The Lantz House
This house is located in Los Angeles, California and made a memorable appearance in the 1984 Wes Craven horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Despite that the film was set in the Midwest, the house is actually in very close proximity to the famous Sunset Boulevard and the West Hollywood area. While 1419 is its actual street number, the house was relocated to 1419 Elm Street in the fictional city of Springwood, Ohio for the movie.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The film is based on a series of three articles that appeared in the Los Angeles Times over the course of a couple of years. The stories involved Cambodian refugees who had mysteriously died in their sleep after complaining about suffering from horrific nightmares. While no one else seemed to connect the otherwise random stories, writer/director Wes Craven was inspired to further probe the strange coincidences as the plot for his next horror film. Rather than refugees, he centered A Nightmare on Elm Street on a group of normal Midwestern American teenagers who are hunted in their sleep by the character of Freddy Krueger - a former child killer that was killed by vigilante justice at the hands of the teens's parents.

Though located on the same street as the more recognizable house that dubbed as the residence of the main character, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) (see Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): The Thompson House), this house did not appear in the film until much later. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the house doubled as the home of Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp), and was also the site of his demise. It received two major close-ups in the film. First as Glen's parents (Ed Call and Sandy Lipton) are standing on the front porch and keeping an eye on the Thompson house, and again when the police and paramedics show up after Glen's death.

Having two houses almost directly across from one another came in handy for the filmmakers behind A Nightmare on Elm Street. In one scene, the characters of Nancy and Glen are talking on the phone as they look out their bedroom windows at one another. The crew actually set-up at both houses and shot the scene simultaneously looking over their shoulders as Langenkamp and Depp (in his first screen role) quite literally talked with one another over the phone. The takes were then inter-cut with exterior shots of the camera looking in the windows, which were actually shot on a set at a later time.

As with the other house on Genesee Avenue, only the exteriors of this house were used for the production of A Nightmare on Elm Street with the exception of the scene mentioned above. In fact, Glen's death at the hands (or knives) of Krueger (Robert Englund) was shot on a specially designed "gyro" studio set. The set could turn a full 360 degrees, allowing the filmmakers to turn the room completely upside-down. After shooting Depp being pulled through the bed by Freddy, they flipped the room upside down and pumped several gallons of "blood" through an opening in the bed - ultimately giving the effect that the blood was rocketing up and out of the bed. During the filming of the scene, the crew attempted to turn the room slightly to get the effect of the blood flooding the ceiling, but the "gyro set" was off-center with the added weight and ended up dousing the entire crew with the fake blood and nearly shocking a few as well. The same gyro set was employed in the earlier death scene of the character of Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) as she slowly crawled to the ceiling while unsuccessfully fighting off Krueger.

The film was shot between the months of June and July in 1984 and was released on November 11 of the same year. Despite the fact that it took three years before Craven finally found a studio willing to produce the film (after receiving multiple rejections from other studios because it was deemed not scary enough), A Nightmare on Elm Street went on to gross over $25 million at the box-office and spawned several sequels. Various other Los Angeles locations were utilized in the production, including a nearby library that doubled as the police station (see Halloween (1978): The Wallace House).

The House Today
Despite the removal of some shrubbery in front of the house entrance, the residence looks almost identical to its appearance in A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is however still a private residence and it is safe to assume that the owners do not want to be bothered by fans of the series. Any fan wanting to visit the residence should view the house from the sidewalk or road and respect the owner's right to privacy.