Wes Craven’s Nightmare On Elm Street is considered one of the greatest horror films in history. Many children lost many hours of sleep after watching this horror classic. But did you know that the movie was actually based on true events? A Nightmare on Elm Street is actually based on a totally real, yet rare medical condition.
According to BuzzFeed, the movie’s director, Wes Craven, got the idea from a real story he read in the newspaper. In the 1980s, a wave of deaths shocked the world.
According to a report by The Los Angeles Times from 1987, around 130 people died mysteriously in their sleep.
These deaths became of interest in the US in the late 1970s. The New York Times reported on them a little earlier, in 1981. Just three years later, Wes Craven would take inspiration from these deaths for his most popular feature film.
The medical condition became known as “Asian death syndrome,” as most of the people affected were of Southeast Asian descent living in the United States.
The afflicted would suddenly scream in their sleep — and then they would die.
Some Southeast Asian countries already had a name for this strange phenomenon. According to The Los Angeles Times, it is called bangungut in the Philippines and pokkuri in Japan.
Both of these words translate, roughly, to the same thing: “nightmare death.”
As these strange, scary deaths happened more and more often, doctors took a closer look at the victims.
Dr. Robert Kirshner was at the forefront of this research. He found that all of the victims were in perfect health before their sudden death.
Kirschner told The Los Angeles Times:
These are all healthy men with no previous symptoms; the average age was 33. The situation is almost always the same. It only occurs in men and it only occurs in their sleep. The report is they cry out and die or are found dead the next morning.
At the time, no one could figure out exactly why these men were suddenly screaming, then dying, in their sleep. All of the men did have slightly enlarged hearts, and the majority had “defects” in the system that carries electronic impulses from the brain to the heart.
Kirschner theorized that “a random electronic discharge,” perhaps caused by a nightmare, “shorted out” and overloaded these systems. This may have led to a sudden death.
We Still don’t know anything more about “Asian death sydrome” today than we did in the 1980s. The horrifying real-life cases definitely inspired Wes Craven creation of Freddy Krueger and obviously took some artistic liberties but it’s still interesting to know where he got his inspiration.
H/T LittleThings
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