The nursery rhyme featured in A Nightmare On Elm Street is a memorably eerie piece of music, but how did this inspire both Jordan Peele’s Us and 2021’s Candyman? Released in 1984, A Nightmare On Elm Street was a terrifying shot in the arm for the slasher sub-genre courtesy of future Scream director Wes Craven. The teen horror hit reinvigorated interest in slashers by eschewing the formula popularized by much-copied sleeper hits Halloween and Friday the 13th, wherein a hulking masked murderer wordlessly stalked a slew of teens.
Instead, A Nightmare On Elm Street’s killer was both unmasked and eloquent, and the Springwood slasher used more creative methods than simple stabbing or slicing to cut a bloody swathe through his victims. Killed by an angry mob for his crimes against children, villain Freddy Krueger returned from the dead to haunt and kill the offspring of his attackers in the one place no one could stop him. Transformed into an immortal dream demon, Freddy killed the characters of the Nightmare On Elm Street series in their dreams.
Turning the safety of slumberland into the site of a teen massacre was an inspired decision that elevated A Nightmare On Elm Street above the slashers packing out multiplexes at the time, but Craven’s invention went beyond the premise. The first film also introduced the creepy nursery rhyme “1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you,” (sung to the tune of “1, 2, buckle my shoe”) that proved unnervingly effective. This memorably haunting chant paired a childhood favorite singsong with frightening imagery and instrumentation, and the trick proved so effective it was repurposed by not one, but two horror hits of the 2020s—albeit in slightly altered form. Both 2019’s Us and 2021’s Candyman legacy sequel used A Nightmare On Elm Street’s childhood music motif in a daringly different fashion.
Nightmare On Elm Street’s nursery rhyme re-contextualized use of a seemingly innocuous children’s rhyme was a clear inspiration for the remixes of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” and Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” that was featured prominently in the promotional materials for Candyman and Us respectively. However, the added twist is that Candyman and Us remixed songs were not childhood favorites per se, but rather hits that were big during the childhood of most of the target audience. “Say My Name” is also a clever joke punning on the method used to conjure up Candyman‘s titular slasher, but in both cases, Luniz’s Us cameo and Candyman’s repurposing of the song call to mind A Nightmare On Elm Street’s subversion of a harmless kid’s classic.
While Luniz’s song was originally released in 1995, “Say My Name” came out four years later in 1999. Thus, millennial viewers watching Us and Candyman would likely associate both tracks with their childhood, making the creepy remixes featuring in both much more effective. This idea of twisting a childhood favorite was pioneered by A Nightmare On Elm Street but given a modern pop culture makeover by both Us and Candyman decades later.
