How A Nightmare on Elm Street influenced Twin Peaks

Perhaps it’s sacrilegious to suggest that Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street had a deep and lasting influence on Twin Peaks. Today, Twin Peaks is regarded as a fairly classy show—prestige TV before the current era of prestige TV— whereas A Nightmare on Elm Street is decidedly less classy, partly due to the fact that it was followed by a string of increasingly campy sequels. But when you stop and consider the two works in relation to one another, you find numerous similarities.

For starters, like much of Twin Peaks, the original Nightmare on Elm Street focuses on the friendship between two high school girls. Blond, tempestuous Tina resembles Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, being free-spirited and sexually active with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Rod…

…whereas brunette Nancy Thompson resembles Donna Hayward, demure and virginal despite the advances of her own boyfriend, Glen (played by none other than Johnny Depp).

Tina gets killed around the film’s seventeen-minute mark, a brutal act clearly inspired by Marion Crane’s startling demise in Psycho. The rest of the movie sees Nancy, just like Donna Hayward, grappling to come to terms with her best friend’s murder, even as she’s haunted by the specter of Tina’s corpse shrouded in plastic…

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…an image that of course has a direct parallel in Twin Peaks.

What’s more, just like Laura Palmer’s murder, Tina’s death and specter are incongruous, anomalies in Nightmare’s fictional Springwood, Ohio, whose middle-class homes and tree-lined streets prefigure the ones in Twin Peaks.

Nancy winds up imprisoned inside her own home by her mother, Marge, a plot development that Wes Craven presumably borrowed from Carrie. Marge visibly degenerates over the course of the film, drinking and smoking cigarettes, and thereby foreshadowing Laura Palmer’s chain-smoking lush of a mother, Sarah.

At the same time, a harrowing experience causes some of Nancy’s hair to turn gray, a mysterious transformation that she shares with Leland Palmer (and with Diane Freeling in Poltergeist).

Meanwhile, the Springwood police arrest Rod for Tina’s death. That sarcastic young man, with his criminal record for “brawling” and selling drugs, recalls Laura Palmer’s delinquent boyfriend Bobby Briggs…

…while Nancy’s quiet boyfriend, Glen, resembles Donna’s sensitive suitor, James.

Of course the real murderer is the one and only Freddy Krueger, a wisecracking demon who makes his home in what might be David Lynch’s favorite place: the land of dreams. Lynch first created his own version of Freddy Krueger in Blue Velvet, whose sadistic psychopath Frank adores the Roy Orbison classic “In Dreams.”

Later, in Twin Peaks, Frank’s descendant, BOB, haunts Laura Palmer’s dreams, the same way that Freddy Krueger haunts the dreams of his victims. Both BOB and Freddy are ragged and dirty, and both are associated with fire: Freddy was burned alive, whereas BOB (in his Robertson guise) flicked matches at a young Leland Palmer while asking if the “little boy” wanted to “play with fire.” BOB would also seem to be the subject of MIKE’s cryptic poem:

Through the darkness of future’s past,
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds,
“Fire walk with me.”

This is already a lot, but there are still many more similarities. Gradually, both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Twin Peaks reveal themselves to be about how their teenage protagonists are suffering due to the sins of the previous generation. Freddy Krueger hunts Tina and Nancy and their boyfriends because their parents murdered him (after he murdered twenty young children). In Twin Peaks, Teresa Banks, Laura Palmer, and Maddy Ferguson all die because Leland Palmer allowed himself to become possessed by BOB, an apparent metaphor for his having succumbed to forbidden temptations like adultery and incest. But Leland isn’t the only adult in Twin Peaks with dark desires, and as the series progresses, Donna Hayward and Audrey Horne discover secrets that their respective mothers and fathers would rather remain concealed.

Both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Twin Peaks also dabble in Orientalism, associating Far Eastern cultures with the ability to gain mastery over one’s dreams. In the first Nightmare, Glen tells Nancy about “the Balinese way of dreaming”:

Glen: They got this whole system they call dream skills. So if you have a nightmare, for instance, like falling—right?
Nancy: Right?
Glen: Well, instead of screaming, and getting all nuts, you say, OK, I’m gonna make up my mind that I fall into a magic world where I can get something special, like a poem or a song. They get all their art and literature from dreams. Just wake up and write it down. Dream skills!

That knowledge doesn’t benefit Glen, but Nancy remembers his advice, and uses dream skills to defeat Freddy. Declaring that the murderer is nothing but a dream, she turns her back on him, which causes him to disintegrate (at least temporarily). By the time she returns in the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, she’s developed her own interest in Eastern mysticism, explaining to her colleague Dr. Gordon that her “Malaysian dream doll” is a totem that’s “supposed to bring good dreams.”

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is something of a dream warrior himself. In the second episode of Twin Peaks, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” Cooper explains to the town’s law enforcement officers that, three years prior, he awoke from a dream “deeply moved by the plight of the Tibetan people,” as well as miraculously possessed “of a deductive technique, involving mind-body coordination operating hand-in-hand with the deepest level of intuition.” Soon thereafter, we witness one of the man’s deductive dreams, in which Cooper meets the one-armed man, MIKE, who tells us about his criminal past with BOB (a monologue that includes the “fire walk with me” poem). We then catch our first glimpse of BOB himself, who calls out for MIKE before boasting about his “death bag” and vowing to “kill again!” Just like Freddy Krueger, BOB makes his sneering threats while standing in a glowing boiler room.

