One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again.

And with those bone-chilling lyrics, director Wes Craven unspooled a horror bad guy for the ages who is still the king of the movie villain hill. Heather Langenkamp’s portrayal of Nancy Thompson is as American as apple pie. She was the girl next door who knew how to look pretty and kick your ass at the same time. Currently available at the I Am Nancy website and Amazon is the new documentary about the three key players behind the popularity and success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the fans who love them.

Jason Bene: What is I Am Nancy?

Heather Langenkamp: It’s a jumble of different kinds of movies. We were kind inspired by documentaries like Super Size Me, Air Guitar Nation and King of Kong. It was those documentaries where you go into a world that people really don’t know anything about, and you try and tell them about it. My first mission was to kind of explain this horror craze that has taken over America. Once we started getting our footage at conventions we really realized that fans had a lot to say about Freddy, of course, and they also had a lot to say about Nancy, which kind of surprised me. It’s kind of Freddy mania out there. Everyone is wearing a red and green sweater. They sell hats and gloves. There are two Nancy dolls and they both don’t move. We started focusing on the toys and the marketing. We started asking people deeper questions about “Who is their Freddy in their life?” “Who was their Freddy?” “What person did you have to battle like Nancy did?” That’s when the heart and soul of the movie started to develop.

The movie has this strange arc. If you really want to know how important the film is to people,  then you really need to go out and meet the fans. The second act of the movie talks about the fans and the marketing and these conventions. This is going to be a big benefit for conventions because they just look like so much fun. Then we move into an interview with Robert Englund. We really get to know what kind of guy Robert really is, and what a great actor he is. His real life personality is sweet, goofy, fun, loving, caring and gentle. Then you realize this is the guy who played Freddy Krueger – people are really going to appreciate Robert Englund in a whole new way. Then we decided that Wes Craven was going to tell us even more about the dynamic between Nancy and Freddy. It’s quite a long interview with Wes. His interview leads us into a much deeper and more philosophical discussion about the movies. We interview Jessica Craven, Wes’ daughter, who was very instrumental in the creation of A Nightmare on Elm Street in several ways. I think fans are going to be shocked by the things they don’t know about Wes and Robert. It’s going to give people a really new insight into the people who made that movie.

Jason Bene: It doesn’t surprise me that you are so popular with fans because your character went against the cliche and fought back and wasn’t a victim. You are also in the three best films in the series – A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Heather Langenkamp: I think you hit the nail on the head. I don’t think that it is me. But I do think that Wes knew the formula for this movie had to include this battle between this young person and Freddy. He made the conscious decision to make the character a girl. What is more important about Nancy is the way she approaches the battle. It doesn’t have anything to do that she is a girl fighting, it has more to do with the fact she’s a person who’s actually willing to face Freddy and go straight at him. I think the word victim is more about how you approach your adversary. You consciously admit or decide to feel that you can’t fight back. Wes says, ” A hero is someone who is willing to face fear.” The fact that it is a girl or boy has never mattered. A lot of people want to make it like “final girl”. I really don’t think it’s about that.

Jason Bene: This was filmed at five different conventions in two continents. Is that your normal convention schedule?

Heather Langenkamp: No. I usually do two a year. Only recently did I start doing them because of the 25th anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street there were lots of requests to go places. I used that as an excuse for being able to go to these places. We actually went to six conventions by the end of it. We took our camera all over the world. Some of the camera footage is from my Sony HD. We filmed all the fans who agreed to be on camera. We got home and we had over one hundred hours of footage. We took a year to edit this film. There are probably close to one hundred fans featured in the film. We also have a music video on the DVD that features more fans because there were some fans that we hated cutting. We tried to put everyone who could in the movie. They are the stars in a lot of ways. In the end, everyone just wants to be on screen.

Jason Bene: I like how you joke in the trailer how Robert Englund has a huge line of fans compared to you at the convention.

