One of Hollywood’s Biggest Flops Has a Hilarious Connection to a Horror Favorite

Hollywood is all about unexpected connections. We’re not talking about a “who you know” situation; we’re talking about the interesting threads that connect otherwise disparate projects. Sometimes it’s a matter of actors appearing across various films made by different filmmakers that create interesting Easter eggs and sometimes it’s deeper and it makes for really interesting lore. And then there are some connections that absolutely unexpected and hilarious that remind you just how connected everything is — and there’s one such connection between one of Hollywood’s biggest flops and a horror icon.

41 years ago, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo hit theaters. The fast-to-screens sequel to the surprise hit breakdancing film Breakin’ wasn’t quite able to capture the success of the original film and had a weird small guy (in this case the dance community) against corporate greed story, it did give us the “Electric Boogaloo” meme we use to describe goofy sequels even today. But what people might not know about the famous flop is that the dance movie has a unique and slightly unsettling connection to another movie that came out in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street.

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A Rotating Room Does Double Duty As a Far-Out Dance Studio

One of the most iconic scenes in Breakin’ 2 (yes, even notorious flops have iconic scenes) is a dance scene that takes place in a dance studio and features someone dancing on the ceiling, moonwalking up the wall, and otherwise defying the laws of physics and gravity for a truly wild dance sequence. To achieve the defying gravity effect of things, the production used a rotating room set with all of the various props in the room secured into place. It’s a kind of cheesy scene, but someone dancing on the ceiling is undeniably cool.

However, while the dance studio in Breakin’ 2 is fun, it’s previous use is the stuff of nightmares — quite literally. Revealed in the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, the same rotating room set that Breakin’ used to dance on the ceiling was also the room where Johnny Depp’s Glen Lantz is killed by Freddy Krueger. That scene sees Glen pulled down into his bed when he falls asleep and blood spews out of the hole left behind. It’s a very gory moment and creating it has a lore of its own. Fake blood, 500 gallons of it, was poured through the hole. Because the blood was made out of Karo syrup, it also weighed more than expected which created some problems of its own — notably causing the set to shift the wrong way and go entirely out of control and spill not just blood but electrical cables as well. That in turn had its own problem.  

The Rotating Set Created an Unexpected Electrical Hazard

There were also issues with the blood hitting electrical and causing some injuries to crew but the effect looked insane in the final product and is one of the more iconic moments from the film. Because A Nightmare on Elm Street filmed before Breakin’ 2, what was a nightmare horror movie murder scene ended up becoming a brightly colored dance den in a very short period of time.

Beyond the iconic Glen scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the set was also used for the death of Tina (Amanda Wyss) whose death involved her being dragged across the ceiling before Freddy slowly ended her. The room, which was inspired by the 1951 musical Royal Wedding which saw Fred Astaire dance up a wall and across the ceiling, was built by the film’s mechanical special effects designer Jim Doyle on axles to achieve the 360 rotation. Doyle would go on to rent the creation out both to Breakin’ 2 and another horror movie, The Stuff, which was released in 1985.

It’s a strange connection between the two films, but there is something kind of interesting about a truly iconic horror movie with its infamous and deeply bloody scene having a direct connection to a major flop that changed how we view movie sequels forever. It’s a reminder that despite being a major industry, Hollywood can be a very small place and that, somehow, everything really is connected. Just maybe not in ways you’d expect.

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