Fred Olen Ray felt he deserved credit on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Fred Olen Ray is one of the most well known directors in the B horror world, so it's kind of surprising that he never seemed to get anywhere close to any of the major horror franchises. On an episode of his podcast One Take Territory, Ray revealed that it wasn't due to lack of trying. For a while he was with the Agency for the Performing Arts, and his agent sent him out on meetings to work on the Friday the 13th TV show and to pitch an idea for a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movie.

In fact, Ray even fought to get credit on A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD, as he felt the movie was inspired by a story he had pitched to New Line Cinema.

As he tells it in his podcast, Ray says his agent told him New Line was looking for a writer/director to make the next ELM STREET sequel. So he went to see the most recent one in theatres and came up with an idea: 

This is the part I don't get about these movies, why is it always the evil guy who gets to come back from the dead and revenge himself on people? You know, Freddy Krueger kind of got what he had coming. It wasn't like it was an undeserved hazing that he received. But I always wondered why the bad guys get to come back from beyond the grave. I said, why don't we do a story where the child victims of Freddy Krueger would come back to thwart him at the end? The kids that he had murdered would come back to be his undoing. 

And you had to bring him back in the movie in some fashion, so I devised a plot where a girl became pregnant and she was kind of acting strange, and she was knitting dirty little red and black striped sweaters. Eventually Freddy Krueger would rip his way, be born as a full grown man out of her abdomen during the course of the movie, that's how he could come back into the movie."

Ray says he wrote a treatment, registered it with the Writers Guild, and pitched it to an executive at New Line who told him his story wasn't like any other they had heard before. But he didn't get the job to make the new movie.

Then New Line made THE DREAM CHILD, which has a pregnant heroine and features a scene in which Freddy is born as a little mutant puppet and quickly grows back to full size. After seeing that, Ray went to APA wanting them to contact New Line and get him credited on the movie.

I said I would like, on anything that comes in the future, whether it's a VHS or whatever it is, that my name gets added to the credits for "story" or something, and that they pay me something token, like $5000. Which I believe Harlan Ellison had a similar deal on TERMINATOR."

According to Ray, APA called New Line and the studio told them that he had never come in for a meeting. APA didn't want to rock the boat with a big company like New Line, so they gave up this DREAM CHILD credit fight as a lost cause.

Ray didn't get the credit or the cash he wanted, but he didn't let this upset slow him down. He's still working steadily to this day, and has 158 directing credits and 75 writing credits to his name so far. While he didn't get to make an ELM STREET movie, he did bring the world classics like HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS and EVIL TOONS.