Oklahoma native Heather Langenkamp looks back on 40 years of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' (2024)

Brandy McDonnellThe Oklahoman

Heather Langenkamp admits she got the wrong impression of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" when she first auditioned for Wes Craven's now-famed 1984 cinematic phantasmagoria.

"It was the time when John Hughes films were really big, and 'The Breakfast Club' and the Brat Pack were becoming a thing. When I read it at first, I thought, 'Wow, this is about teenagers, and they're all really sweet and they all have such a great relationship.' I just looked at it through this lens of the teenager relationships — I was a teenager at the time — and the whole Freddy part and the nightmare part just kind of escaped me," she told The Oklahoman in a recent Zoom interview.

"Then, when I got to set and I saw Freddy Krueger, I'm like, 'Oh, yeah, this is a horror movie.' I just had not been exposed to that many horror movies in my life, so didn't know what to expect."

Born and raised in Tulsa, Langenkamp certainly didn't expect the low-budget "Nightmare on Elm Street" to become a box-office smash, a franchise starter and one of the most influential horror movies of all time — or that playing the lead role of Nancy Thompson would establish her as one of the genre's most beloved "final girls" and Oklahoma's own "scream queen."

"I never, ever imagined in a million years that Nancy would actually end up being such an important part of the horror genre, or an icon in and of herself," she said.

Recently, Langenkamp, now 60, has spent even more time than usual contemplating the legacy of her breakthrough "Nightmare," as the movie is marking its 40th anniversary this fall. In honor of the milestone anniversary, the movie is newly available to buy digitally in 4K Ultra HD and will bow Oct. 15 on 4K UHD Blu-ray.

"It's the exact opposite of what I thought the film would end up as, frankly, a young actor in Hollywood just looking for any job they can, just so that you can stay living in Los Angeles. You have to pay your rent, and I really looked at it as an opportunity to continue being in LA for a few more months," Langenkamp said.

"I wanted to be in a film, but most people in my life told me that I would regret being in a horror movie."

How did being an extra in 'The Outsiders' and 'Rumble Fish' help Heather Langenkamp launch her career?

Growing up in Tulsa, Langenkamp was just a girl when she took her first acting class at the Philbrook Museum of Art.

"They had summer classes for kids. ... But acting was my favorite one, and we did a little play where I got to play a witch," she recalled with a smile. "I never forgot how excited I felt when I was putting on the makeup and getting into my costume. Yeah, that definitely stuck with me."

Although she attended high school in Washington, D.C., after her father, Tulsa oil and gas attorney R. Dobie Langenkamp, was offered a U.S. Department of Energy job in President Jimmy Carter's administration, she returned to her hometown in the cinematic summer of 1983.

"I was so lucky that that summer before my freshman year in college, Francis Ford Coppola came to Tulsa to make two films: 'The Outsiders' and 'Rumble Fish.' I actually was an extra in 'The Outsiders,' got to see how a real film was made. I had never been on a set before," she recalled.

"I'm probably a fleeting image or just on the cutting room floor ... but being in Tulsa that summer, you felt like something big was happening. Of course, all of us read 'The Outsiders' when we were in junior high. Such an important book for Tulsa. S.E. Hinton was like a saint for all of us who grew up in Tulsa, just for her accomplishments as an author."

Although her brief speaking part in Coppola's more avant-garde Hinton adaptation "Rumble Fish" got cut, it was enough to earn Langenkamp entry into the Screen Actors Guild.

"When I went to California to college, I already had my SAG card, which really changed the course of my life," she said.

How was Heather Langenkamp's character different from other girls in horror movies?

As a Stanford University undergraduate, Langenkamp pursued her acting career with roles in television pilots, movies of the week and after-school specials, until Craven, who died in 2015, cast her as the teen heroine of his "Nightmare."

Craven's script pitted her clever, capable Nancy Thompson against now-legendary villain Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) the burn-scarred ghost of a psychopathic child killer who seeks vengeance against the vigilantes who killed him by targeting their children in their dreams.

