It's pretty much ingrained into our brains as a cultural society to picture Freddie Krueger's razor-gloved hand emerge from under the sudsy water every time we take a bath. Just like we picture ourselves being murdered while showering, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. These scenes give us goosebumps because we are at our most vulnerable in those situations. But that's what makes it so good.
A Nightmare on Elm Street revolutionized the horror genre, and it's probably on a lot of people's lists of the best horror films ever. The film that kicked off the Freddie Krueger franchise gave us not only a pre-fame Johnny Depp but also that hysterical bathtub scene, which is one of the scariest scenes in horror.
Women in horror are often the helpless victims getting their pretty little throats slashed, but thankfully, Wes Craven chose to save his heroine from drowning this once. Read on to find out the inner workings of the notorious bathtub scene.
The Scene In Question
To familiarize yourself with the bathtub scene, if you're not scarred from it already, look to the video above, where the character Nancy is taking a very calming and relaxing bath. Calming and relaxing is not what she needs right now because if she falls asleep, she knows that Krueger will be waiting for her, knife-fingers ready. Speaking of knife-fingers, is it a coincidence that Johnny Depp goes on to play Edward Scissorhands, Krueger's long-lost son? Anyway, we digress.
As Nancy gets more and more relaxed, she starts to change the lyrics of a children's nursery tune to "One, Two, Freddy’s comin’ for you," seemingly without even noticing herself, as if she's being hypnotized. She nods off, and we see the ugly gloved hand rise out of the water between her spread legs until her mother thankfully knocks on the door, waking her.
Nancy should have taken her mother's unexpected arrival as a sign to stay awake, but classically she doesn't and falls asleep again, only this time she's sucked under the water by Krueger. Underwater, the tub is gone, replaced by a deep dark watery grave.
She struggles to hold on to the lip of the tub and calls out for her mother, who actually hears her, even though she's dreaming. Her mother gets into the bathroom, and Nancy is already out of the tub, acting as if nothing happened. It's such a classic scene.
Just like the scene surprised audiences, it surprised the actress who played Nancy, Heather Langenkamp.
"I didn't feel like I was at all aware that I was going to be led into this chamber of horrors that I would have to deal with," Langenkamp told Rolling Stone. "I thought, "I'm going to make a movie. It's not going to be a big deal." But every day, Wes presented me with something that would make me shift my mentality: "OK, today, I am going to be a bathtub all day long." It lasted eight or nine hours…there was lots of pruning."
The Scene Needed A Lot Of Technical Work To Be As Scary As Possible
The scene would never have been as successful if not for the work of Jim Doyle, the film's mechanical special effects designer. He and his team built a bottomless tub put into a bathroom set built over a swimming pool.
Krueger's hand is actually Doyle's. He was chosen because he was a scuba diver and a swimmer for a while, so he was good, being in the water during filming. "I was holding my breath for up to a minute and a half for those scenes. Heather was basically sitting on my knees," he said.
In a scuba suit, Doyle was under Langenkamp, who was sitting on "a two-by-four across a bathtub that had the bottom cut out, and beneath me was a tank made out of plywood, filled with water."
Langenkamp said it was a challenge to keep the water at a reasonable temperature so she'd get cold sitting there.
"What I remember mainly are the sounds. Wes told Jim, 'I'm going to bang on the bathtub when I want you to stick the claw out.' So Jim is blindly plunging that thing between my legs. One time it's too far to the right, next time it's too far to the left, then it's way too fast — and Wes just patiently waited until he got the take that he wanted."
For the part when Nancy plunges into the deep dark abyss? "We had a washcloth across her stomach, so when I dropped my knees and pulled the washcloth down, she just went," Doyle said.
For the shot where Nancy resurfaces, they "went into Jim Doyle's pool out in the Valley. It was after the wrap party when we were all horribly hungover, and we spent the whole day in the blazing sun in scuba outfits. We filmed his assistant swimming through the water with the pool being blacked out by this sort of plastic sheeting that kept breaking loose and flapping around, and we would get entangled with it underwater," Craven said.
"Jacques was really sharp and brought his snorkel lens. He was about to get right down at the water level; I was weighted so I wouldn't move up," Doyle continued. "We used my office assistant in that scene, and she later became the wife of Charlie [Belardinelli, special effects assistant]. They started dating on the film. They're still married. It's a Hollywood marriage that lasted [laughs]."
All in all, Langenkamp spent a total of 12 hours in the tub filming the scene. It was worth it, we'd say. Her, probably not so much. Thankfully she put up with it for our benefit. That's true dedication. She's probably more of a shower person now.