Heather Langenkamp: I try to be really tongue-in-cheek about that. I pretend I am the little sister who gets no attention. That’s part of the humor of the film is that we really try to play that up. We try to come to this serious place, but all along the way we try and make people laugh. In horror, everyone wants to scream and be scared. I’m hoping that people have patience with the fact that I don’t think they will ever get scared by my movie, but they might laugh.

For the film to get made though, Wes gave up the rights to New Line Cinema’s CEO Bob Shaye, leading to legal entanglements that caused serious friction between the two over the years. Though Wes would eventually return to the franchise he created in 1994 [New Nightmare], he yearned to establish a new madman to call his own.

Nightmare would go on to become a box-office sensation and put New Line on the map -  to this day the company is referred to as ”the house that Freddy built”.

Universal Pictures releases Shocker on October 27, 1989.

TV repairman/serial killer Horace Pinker [Mitch Pileggi] has been limping around Los Angeles slaughtering one family after another. When detective Don Parker [Michael Murphy] starts closing in on Pinker, he murders his wife, daughter, and biological son. Jonathan [Peter Berg] is his adopted son, who has a unique connection where he can see the killings before they happen.

Jonathan leads the police to a repair shop where Pinker makes a getaway, not before slicing and dicing some police officers. He sets his sights on Jonathan’s main squeeze Alison [Cami Cooper], brutally murdering her. Eventually Horace is caught and sent to die in the electric chair, not before he made a deal with the evil gods and becomes a high-voltage phantom upon death. He now has the ability to jump in and out of bodies, televisions, and airwaves. How do you stop someone who doesn’t take human form?

The first thing you notice right off the bat is that this is not straight-up horror. Starting in the mid-80′s with films like Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead, humor was being injected into fright flicks, sometimes with inconsistent results. Even though Shocker is a not-so guilty pleasure of mine, it’s not without its faults.

The first fifteen minutes are played straight and you think this could be a real white knuckler, but it becomes apparent the more you see Pinker, the more you realize that he is more comic relief than terrifying. Quotes like  “Come on, boy, let’s take a ride in my Volts Wagon!” and “Finger lickin’ good!” fall flat, then hit the zenith when a possessed little girl starts up a bulldozer and says “Come on, you fucker! Move! ”

The official remake for A Nightmare on Elm Street hits cinemas in 2010, and you could call Shocker a quasi-redux considering all the similiarities between the two. The suburban setting, dream scenarios, and even the opening credits ape Craven’s trendsetter.

At the end of the day, this is still is a fun, head bangin’ horror film. The soundtrack is the best since Lamberto Bava’s Demons. There is Megadeth belting out a cover of Alice Cooper’s No More Mr. Nice guy and The Dudes of Wrath screaming the main title track.

What a lot of fans might not realize is that while this film is a bloodbath, it was heavily censored by Jack Valenti’s violence crusaders at the MPAA. Time after time it was sent back for trimming. I’m not sure if the footage exists, but I’d love to see a Director’s Cut released one day.

Sadly, Shocker didn’t fair well with tickets sells, nixing any chance of a return visit by Craven’s latest designer psycho.

Wes Craven’s Shocker is derivative of everything from The Thing to The Hidden, and won’t win points for being frightening. I say take it for what it is – a hoot and half that should be experienced with a six pack of beer.

Heather Langenkamp cameos as a potential victim, Wes Craven as the neighbor at the end, and Dr. Timothy Leary as a television evangelist.

To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Shocker, the New Beverly in Los Angeles held a screening with Wes Craven, Ted Raimi [Pac-Man], Richard Brooks [Rhino], and Vincent Guastaferro [Pastori] in attendance.

Thanks to filmmaker Daniel Farrands’ Facebook page, we can show you the early DVD Artwork for Never Sleep Again, a comprehensive documentary on the Nightmare of Elm Street series.

