Kadushy Posts

why u putting words in our mouths

Since douchey is here. Fun fact: Freddy Krueger and the whole idea of the dream which you can die was based on true facts. A weird mental disease which is an extreme form of night terrors... which i have sometimes. The articles described how several of the group began to suffer horrific nightmares and after a few nights, refused to sleep. However, due to exhaustion, when they finally did fall asleep they awoke screaming and in terror, then almost immediately died. Three of the group died over the course of the year; a young man died first, followed six months later by another young man, and three months after that a third victim, a young boy. What particularly intrigued Craven about the situation was that when an autopsy was carried out on the third victim, he was shown to be in perfect health he hadn't died from a heart attack or any other physical ailment; he had simply died. Medical authorities have since labeled the phenomenon Asian Death Syndrome, a condition which afflicts only east-Asian men between the ages of 19 and 57. Asian Death Syndrome (also known as Thai SUDS and Lai Tai) is believed to be a form of Brugada Syndrome, itself a form of Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome (SUDS).

Wes Craven read this and came up with the idea of the dream demon which is a real thing in asia. Speaking of the articles, Craven has commented,

The eeriest case was the boy who had a nightmare that was worse than anything. His family tried to quiet his nerves, and he refused to sleep. He stayed up several nights, and they sent for a doctor who gave him sleeping pills. The kid threw them away. Finally there was a night when the kid could not stay up any longer, and he went to sleep. The house was quiet at last. The parents were relieved that their kid was getting some rest. Then they heard this horrendous scream from the bedroom. The parents ran in and found the boy thrashing in his bed, only to fall still a moment later and die. An autopsy revealed there was nothing wrong with him, no heart failure or any reason for his death. He was just dead. I became fascinated with the idea of harm happening to a person in such a way that people would not be able to clearly discern if the harm came in a dream or if it came in reality (extract from The Nightmare Never Ends: The Official History of Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street Series by William Schoell (1992); quoted here).

Craven has also stated,

It was a series of articles in the LA Times, three small articles about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and who had died in the middle of nightmares and the paper never correlated them, never said, 'Hey, we've had another story like this.' The third one was the son of a physician. He was about twenty-one; I've subsequently found out this is a phenomenon in Laos, Cambodia. Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: 'You must sleep.' He said, 'No, you don't understand; I've had nightmares before this is different.' He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, 'Thank god.' They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons. They found in his closet a Mr. Coffee maker, full of hot coffee that he had used to keep awake, and they also found all his sleeping pills that they thought he had taken; he had spit them back out and hidden them. It struck me as such an incredibly dramatic story that I was intrigued by it for a year, at least, before I finally thought I should write something about this kind of situation (from 'Wes Craven on Dreaming up Nightmares', by Steve Biodrowski (October, 2008) Cinefantastique Online; quoted here).

Only if you promise not to tell anyone. If you tell your parents, I'll kill your fucking dog.

I'm really high, lets keep this going.

Cleaver.