Cooper next visits the Red Room, where he meets the Man from Another Place, who dances to an Angelo Badalamenti composition entitled “Dance of the Dream Man.”

That episode also suggests that Cooper shares a psychic link with Audrey Horne, perhaps due to her schoolgirl crush on him (or perhaps she crushes on him because they share a psychic link?). Just like the Dream Man, Audrey dances to an Angelo Badalamenti track (entitled “Audrey’s Dance”) until her father turns it off. The very next episode, she plays the piece on the jukebox at the Double R Diner, exclaiming to Donna, “God, I love this music! Isn’t it too dreamy?” And while the second season of Twin Peaks introduced the mysticism of the Black Lodge and the White Lodge, in the beginning, at least, dreaming was the series’ device of choice for shuttling between the everyday and the realm of the supernatural.

The first sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, the singular Freddy’s Revenge, also appears to have exerted some influence on Twin Peaks. Set five years after the first film, it sees its teen protagonists discover Nancy’s blood red diary, in which the young woman describes how she longed for Glen even as Freddy visited her, trying to violate her:

March 15th. He comes to me at night, horrible, ugly, dirty, under the sheets with me, tearing at my nightgown with his steel claws. His name is Fred, and he keeps trying to take me to the boiler room. He wants to kill me.

The entry sounds strikingly similar to the ones that Laura Palmer wrote in her own secret diary. What’s more, Freddy’s Revenge sees teenage Jesse struggling to fight off what we might call seduction by Freddy Krueger, as the dream monster steadily assumes control over Jesse’s body. After Freddy murders Jesse’s best friend, Grady, Jesse wakes up with blood on his hands, and sees himself reflected in a mirror as Freddy…

…not unlike how Leland Palmer would sometimes see himself reflected in mirrors as BOB.

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Jesse also discovers that sleepy Springwood harbors a seedier side — a literal red light district — just like his teenage counterparts would in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks (especially in Fire Walk With Me).

It’s worth taking a moment to note that Freddy’s Revenge was directed by Jack Sholder, who also directed The Hidden, a supernatural crime film that appears to have had its own influence on Lynch. It stars none other than Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI agent…

…who’s hunting an alien parasite that infects ordinary people, then makes them do horrible things. The first victim is played by Chris Mulkey, who went on to play the villainous domino-sucking Hank Jennings on Twin Peaks…

…and the second victim behaves quite bizarrely, not unlike Dougie Jones in the recent Twin Peaks: The Return.

Furthermore, the alien’s means of passing from host to host arguably influenced a particularly memorable shot in The Return.

The point here is that David Lynch certainly seems to have watched a lot of horror movies in the mid-to-late 1980s! (I’ve argued elsewhere that the wonderful but underrated Poltergeist III was yet another influence on Twin Peaks.)

That said, by the third Nightmare movie, Dream Warriors, the connections between that franchise and Twin Peaks start to wane. I’ll note, however, that Dream Warrior’s score was composed by none other than Angelo Badalamenti, and that the movie marked the film debut of Patricia Arquette, who turned up ten years later in a dual role in Lost Highway. It also includes a scene that continues Freddy Krueger’s association with mirrors.

Of course, I can’t definitively prove that the first three Nightmare movies influenced David Lynch. But given these similarities, as well as the fact that Lynch worked with some people who worked on them, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable to assume that he would have seen the films, and that he probably enjoyed them. (Or maybe he saw them and thought, “I can do better than that!”)

But even if Lynch never saw the first three Nightmare on Elm Street films, I’d maintain that there’s still value in noting the similarities between them and Twin Peaks. These days, it’s become fashionable to emphasize the avant-garde nature of Lynch’s work, which involves making a big deal over the director’s kookiness. A cult of personality has spring up around Lynch, similar to the ones that have sprung up around Werner Herzog and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and a lot of people are now deeply invested in treating Lynch as a divine shaman or mad genius who, I dunno, channels alien transmissions from another dimension. It seems to me that people commit to this take on Lynch (i.e., “He’s absolutely crazy!”) because it makes consuming his work more fun. Part of the pleasure of watching Lynch’s movies and TV shows is pretending that those works are sublimely bizarre, inscrutable mind-blowing oddities that sprang from nowhere and that resist all rational analysis —that they’re sacraments whose mysteries can never be exhausted.

But believing this narrative requires us to forget how mainstream Lynch’s work was between roughly 1986–2001, the height of his popularity. While the man is on the one hand an art-school alum deeply influenced by surrealists like Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren, he’s also an Eagle Scout from Montana who loves classic Hollywood films like The Wizard of Oz, Laura, Whirlpool, Sunset Boulevard, and Rear Window. And he won commercial success in the ’80s and ’90s by making movies and TV shows about cops and serial killers, subject matter that appealed to wide audiences. (Recall that in creating Twin Peaks, Lynch partnered with Mark Frost, who’d been a writer on Hill Street Blues.)

In that regard, Lynch is very much like Wes Craven, who used dream logic in order to justify embedding outlandish concepts and images inside mundane settings — and in doing so threw those nightmarish moments into starker relief, thereby giving them greater power. Whereas Wes Craven had Freddy Krueger stalk the middle-class teens of Elm Street, David Lynch had Frank and BOB stalk the middle-class teens of Lumberton and Twin Peaks. Ultimately, both directors struck nerves with audiences precisely because their respective works rooted the unfamiliar in the familiar.