Johnny Depp's Nightmare On Elm Street's Death Scene Nearly Killed Someone For Real

Glen's (Johnny Depp) death in Wes Craven's 1984 horror film "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is one for the record books. "Nightmare on Elm Street," of course, is about the ghost of a child murderer — Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund — who can stalk and murder people in their dreams. When they die in their sleep, they die in the waking world as well, sometimes in a spectacularly bloody and undoubtedly supernatural fashion. Early in the movie, the character Tina (Amanda Wyss) is, in her dream, pulled up a wall and onto the ceiling by Freddy, a killer who happily flouts the laws of physics. 

Something similar happens to the laidback Glen. During the film's climax, right as the stakes are the highest, Glen — happily listening to his headphones — dozes off during a crucial moment. Glen's catnap gave Freddy a chance to work his murderous magic. A portal opens in his bed, and Glen is bodily sucked inside of it. A moment later, Glen remerges from the portal ... as a geyser of blood. Just like Tina, Glen's liquified remains pour onto, and remain adhered to, the ceiling.

To shoot Glen's death scene, the film's crew constructed a rotating set. The entire set was physically inverted, after which the "blood" was poured in from above. Invert the image, and it's a geyser. It's a really cool effect. It was so much liquid, in fact, that the movie's technicians created, essentially, a foot-deep, bedroom-shaped kiddie pool of blood-colored water on Glen's ceiling. However, as revealed in the documentary film "Never Sleep Again" (via Film School Rejects), it seems that the water-filled set caused an electrical short near Glen's ceiling light, which led to the mild electrocution of a crew member.

As mentioned, for Glen and Tina's death scenes, Craven constructed a huge rotating bedroom set. Everything was secured in place, and the camera rotated with the set. This allowed the actors to roll along with it, making it look like they (and/or blood) was on the walls and ceiling. It's a technique that goes back at least as far as Fred Astaire's dancing-on-the-walls number in the 1951 movie "Royal Wedding." For Glen's death, in particular, the set was water-tight as to allow the blood to pool without leaks. The filmmakers then poured gallons upon gallons of blood-colored water through an aperture in the bed, filling the set.

Because the effect was so messy, though, the "Nightmare on Elm Street" creatives only allowed themselves one take to get it right. There would be no chance to clean and dry out the set and have another go. For the most part, everyone was careful and tried to avoid any mistakes by pouring the blood just right. Something the crew forgot to account for, however, was Glen's ceiling light, which wasn't covered in plastic or protected from the liquid by anything other than its traditional glass dome. That caused an electrical current to run up the water and into the body of the (unnamed) crew member pouring it.

Cinematographer Jacques Haitkin recalled the incident with clarity, saying in "Never Sleep Again" that "as soon as [the blood] hit the ceiling and hit the light, it immediately electrified the water. So, the guy pouring the water got electrocuted."

And things got ever worse from there. Liquid can cause many problems, all of which apparently happened on the "Nightmare on Elm Street" set.

Haitkin and Craven also recalled that the water not only electrocuted one of the crew members, but that the entire set pretty much went haywire as well. It seems that when the set was finally filled with fake blood, it began sloshing around in an unpredictable way, throwing off the balance of the entire rotating set mechanism. Those controlling the rotation mechanism lost control of the room, and it spun back to its normal position without warning, ripping cables and riggings off the walls and spraying fake blood all over the place. The spray caused additional electrical shorts in the additional lighting it hit, and the lights all went out. It was, well, a nightmare. As Craven put it:

"[The blood] went into all the lights and there were these huge flashes in the dark. [...] We were spinning in the dark with all these sparks going on." 

When enough of the blood had leaked out, and the set stopped sloshing, everything finally came to a halt. One poor crew member was stranded on the set, strapped in upside-down, in the dark, covered in blood, for about 20 minutes while everyone rushed to get things up and running again. Rotating sets, as was mentioned, had been used on many, many projects before "Nightmare on Elm Street." But none of them had to deal with the weight and physics of being filled with fake blood. It's a miracle that the set didn't collapse or that anyone else was more seriously injured. 

But the "Nightmare on Elm Street" crew got the shot. And Craven managed to capture on film one of the weirdest and most memorable deaths in horror movie history.