Over the past few years, author Wayne Byrne has become one of the best film writers around. Debuting with an outstanding account of the career of US indie filmmaker Tom DiCill Include Me Out– which featured a foreword from Reservoir Dogs and Fargo star Steve Buscemi – the Naas native has since completed a compelling biography of late screen icon Burt Reynolds, with a book about 48 Hrs and The Warriors director Walter Hill also on the way.

His latest effort, Welcome To Elm Street, is a fascinating deep dive into the creation of Wes Craven’s iconic horror franchise, with some rip-roaring behind-the-scenes tales, in-depth analysis of its social-political and Freudian themes, and fascinating interviews with key players who’ve never previously discusses their involvement in the series.

In a notable coup, the interviewees include Robert Englund, the actor who made Freddy into one of the most famous horror characters of all time. Though he passed away in 2015, Craven continues to have a huge cultural imprint: the recently released reboot of his other celebrated horror franchise, Scream, is already a massive box office hit.

Elsewhere, to mark the movie’s 35th anniversary, Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly cinema in LA has included the third Elm Street film, Dream Warriors – arguable the series’ high point – in its slate of February programming. All of this and more were on the agenda when I recently caught up with Byrne for a chat about the book...

The likes of Nightmare On Elm Street and The Exorcist were always too intense for me as a kid. But is it fair to say you were very open to the horror genre?

Absolutely. Also, I wasn’t a Disney kid, I was a New Line kid – I was just never into cartoons or that kind of thing. I had lenient parents. I’d go into video shops with my Dad, and he’d see the old boxes for horror movies, which were so fantastic.

The way he would look at Freddy, that was the equivalent of Frankenstein or Dracula to him. So there was never really an issue with me accessing them at a young age. With Nightmare On Elm Street in particular, they’re not truly scary. They’re not that dark – there’s always an element of adventure, action or even a little bit of comedy. They kind of eased me into horror.

As you write about in the book, there was a particular cultural context in which you discovered the series – it’s a period that’s very resonant to Gen X-ers like me!

The first films I saw in the series were parts 3 and 4. Around the same time in the late ’80s/early ’90s, on Friday nights on Sky One, you had Hunter, Unsolved Mysteries, Wrestling Challenge – and Freddy’s Nightmares. I’d get my Dad to tape it and I’d watch it on Saturday mornings. It was the perfect maelstrom, everything was Freddy!

The pound shop in Naas, Donal’s, had Freddy lunchboxes and the classic gloves. And these little things they used to call ‘Fred Heads’; you’d put them in water, squeeze them and use them as a water gun! I think it was the perfect time to get into Freddy, because he was everywhere in culture.

The franchise has been widely written about, but you obviously felt there was still plenty of ground to cover in the book.

Elm Street is referenced in a lot of horror books, but I was never satisfied with the level of analysis. There’s a lot scholarship on it, but it never really went into the themes. I’d always felt I’d love to write about it. I did a freelance piece for Darkside magazine about Part 3, I think for its 25th anniversary.

I loved being able to dig into the themes, and having a written a couple of books, I was lucky enough to be asked what I wanted to next – and I said I’d love to do a book on Elm Street. The modus operandi was to get people who haven’t really talked about it before, and get a different angle on the making of it.

As well as the iconic debut, the third film, Dream Warriors, is also regarded as a cult classic. Is that your favourite in the series?

I kind of love the first, third and second movies equally. Six probably in there as well.

What sort of impact did it have on you?

I would have seen when I was around five (laughs). The thing about part 3 was that it eased you into it. It the the first real MTV Freddy; it had that cool soundtrack. And it was the start of Freddy being a more witty, gregarious figure – almost Bond-like with the quips. But it’s also a great fantasy and adventure movie, because you have this group of teens in an institute for kids who can’t sleep and have mental issues. So, there are all these characters who go through their own little adventures.

It’s kind of a multi-faceted movie with all these protagonists, whereas in the first movie, Nancy is the main character and you’re with her throughout this dark movie. But I think in part 3, we’re able to relate to the kids a bit more, because they each had different issues – they went on their own individual adventures against Freddy. It almost felt like an 18-rated Goonies!

It’s an incredibly creative film as well.

It’s very imaginative, some of the best kills are in that movie. Freddy putting Jennifer’s head in the TV and saying ‘Welcome to Prime Time bitch’ – all that stuff. Even at five or six, I’d get a chuckle out of that and not be disturbed by it. Later on, I think I was almost more disturbed watching the first one, when I was slightly older, because that’s a much darker film and Freddy’s a more malevolent force. He’s not terribly comedic in that.

