In the late 1970s, healthy young men began dying in their sleep. Mostly Hmong refugees, they would go to bed and just not wake up, apparently in the grip of terrible nightmares. Doctors had no explanation.

Wes Craven read about it in the LA Times and one particular account stayed with him: A man became so frightened of a thing chasing him in his dreams that he refused to sleep, staying awake for days. When exhaustion finally took him and his family thought the worst had passed, they heard him screaming in the night. By the time they reached him, he was dead. He had died in the middle of a nightmare.

Every major studio passed on Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984). Disney was interested but wanted it softened into something for children.

The project finally landed at New Line Cinema, a tiny distributor that had never produced a movie of its own. During the shoot, its financing collapsed, and for two weeks it could not pay the crew.

Freddy was assembled from Craven's own life. The power to kill in dreams came from those refugees. The name came from a boy who bullied him as a child. The face came from a night in Cleveland when young Wes, watching from his apartment window, saw a lurching man in a fedora below. The man somehow sensed he was there, stopped, and looked up, straight into his eyes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street became a phenomenon, made Freddy Krueger immortal, and turned that little outsider into a real studio. New Line is still nicknamed the House That Freddy Built.