This. Right here. I’m saying
And it’s like once you start watching Asian horror movies- some American horror seems tame by comparison. I’m sure you’ve seen Train to Busan and Alive. Nightmare on Elm Street is based on a Korean incident of children dying in their sleep.
What inspired “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and Freddy Krueger? | Read | The Take.
-continued-
In 1981, news of a medical mystery began showing up in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. A few dozen people unexpectedly died in their sleep for unknown reasons. The men were young, healthy, and curiously enough, all of Asian descent. Papers dubbed the phenomenon “Asian Death Syndrome,” and the body count crossed 100 by the time A Nightmare on Elm Street hit theaters. The condition went on to become known as the less-racial “sudden unexplained death syndrome,” or “Brugada syndrome,” and for quite a while confounded medical professionals as to its cause.
In Craven’s film, the victims were pastel-clad teenagers with 1980s personalities and little more to worry about than hitting up the shopping mall. In reality, the victims of this sleep-death phenomenon were Hmong refugee males who fled the Killing Fields in Cambodia during the genocide of the late 1970s. They survived the Khmer massacre, fled to America, and acclimated to American life, only to die in their sleep without possessing any noticeable health problems.
When Craven read about this phenomenon in 1981, its curious nature was enough to prompt investigation by the CDC, and was becoming a cultural concern for all Hmong people living in the country. As it turned out, Homgs refugees in America weren’t the only ones suffering from the condition—healthy Asian men worldwide were dying in their sleep with inexplicable frequency. But the American refugees seemed to be particularly susceptible.
Back in 2014, Wes Craven articulated a story about a specific Hmong refugee family which really pushed the idea of Freddy Krueger to the forefront of his imagination. The family fled the Killing Fields and came to America, and their young son began having terrible dreams. “He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare,”
Craven said.
Brugada Syndrome is now detectable and preventable by modern medicine, but the question of why it so viciously attacked Homg refugees in the 1980s has never quite been nailed down.
The key bit of inspiration seems to be the mysterious deaths of 18 healthy Laotian refugees in 1981, just three years prior to the first Elm Street film. As related in
The New York Times on May 9, 1981, Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control looked into several possible causes for the deaths, including the possibilities that they were
frightened to death by nightmares. **
** I also ran across a 1951
SUDS). More investigation gleaned that the underlying cause was something we call
Brugada syndrome, which is disproportionately linked to individuals of Southeast Asian descent.
Not everyone with the condition dies in his or her sleep, and nightmares actually don’t really have anything to do with it. Brugada syndrome is actually an inherited heart rhythm disorder, but its propensity to cause sleep deaths seems to have influenced the emphasis on sleep demons in South Asian mythology.***
Actual Sleep Deaths Inspired A Nightmare on Elm Street
Good night and pleasant dreams everyone!
.
”
.
