A Nightmare on Elm Street has many graphic and brutal deaths, and one of the worst and thus most memorable ones is that of Tina, Nancy’s friend – and here’s how that scene was shot and how a mistake made it more dramatic. The slasher genre went through a great run in the 1980s, and one of the most notable titles from the decade was Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, released in 1984. The movie introduced the audience to a one-of-a-kind villain and made way for a franchise covering not only more movies (including a remake and a crossover with Friday the 13th) but also novels, comic books, and video games.
A Nightmare on Elm Street follows four teenagers who become the target of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a villain with a very specific and unique plan: haunt his victims in their dreams, so if he kills them there, they die in real life too. A Nightmare on Elm Street also introduced a new final girl in Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson, who returned in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. As the final girl, Nancy saw many people die by the claws of Krueger, including her boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) and her friend Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), this last one in a very brutal way.
Tina is the first of the group to have nightmares about Freddy Krueger, and at the beginning of the movie, she has a dream where she’s attacked by him in a boiler room and wakes up with four slashes on her nightgown. The next day, she shares her worries and fears with Nancy and Glen, who agree to stay at Tina’s house as her mother went out of town and are later joined by Tina’s boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri). When Tina falls asleep, she’s once more haunted by Krueger, who gets her for real this time. Tina is then dragged, in the real world, all over the room by an unseen force and slashed across the chest, with Nancy and Glen finding her body covered in blood.
Shooting Tina’s death scene wasn’t easy as it required a special set, carefully planned shots, and the actors to keep track of where they were. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, Craven, Wyss, and mechanical special effects designer Jim Doyle shared the secrets behind Tina’s death in A Nightmare on Elm Street, revealing they built a special rotating set to make the illusion of Tina being dragged all over the room more believable. Craven was inspired by the musical Royal Wedding, in which Fred Astaire does a dance number where he dances up the sides of the wall and across the ceiling, but filming in a rotating set wasn’t easy for the crew and actors.
Wyss shared she got vertigo after the first spin, and her perspective kept changing as she moved and the set circled more and more. Doyle explained that the wall was “a long way away” and suddenly it came up really fast, so Wyss just fell into it, and they realized that it actually looked good (but it certainly didn't feel that way). This disorientation actually helped Wyss’ performance as the terror in her “was 75 percent real”, and it also added to the desperation her character was feeling, with Craven sharing that once they got their take, Wyss was “completely freaked out”. Wyss’ confusion and vertigo ultimately made the scene look crazier, and Tina’s death became one of the most memorable and shocking moments from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
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