Chilling real life story inspired iconic horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a cult classic, but the stories that partially inspired it are equally terrifying.

A lot of your favorite horror film classics have Nightmare on Elm Street to thank for setting the bar on what it means to have a great villain and plot.

The 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street turned 40 this year, and without it, director Wes Craven might not have been able to give us the Scream franchise or Red Eye.

In case you didn't know, A Nightmare on Elm Street followed a group of teenagers being haunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a scarred man with a gloved hand and wisecracks to boot.

However, the real kicker is that if he catches them as they sleep, they die in real life - meaning the only option was to stay awake or risk death in the most creative of ways.

The surprise hit film spawned a whopping 9 sequels, comic books, TV shows and has shown up in a whole host of video games over the years.

While the film might seem a bit tame by today’s standards, back in the 80s, it was a terrifying phenomenon and would go on to be mimicked and parodied for decades.

But what makes the film even scarier all these years later is that it was inspired by a real life phenomenon.

Here he is just standing there...menacingly (New Line Cinema)

Now there wasn’t exactly a clawed serial killer demon that was going after teenagers, but there was a time in Los Angeles where unexplained deaths of young men were causing a stir.

Craven explained in a TV interview about his inspirations for the script, and he said that in 1970s, he'd read a newspaper story about a young Cambodian man, who'd came to the US after war and genocide, which left him with terrifying nightmares.

The director said (via Metro): “His father was a physician and had given him sleeping pills, and the kid supposedly was taking them.

"They had come out of Southeast Asia from a camp, so the family just assumed that he had been traumatized.

“He said ‘No, no, it’s different. There’s something stalking me in my dream. I don’t want to sleep.’ And he actually kept himself awake.”

The man finally fell asleep, much to the relief of his family, however, shortly after he was put to bed, they heard 'screaming and thrashing' coming from his room.

Wes Craven spoke about the stories that inspired the film (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)

“They ran into his room, and he was just screaming, kicking in his bed, and then he fell silent, and he was dead." Craven said. "He hadn’t taken any of sleeping pills. It was so dramatic. It was like, holy s***.

"This guy knew he was going to die if he slept. And you have to sleep, whatever you do. How terrifying.”

According to Craven, that became the 'central line of Nightmare on Elm Street', as per Vulture.

Scarily enough, this wasn’t the only incident as there were dozens of reports about Southeast Asian refugees in US dying for unknown reasons in their sleep at the time, Metro further reports.

The phenomenon was later named sudden unexplained death syndrome (SUDS) which most often impacted Asian men when they were sleeping, with their postmortem examination often not revealing a cause of death, as per National Library of Medicine.