If you were to make a list of the top final girls in film, one name stands out above the rest during the 1980s horror dominance at the box office. In 1984, director Wes Craven turned what we thought a slasher film was upside down, with his creation of the evil Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Chosen to fight this new icon of horror was a young Heather Langenkamp.
When casting the lead for his latest film, Craven voiced his desire for someone who wasn’t a known movie star. Most times, it helps to have a big name attached to a film. It immediately serves to give it more attention and helps its potential chances at the box office. Horror is different. Sure, many horror films have succeeded with big stars in their lead roles, but some of the best ones work by casting relative unknowns. Doing so helps to pull the audience into the picture. Rather than having a wall up between us and the fear being displayed on the screen because we know a certain actor from so many other films, casting an unknown serves to tear that wall down and make the frightening images feel that much more real.
Wes Craven wanted an unknown, a girl next door type, to play Nancy Thompson, a teenage girl whose dreams are haunted by a burnt man with knives for fingers. Enter Heather Langenkamp. The 19-year-old only had a few acting credits to her name, most notably the 1984 film, Nickel Mountain. With over 200 other actresses vying for the role, Langenkamp’s odds at landing the part were slim, but she was exactly what Craven was looking for.
An Unknown As the Final Girl
Craven knocked it out of the park with her casting. Heather Langenkamp was astounding in the role. Nancy Thompson fit the final girl mold: shy, smart, and good. That didn’t mean she was a stick in the mud though. Her friends were edgier. She loved them and laughed with them. She had a boyfriend named Glen (memorably played by Johnny Depp). She also showed unimaginable strength when it mattered most.
Many final girls were part of horror films where the antagonist is a masked and silent killer. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger is the exact opposite of someone like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. There is no mask. His face is shown, and it's deeply etched with emotion. He’s definitely no mute either. Freddy is a talker that never shuts up. What Robert Englund did in the role made Freddy one of the most famous villains not just in horror films, but in all of movie history, up there with even Darth Vader.
His character couldn’t have worked without the right person opposing him. Heather Langenkamp was the perfect foil. She’s vulnerable and scared like she needed to be. We fear Freddy because she does. She’s also strong, not just in the usual final girl way of attacking the villain, but for being able to battle it out with Freddy, matching his wits, outsmarting him, and being able to verbally jab him back. With the wrong actress, it could have all been hokey, but with Langenkamp, we have the ideal final girl going up against the ultimate slasher.
You've Got to Have a Sequel... Or Five
A Nightmare on Elm Street was a massive success, earning a solid $25 million at the box office, but growing in strength on home video. Its popularity demanded a sequel. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was an okay follow up, though without Craven and Langenkamp on board, it didn’t feel right.
Meanwhile, Langenkamp’s acting career didn’t exactly take off after such a huge high. She did some work in after school specials and was part of a few failed pilots, but her next film role didn’t come until three years later, when she returned to the part of Nancy in 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The second film was considered a bust and the series almost died right there, but the third film, led by Langenkamp and a returning Wes Craven, who wrote the screenplay, reignited the franchise.
Dream Warriors is the best of the sequels and the most inventive, with bigger sets and bigger kills. It’s almost chaotic, with the Freddy character set loose seemingly without any boundaries. If Craven could think it up, Freddy could do it. Langenkamp is the glue that holds everything together, keeping the plot grounded when it threatens to float away to absurdity.
The result is a film that works not by recreating what worked in the original, but by expanding on it. Instead of taking place in the suburbs, we’re in a psychiatric hospital. Instead of the focusing on the usual trope of teenagers, we’re introduced to a wide variety of troubled kids, all with a different set of powers in their dreams. Nancy is now a therapist. Her character hasn’t regressed after the shocking events of her past, but has used evil to create good.
The last time we had seen Langenkamp, for most of us literally, she was a shy teenager. She’s barely into her twenties here, but as Nancy she provides a level of maturity rarely seen in someone so young, and rarely pulled off by an actress of Langenkamp’s age. She’s motherly and protective of these teens who are just a few years younger than her, but filmgoers easily bought the progression of the character due to Langenkamp’s natural ability to evolve. She could have easily mailed in her role, letting any frustrations of an acting career that hadn’t taken off, of having to come back to a horror franchise, eat her up. Instead, she gives it her all.
As great as Langenkamp was in the original, she’s even better in Dream Warriors for being able to so effortlessly leave the final girl trope behind. Just as impressive is how she seamlessly shares the screen with her supporting cast, especially with Patricia Arquette, whose Kristen character is the main focus for much of the film. It feels like the proud passing of a torch, one that is much more certain when Nancy shockingly dies in the end, leaving Kristen to be the final girl.
A New Nightmare
It’s a shame that Langenkamp’s career didn’t take off after that. What she accomplished in the Nightmare films was just as great if not better than what Jamie Lee Curtis did in horror films throughout the late '70s and early '80s. There was no bitterness from Langenkamp, however. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, she did more TV work, most notably as one of the leads in the short-lived Growing Pains spinoff, Just the Ten of Us. Outside of showing up in a cameo in Craven’s film, Shocker, Langenkamp didn’t return to the big screen until 1994.
It was Freddy that once again brought her back, but not as an act of desperation. By the early '90s, the slasher craze was dead, and Freddy Krueger had been relegated to a joke. A trio of worsening sequels after Dream Warriors had turned him into more of a comedian than a killer. Freddy truly was dead, until Craven found a clever way to bring him back.
In 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the Nightmare films are fiction, and there is no Nancy Thompson, but just Heather Langenkamp, the actor that played her. The meta premise sees a demonic entity take the form of Freddy and enter the real world. While it wasn’t a big commercial hit, it was critically favored and has since gone on to become one of Craven’s most beloved works.
Heather Langenkamp is superb in the role that sees her play a variation of herself. If she was the ultimate final girl and Scream Queen of the 1980s, this performance placed her as one of the best of the '90s as well. It was a difficult role for Langenkamp to wrap around, where she wouldn’t be playing Nancy, and wouldn’t be playing her true self either, but a variation of, which sees her becoming a widow at the hands of the Freddy entity, and then as a single mother, fighting to protect her young son.
Continuing Career
Despite her limited roles, Langenkamp showed what a talented performer she is. If in Dream Warriors she tapped into the maturity of someone a decade older than her, in A New Nightmare, Langenkamp, who wasn’t even 30, seemed like someone world-weary and in their 40s. Part of that came from the bravery of accepting a role that hit a little too close to home. Langenkamp had been involved in a real life incident that saw her stalked by a crazed fan after the cancelation of Just the Ten of Us. Rather than running from the incident, it’s written into the film in a way, as Langenkamp’s character is stalked by someone in threatening phone calls. This film isn’t about Freddy per se, but about fear and how we face it. Heather Langenkamp had faced fear in real life, and used that energy to convey a heartbreaking but genius performance that may be the best of her career.
Langenkamp had more small roles after New Nightmare, before mostly leaving acting to focus on being a mother. She hasn’t left the role that made her famous, however. She’s proud of what she accomplished in helping to change the shape of an entire genre. In 2010, she produced, narrated, and appeared in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, a massive four-hour documentary that chronicles the Nightmare films. She was also the driving force behind I Am Nancy the next year, a documentary focusing on her role in the films.
While she didn’t have the iconic careers of other final girls like Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell, she didn’t need to. All she needed was one role to make her live forever in film history. That doesn’t mean that Langenkamp is a name of the past though. She’s now one of the stars of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Midnight Club. Perhaps it will result in a resurgence of her career, but even if it doesn't, through a nightmare, Langenkamp has already lived the dream.