Forty years ago, A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced a new type of killer to a generation's nightmares by stabbing, slashing and hacking. Freddy Krueger, the disfigured child killer from A Nightmare on Elm Street, became the defining character of the golden age of slasher movie villains, thanks to his iconic bladed gloves.
And while the diabolical imagination behind it all belongs to horror legend Wes Craven, the sticky visual wizardry that made the film a franchise-spinning hit — and much of those gloves — were the work of Jim Doyle, a young, ambitious special-effects wizard who saw the movie as a career-defining challenge.
“I ended up in this movie because the guy they pitched it to said they couldn't make it on their budget,” Doyle, now 69, tells Yahoo UK from his home in California. “But he said he'd risk his life to have me in it, and he wanted me to do it. And he was right.”
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When Doyle first read the script, he was blown away by the film's visual ingenuity, but also by the scope he was asked to create with a tiny special effects budget of just $57,000: “If you basically break it down, there's a major practical special effect on almost every page. We have 84 special effects setups in a 95-minute movie,” he laughs.
“And I was 28 years old. I'd never done anything like that. I think I contributed a lot to the look and success of that movie, because a lot of the gag ideas came from me when we were figuring out how to achieve the effects for that movie.”
The first order of business was Freddie's trademark gloves, which weren't finalized until very late in pre-production: “Wes said to me, 'I want a weapon. I want it to be something he could make in a boiler room,'” Doyle recalls.
“What we ended up making were gloves. We only used the techniques available to boilermakers – copper tubing and rivets – so the original gloves could have been made by any competent craftsman or tinsmith.”
Doyle made three versions: a “hero” glove with a real knife for close-ups, and a “weakened” version for long shots. “We could only do one, the hero, with the real sharp blade,” says Doyle. “The first time Robert Englund put it on, he stabbed himself in the arm with it. Almost everyone did. We had to stop people from trying to wear it.”
“I was in charge of the cutting for the majority of the time. We shot two-unit. I was Freddie's glove and Freddie was running around the house.”
The knife-fingered glove became one of the most instantly recognizable props in horror movie history, the ruby slippers of slasher movies. “I know a guy who has them,” says Doyle. “He's an avid collector, and he hadn't seen them in decades, so he brought them here to be authenticated.”
“He bought it years ago for $75,000. It was recently put up for auction. He was hoping for $200,000 but the bids only reached $190,000. I don't think he really wanted to sell it anyway.”
But the gloves were nothing compared to the other dream sequences Doyle was trying to bring to life, the most challenging of which was the murder of Tina (Amanda Weiss), who is blown through her bedroom while being slashed by an unseen assailant, and the untimely death of Glenn (Johnny Depp), who is engulfed in his own bed and then expelled in a spurt of blood.
Doyle decided to solve both problems by building a rotating set, which was an incredibly ambitious idea, as this technique had typically only been used by directors working with big budgets (think Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Christopher Nolan in Inception).
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“I didn't know anything,” laughs Doyle, “and we just plunged into it. They were like, 'So how are you going to do that?' And I said, 'Well, we're just going to keep it after we move out and you're not going to have a say in it.' So I kept the revolving room. I ended up spending about $15,000 on it. But the fact that I was able to keep it after that kept me busy on other movies for a year and a half.”
“Plus, I thought it was too complicated than it needed to be. Instead of trying to make something out of steel, I made it out of prestressed timber, because I couldn't afford steel. It's not automated, it's hand-turned. It looks pretty good.”
Still, there was a bit of a stir when Craven arrived to film the blood-spurting sequence. “Oh, um, whoa,” laughs Doyle. “I figured it wouldn't need a brake because it was manual. I had no idea we were going to end up pouring 55 gallons of fluid into this room. It's just going to be fine if it's just sitting there.”
“The problem was, when there was liquid in it and you tried to rock it a little bit, the blood would splash back onto the walls and out the window – and onto us, of course. Luckily it was just the ceiling lamp that shorted out, which wasn't properly grounded. Things got a little crazy. We got everyone off stage and thankfully no one was hurt. But it's a life lesson. After that, I always stood back and thought, 'OK, what could possibly go wrong with that?'”
Forty years after the film's release, Doyle is pleased with what he accomplished, but there are still moments that make him cringe: “It's hard to look at my own work. Some things worked, some were embarrassingly bad, like the arm stretching out in the alley. I hated that effect, and everyone else loves it. I thought, 'Why? It's stupid,' and everyone says it's so creepy.”
“It's easier to see now because of the distance. I see the arm up in the bathtub and I think, 'Wow, that was me up there.' A lot of people I work with now can't believe I was playing Freddy Krueger in all those shots.”
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Doyle won an Academy Award for developing a groundbreaking new smoke machine but left the film industry after working on The Nutty Professor in 1996. He then became director of design and technology at WET Design, creating the technology behind some of the world's most spectacular attractions, including the Rain Vortex at Singapore's Changi Airport and the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas.
“I don't miss it one bit,” he says. “I looked around one day and I didn't see many 55-year-old special effects guys. The film industry is almost carnivorous for contractors. It eats them alive. So I knew what the future held. I don't miss the accountants. But I do miss people like Wes Craven.”
A Nightmare on Elm Street is available to rent or buy digitally.
