Wes Craven's Horror Classic Nightmare On Elm Street Has A Shocking Real World Inspiration

Of all the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, the original film remains the best thanks in part to a very simple but extremely effective premise expertly realized on a shockingly low budget. The idea of a serial killer capable of offing you in your sleep sounds like the stuff of pure, terrifying fantasy. But while Freddy Krueger is, thankfully, entirely fictitious, it turns out the inspiration behind this slasher icon has a very real basis. "A Nightmare on Elm Street" writer and director Wes Craven was actually inspired by newspaper articles covering the bizarre and tragic story of Southeast Asian refugees who died in their sleep after suffering from severe nightmares.

In the 1984 horror classic, Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger terrorizes suburban teens who encounter the slain child killer in their nightmares, in what remains one of the most ingeniously simple setups for a slasher movie in the history of the genre. Unlike the nightmarish inspiration behind "The Terminator," however, Craven didn't base his movie on any personal experience. Rather, it was based around his own obsession with real-life news stories.

In a 2008 interview with Cinefantastique, the director was asked about the genesis of his seminal 1980s slasher, revealing that the initial idea came from three articles he'd read in the Los Angeles Times. The stories detailed men from Southeast Asia who had all died "in the middle of nightmares," according to Craven, who added, "The paper never correlated them, never said, 'Hey, we've had another story like this.'" One particular report struck Craven to the extent he thought about it for a full year before deciding to use it as the basis for one of the most influential horror movies ever made.

By 1986, cases of a mysterious syndrome known by various names (including "sudden death syndrome" or "night terror") had been documented across Southeast Asia, including in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan.In the United States, refugees from these countries continued to suffer from attacks, with a reported 60 to 90 cases per 100,000 male Laotian and Cambodian refugees, though refugees from other South Asian countries were also said to be affected. It was this phenomenon that Wes Craven read about and which inspired "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

During his Cinefantastique interview, Craven (who also based Freddy Krueger on a frightening stranger he'd met) remembered one of the reports regarding a refugee being particularly fascinating, not to mention downright horrifying. "The third [man] was the son of a physician," he recalled. "He was about 21. Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: 'You must sleep.' He said, 'No, you don't understand; I've had nightmares before — this is different.'" As Craven remembered it, the man was given sleeping pills and told to take them, but he forced himself to stay awake for "something like six, seven days."

In Craven's recollection, the man eventually fell asleep on the couch while watching TV with his family, who then carried him upstairs to bed. "Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over," he said. "In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons."

After the man's death, Craven claimed his family discovered a coffee maker in the man's closet which he had been using to stay awake, alongside all the sleeping pills he was supposed to have taken. "He had spit them back out and hidden them," explained the director. "It struck me as such an incredibly dramatic story that I was intrigued by it for a year, at least, before I finally thought I should write something about this kind of situation."

Wes Craven claimed to have confirmed that the experience of the man who died after forcing himself to stay awake affected refugees from Laos and Cambodia. But it seems the phenomenon was even more widespread. A January 1987 Los Angeles Times report, published three years after "A Nightmare on Elm Street" hit theaters, detailed Chicago medical experts' confusion over the deaths of male Asian refugees who all perished in their sleep. According to the outlet, between April 1983 and the date of the article, at least 130 Southeast Asian refugees had "left this world in essentially the same way. They cried out in their sleep. And then they died."

In what was referred to at the time as "Asian Death Syndrome," victims appeared to simply expire from night terrors, prompting deputy Cook County medical examiner Dr. Robert Kirschner to look into the phenomenon. He published his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association, detailing how 14 of the 18 Asian victims examined were found to have abnormally enlarged hearts. 17 of the victims were also found to have had defects in the fibers that carry electrical signals through the heart, while abnormalities were found in the cardiac arteries of eight others. This led the researchers to conclude that "fatal or near-fatal episodes probably occur in response to rare cardiac electrical accidents."

Not quite the same thing as being slain by Freddy Krueger, then, but still terrifying — especially when you consider how these physical health problems might have prompted mental disturbances during sleep. Still, it's not exactly true to say that these victims were dying from their nightmares, and it would surely be little consolation to the deceased refugees that they helped inspire the best Wes Craven movie. That said, it is a fascinating genesis for the film, and for those interested, Redditors have since done some digging and claim to have found the titles of the original articles that inspired Craven, links for which can be found here.