Anyway, part 4 came out within a year after the third one, and that’s the real blockbuster Freddy movie. It’s bright, action-packed, very funny. It was those two films that really caught my attention.

I watched part 3 on your recommendation and – as you detail in the book – there are notable Freudian themes, with the nightmares exploring the characters’ struggles with addiction and other issues. That’s a really powerful aspect to the movie.

It is, and the character of Taryn – the drug addict – is probably the most obvious example. She was the street-punk and when she’s killed via the hypodermic needles, even as a kid, that’s a powerful image. The themes in that film are some of the best and deepest in the whole series. Each of the kids has their own problem, and Freddy manipulates them all to their disadvantage.

That’s one of the scariest things about Freddy: he knows your innermost fears and desires, and he plays those again you. And you can’t escape them, because you have to sleep at some stage. Obviously, Wes Craven is a genius, but Chuck Russell did such a great job directing part 3 that I think it is generally considered a fan favourite, or at least the second best in the series. Because it is so imaginative, and also beautifully shot by the cinematographer Roy Wagner, who did an amazing job.

That was one of the things that fascinated me over the years; I loved the photography. It has this beautiful contrast: the daytime scenes are really bright and sumptuous, and the nighttime clinic stuff is very dark and blue. It’s very rich photography.

I remember as a kid reading about how Wes Craven got the inspiration for the movies – that he’d read somewhere about people who’d died while experiencing nightmares. It was such a disturbing idea, and you go into it more in the book.

Oh my god – the image he conjures up, of the kid thrashing around on the bed, and then just dropping dead… I mean, Jesus Christ. And all these warnings the kid was giving to the parents, and them not believing him. They were telling him he’d be fine, and he had doctors giving him pills. Right down to the coffee pot hidden in the wardrobe, which is what Wes put in part 1. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

Maybe that’s why the themes do linger in the mind – it all comes back to things that are real. Especially when a lot of those fears are related to family. There are those themes of discord, of the alcoholic mother, of broken homes. The parents who are pumped full of medication and distance themselves from every issue around them. What housing estate or neighbourhood doesn’t have those kind of homes? Who doesn’t know somebody who’s gone through stuff like that? So I think it’s very relevant.

What kind of person do you think Wes Craven was?

From what I’ve been told, a very warm person and a deep intellectual. For everyone I’ve talked to, that kind of sums him up. That makes sense, because when you look at his movies – even his silliest, like Shocker – it has a lot of stuff going on, similar to Elm Street. Probably too close, in some respects it’s almost a loose remake. But I think there’s a lot of stuff going on in his films.

You also have something like Deadly Friend, which is genuinely considered among his worst, but I really like it. Again, there’s a lot of themes around the central character, a teenager who’s been abused by her father. All set in this perfect middle class American innocence. He’s digging in behind in the picket fence, like David Lynch does in Blue Velvet.

And, of course, there are a lot of layers to Elm Street.

I think Elm Street is an intellectual movie, and I don’t mean to sound pretentious. Robert Englund actually reiterated a lot of these themes and ideas to me. He had conversations with Craven about them at the script stage. It’s about the death of American innocence and the American Dream, post-Kennedy’s assassination and post-’60s.

Post-Watergate as well.

Absolutely, if you look at the parents in the movie, they’re the burnouts of that generation. They’ve settled in the suburbs and probably become complacent in their ideals. They’re zoned out, whether it be medication, alcohol or that middle class apathy, where people are going, “Okay, we’ve got the house in the suburbs now, we don’t have to care anymore.” And that includes caring about their own kids and their issues. As Robert Englund said, it works on you. As you grow older with these movies, you realise something’s going on there.

The iconography of the series is amazing too, not only with Freddy’s look, but also the posters for the first few movies, which have a real Dali-esque feel.

The US posters are brilliant. For the first one, I actually prefer what I think was the French poster – but it was the VHS cover over here. It’s a blue cover, and it has the suburban house in the foreground, Nancy sleeping in the middle, and Freddy’s claws looming over it. I love that, because all of the themes are in that image: middle class suburbia being invaded by this malevolent force. That’s a powerful image and it sums up the whole thing.

Welcome To Elm Street is available to order here: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/welcome-to-elm-street/