From the Press Release:
Members of the creative team behind His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th have joined forces once again to bring horror fans the ultimate tribute to yet another landmark slasher series, A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy officially began lensing on August 22, 2009, in and around Los Angeles. Starring and narrated by Heather Langenkamp, star of the 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street and two of its sequels (1986′s Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and 1994′s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), this thrilling 90-minute retrospective promises to be the definitive look at the making of the iconic horror series and the enduring legacy of its wise-cracking, razor-gloved villain: the indefatigable “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” known as Freddy Krueger.

For a quarter century Freddy has slashed his way through the nightmares of two generations of movie-goers in one of the most artful, spectacular, and terrifying film franchises in motion picture history. To characterize the Nightmare on Elm Street series as a modern cultural phenomenon would be a gross understatement. To date, the eight (soon to be nine) Elm Street films have scared up well over half a billion dollars in box office receipts in the U.S. alone, launching the careers of such Hollywood luminaries as Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2), Patricia Arquette (“Medium”), Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential), and even Johnny Depp.

Little did Freddy’s “father“, veteran writer/director Wes Craven, know that his terrifying, child-killing creation would go on to become a cult hero and spawn his very own cottage industry. Today Freddy is practically a household name, with his burned visage, trademark fedora, and red and green sweater appearing on everything from T-shirts to video games to action figures to comic books (Freddy was even the star of his own weekly television series!). It’s safe to say that Freddy Krueger may never rest in peace – nor should he – since his fans keep clamoring for more. Even Newsweek called him “The most popular cinematic maniac since Darth Vader.”

“Freddy is like the ‘unholy spirit’ in the trinity of modern monsters alongside Jason from Friday the 13th and Michael Myers from Halloween,” says co-director and producer Daniel Farrands, who previously helmed the documentary His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th and produced the 2009 Deluxe Editions of the Friday the 13th films for Paramount Home Entertainment. A veteran of the horror genre, Farrands most recently served as a producer of the hit supernatural thriller The Haunting in Connecticut, which has grossed nearly $80 million worldwide. “Freddy and the Nightmare films are icons of our generation, and our documentary will revisit the franchise in an exciting new way that will be respectful to the fans and to the films themselves,” assures Farrands.

Co-director and editor Andrew Kasch (Thirsty) concurs, “The Nightmare series has long been regarded as the most high-brow and creative of the mega horror franchises, so our goal is to make a film that reflects those qualities. While His Name Was Jason was campy and off-the-wall, this documentary will offer a serious chronological account of the creative process – the hardships and triumphs behind one of Hollywood’s most iconic characters. Above all else, this is not a fluff or promotional piece for the upcoming remake but rather will focus on the original series of films that began with Wes Craven’s 1984 classic.”

“The Nightmare franchise has had such a huge impact on the genre and its fans and is truly an important piece of horror history,” adds producer/co-writer Thommy Hutson (His Name Was Jason, Prank). “These films proved that horror could be both terrifying and dramatic, thrilling and groundbreaking. And that’s why we’re so thrilled to bring fans an extensive behind-the-scenes look into Freddy Krueger’s hallucinogenic world like never before. It’s a way of paying tribute to Wes Craven’s original vision which has inspired so many of us … and given us a few really good nightmares, too.”

In addition to the exhaustive feature-length documentary, the two-disc DVD release of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy will feature over four hours of nightmare-inducing extras, including the original documentary I Am Nancy, written, produced and directed by star Heather Langenkamp, which looks back at the last 25 years since her debut as heroine Nancy Thompson and examines the impact of the Elm Street films on young people’s lives.

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy will be released in the spring of 2010.

Never Sleep Again officially began lensing on August 22, 2009 in and around Los Angeles. Starring and narrated by Heather Langenkamp, star of the 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street and two of its sequels (1986′s Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and 1994′s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), this thrilling 90-minute retrospective promises to be the definitive look at the making of the iconic horror series and the enduring legacy of its wise-cracking, razor-gloved villain: the indefatigable “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” known as Freddy Krueger.

Source: Bloody Disgusting