"I didn't know that she was so different maybe from all the other women in horror films or slasher films up to that point, because I hadn't seen them. So, for me, just playing that girl who's resourceful and has this amount of bravery in standing up to Freddy, I just felt like it was of the day," Langenkamp said.

"There were just so many women characters who were really flexing their muscles. It was a time of great expansion of what women could do, not only in our society, but also in film. So, I just felt like I was on this train that was already rolling in this direction."

Also featuring Johnny Depp in his first film role, Craven made his bloody and brilliant "Nightmare" on a budget of less than $2 million.

"Many people had very ambivalent views about Wes Cravens' films. 'The Last House on the Left' was really a shocking, very dark film," Langenkamp recalled. "I just thought, 'Well, maybe it's going to go in that direction.' When reading the script, I didn't think it would, but most of the people in my life thought I would probably regret having been in this horror movie."

Instead, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" was a smash that raked in more than $25 million at the box office. Craven's fright fest not only spun off several sequels, a 2010 remake, a TV series, books, comic books and video games, but the movie also established New Line Cinema as a major force in film production. Nicknamed “The House That Freddy Built" New Line went on to spool out "The Lord of the Rings," "Final Destination" and "Blade" movies.

How did starring in 'Nightmare on Elm Street' change Heather Langenkamp's life?

Although performers like "Midsommar's" Florence Pugh and "The Witch's" Anya Taylor-Joy have broken out in horror movies in recent years, Langenkamp said the genre wasn't a valuable launching pad for actresses back then.

"Jamie Lee Curtis, she quickly got out of horror movies, that became something that she really did put behind her. For many, many years, she wasn't looking for new roles in the horror genre until, actually, it had come around, and this evolution had taken place. Actresses like Florence Pugh are perfect examples: Now, people are lining up to try to get into a horror movie, and that just shows you how much things have changed in 40 years," Langenkamp said.

"It was very hard to tell people that I had been in this horror movie. ... Most people in Hollywood hadn't seen it. Maybe their kids had seen it, but it wasn't something that mainstream Hollywood really paid attention to."

The Oklahoma native guest-starred on the ABC sitcom "Growing Pains," earning a lead role in the short-lived 1987 spinoff series "Just the Ten of Us," appeared in the ZZ Top music video "Sleeping Bag" and portrayed figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 telefilm "Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story."

In 1990, she married Oscar- and Emmy-winning special effects makeup artist David Leroy Anderson. Along with raising their two children, she joined her husband in supervising his AFX Studio in Van Nuys, California.

Over the past 25 years, his studio has created the makeup effects for Oklahoma native Ron Howard’s "Cinderella Man," Zack Snyder’s "Dawn of the Dead," JJ Abrams' "Star Trek into Darkness," Drew Goddard’s "Cabin in the Woods" and six seasons of Ryan Murphy’s series "American Horror Story."

She has continued to act, too, returning to her home state to join another storied horror franchise with the filming of the 2018 sequel "Hellraiser: Judgment," which she called "one of my favorite days in Oklahoma City." More recently, she has collaborated with Netflix's next-generation horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan, appearing in his series "The Midnight Club" and in his new movie "The Life of Chuck," which in September won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Along with traveling to horror conventions across the country and producing two documentary projects, Langenkamp also rejoined her breakout franchise to reprise the role of Nancy in 1987's "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 - Dream Warriors" and to play a fictionalized version of herself in 1994’s "Wes Craven’s New Nightmare."

She said her feelings about her role as a horror icon change from day to day.

"Some days, I just feel like the luckiest, happiest person to still be talking about 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and getting to see Robert Englund and being with my friends. It's such an enriched, incredible part of my life. But then there are other days, of course, where I'm like, 'God, do I have to talk about Nancy anymore?' It's like, 'Can't I get another role that's this important?' Langenkamp said.

"Then, it dawns on me, 'No, Heather, you probably will never get a role that's this important to American culture.' We've been entered into the Library of Congress' (registry of) historically significant films. I don't think I'll probably ever be in anything like that ever again. So, I'm very grateful."

Oklahoma native Heather Langenkamp looks back on 40 years of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' (2024)
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