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.
A. D. Jameson's Blog 