Nightmare became a top horror franchise, spanning nine films, as well as comic books and a short-lived TV series. As the film celebrates its 40th anniversary, Langenkamp is crisscrossing the country, signing autographs at horror conventions and rebooting her acting career. Nightmare is broadly considered one of the all-time classic horror flicks, and Nancy representative of a new kind of slasher heroine—one who faces the bad guy at the end of the film and lives to scream another day.
Photo: Isabelle
Anderson
“I really had no sense of how great a role it would be and how it would really affect my entire life,” says Langenkamp. As for being a “scream queen,” a role once seen as a kiss of career death? “I embrace it.”
Born in Tulsa, Okla., Langenkamp got hooked on acting at her all-girls high school in Washington, D.C., where her family lived during the Carter administration while her father, R. Dobie Langenkamp, ’58, worked for the U.S. Department of Energy. The summer she turned 18, she was back in Oklahoma and, while working for the Tulsa Tribune, saw a newspaper ad seeking local extras for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders.
Craven also played a role in Langenkamp meeting her husband. At the 1988 wrap party for Craven’s zombie flick The Serpent and the Rainbow, Langenkamp was introduced to David LeRoy Anderson, a special effects artist. Anderson proposed the following year, while Langenkamp was visiting him on the set of Pet Sematary, and they married in 1990. As her acting career ebbed and flowed, Langenkamp began to help run Anderson’s special effects makeup studio.
Photo: David L. Anderson
Langenkamp keeps a photo of Atticus, ’13, hanging across from her desk at the studio. He’s standing tall, grinning widely next to a model of a horrific-looking burned dead body. It makes Langenkamp smile.
Langenkamp keeps a photo of Atticus, ’13, hanging across from her desk at the studio. He’s standing tall, grinning widely, next to a model of a horrific-looking burned dead body. It makes Langenkamp smile. “He worked on American Horror Story with us for about 2 1/2 years. And we just had such a great time.”
So now Langenkamp is back to auditioning, as well as celebrating the campy blood and gore that accompanies her most famous role. Her parents came to appreciate the significance of Nightmare in her life long ago. Her mom, Mary Alice, was particularly proud in 2021 when the film was admitted to the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, an honor reserved for movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance.