CraveOnline: You said it was imaginary, but did you end up buying that prom dress with Ronee Blakley?
Heather Langenkamp: No, we did not end up… Are you kidding? On that budget we would never have gotten reimbursed. “You’re on the your own on that one!” No, we were aware that there was not a lot of extra cash floating around to do those kinds of experimental research.
When the lock of your hair went grey in the movie, was there a lot of testing to see what looked best? Like, “No, not on the left…?”
I felt bad because Wes had gone through a lot of expense to make me an all-grey wig. In that scene originally I was going to be waking up and my hair was going to be totally grey. So they had a very fine wigmaker from Czechoslovakia, gosh I’m wondering what his name was now, but anyway he made me a beautiful, beautiful all grey, white-ish wig, and it just looked ridiculous. We couldn’t make it work. It just was too much. So Wes said “Let’s just make a streak grey.” The hairdresser pulled a lock of hair out and did streaks and tips, which is an inexpensive spray solution that you put on the hair, and we just did that every day. It moved around. Some days it looked like it was on the left, some days it looked like it was one the right. The continuity is not the most perfect.
The first time I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street, the ending completely freaked me out. I had assumed that you had died. Was that the original idea, that Nancy died at the end of the first film?
Actually I never interpreted it that way. My interpretation was that Nancy still has not awaken from her dream, the dream she enters the night before when Glen dies, she goes into the dream to capture Freddy and she lays traps and does all that, goes through the whole dream, does the fight, sees her mother die in the bed, and then decides to use the dream skills that Glen had told her about and turns her back on Freddy. She says, “You’re nothing. You’re shit,” then walks out the door, and the way it’s filmed you think oh, she’s walking through her morning the next day and she’s alive, but I always assumed that was just a continuation of that same dream. We don’t know how it ends. We don’t know if she wakes up alive or never wakes up. We never see Freddy kill her and so that’s why I think I’m able to justify the fact that she comes back in Nightmare 3, because that dream… she survived it.
I love Dream Warriors. It’s a really cool movie, and it was wonderful to see a hero return from an earlier horror film and they’ve gained strength from it. They’re not just damaged or in an asylum somewhere.
[Laughs] Well that’s because the tradition is that the monster returns, the evil one returns. Yeah, I think that’s why Wes was so creative. And then she returns again the seventh one and she’s a mixture of herself and the character that she played. So when you look at the throughline of Nancy over those ten years it’s an amazing role. Amazing role. No one woman could play that role at the same time. You would have to do it over ten years to effectively capture the aging of a woman, she has kids, all the things a girl goes through into womanhood you can really see Nancy go through too. I’m so lucky to have been able to play all three versions of that character.
I’m glad you brought that up because New Nightmare is one of my very favorite horror movies…
Thank you.
It’s not just because it’s clever, although it’s really clever, but it flips the franchise around and makes you sympathize with the parents in the Freddy Krueger story, whereas in the original it’s all about the kids and the parents don’t understand. Tell me about using that, because it feels like now you’re Ronee Blakley.
And I still burn Freddy up in a boiler. It is very parallel. The whole idea of growing up is all about that. You can never empathize with your parents as a teenager. You just think they’re just on another planet. Then Nancy, as a working girl – well, not a “working girl” but as a professional – she is straddling that [in Dream Warriors]. Caretaking versus still being a teenager, understanding and fully empathizing with their journey, but also wanting to be more of a teacher and more of a parent, and having wisdom about what’s going on. So then in Nightmare 7, now she is the older generation, and how does she avoid the pitfalls of that, and how does she not succumb to…?
The parents’ role was morally ambivalent. I do think that what they did, and Wes would agree with me, was not right. But I think Nancy was, by entering the dream to get Freddy, able to absolve herself of some of the moral, evil overtones that her parents had, and using the techniques that she knows will work makes her avoid having to be an immoral figure. That’s why I think she’s such a hero at the end. She sacrifices herself for the kids in Nightmare 3 too which also makes her incredibly heroic. She’s just an incredible character. Really, a great character.
