialogue from one scene that’s intended to be a setup or callback, but they throw out the other half.”

Image courtesy of nightmareonelmstreetfilms.com

The week he spent on set, Heisserer recalled, was a mad scramble.

“In the end, I don’t know if I really improved anything or not,” he said.

“They’d locked in the locations; they’d coordinated the stunts. The only thing I could have an impact on at that point was the dialogue. We had two highly talented leads, so I wanted to do whatever I could to bolster them. It was traumatic, and I don’t remember much of it. One thing I struggled with was that we had done a lot of work to make the scares unexpected or inventive. When I was taking meetings with the New Line execs, I’d been saying the thing we’ve seen a hundred times over is the bad guy standing in the middle of the road gets lit up by the headlights, and the driver careens off the road to avoid hitting them. We’ve seen it in a bunch of places, it’s trope-y, and so we weren’t going to do that. Instead, we were going to let the audience expect that’s where Freddy’s going to show up, and then have him show up in the back seat, gore Nancy in the passenger seat, and have the blood splatter all over the windshield and all over Quentin. Quentin screams, and Nancy - who’s a bloody mess - grabs on to him and says, ‘Quentin, wake up!’ He snaps to and realises he’s had a micronap while driving. I was on-set, it was my third night on the shoot, and they’re setting up the Freddy Kruger stunt double in the middle of the road. And that’s when I started to wonder where everything took a turn.”

When the shooting was complete, the novice writer still had another shock in store - the man behind the iconic franchise, Wes Craven, was set to be given short shrift with a “Based on characters by” credit instead of a story credit. “It’s a subtle, but important, distinction,” Heisserer said.

“The ‘based on characters by’ credit means the writer is taking something another writer created and telling an original tale using those characters. It’s often seen on sequels, prequels and occasionally spinoffs. When you’re taking another writer’s work and updating or redoing it, their original sequel is your road map. You’re taking that original story. It’s a big deal since that credit (‘based on a screenplay by’) means you’re making more use of the original writer’s work than just characters. As a result, the original writer receives an upfront credit and a much bigger fee. I had never met him, and it was weird for me to suddenly become his surrogate defender during the credit arbitration, but I felt I had to raise it because we’d essentially taken the most important beats from his original story and played them out in the remake.”

It was another lost cause, though, with Craven retaining only the character credit in the finished film. Heisserer said his first chance to see the finished product was when the film premiered in April 2010.

“To tell you the truth, I was sweating. There’s a lot of excitement in getting your foot in the door in this business,” he said.

“It didn’t really showcase what we’d designed the movie to be, but a lot of movies - like ‘World War Z’ to pick one example - go through that transition and find a really compelling movie in that process. It was difficult for me not to be critical, but at the same time, I knew I had come into it armed with information that the movie-going public didn’t have. It’s hard for me to talk about what’s good and sort of brag about stuff I wrote that I think worked. Instead, I just live with the horrors of what went wrong. But I think some of it worked well. The scenes with Kris - especially in school when she begins to nod off - are good and, for what little of it we get, the third act where we have Quentin and Nancy tracking down Kruger and dealing with their micronaps... some of that is quite effective.”

Looking back, more than a decade after the remake debuted, Heisserer described his Elm Street experience as a “necessary trauma”.

“It helped me get stronger for the next time I went through a studio experience. I could anticipate some of the problems and speak more fervently towards things that I knew would need to be defended against any and all comers,” he said.

“I also learned to bolster the right people at the right time and find out early on who your advocates are... not just you personally, but the people in the business out to make the best version of something. Then set out to work with those people. A lot of that experience (Elm St) was me adjusting to the reality of the process. It’s not really the fault of the producers, the studio or the director. It was me earning my stripes. This business is odd in that so many people build up a set of assumptions about how they think filmmaking or television works. They can create a detailed map of the process in their mind. Nothing destroys that quite so well as experiencing the actual process.”

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