A Nightmare on Elm Street: Springwood in Los Angeles

Springwood High is John Marshall, a Collegiate Gothic campus built in 1930 in Los Feliz, which had already appeared in Grease and Pretty in Pink. The morning after Tina Gray's death, Nancy Thompson dozes off in class and is chased through the boiler room in her dream. She burns her arm on a pipe to wake herself, and the burn is still there when she opens her eyes. The school is a working public high school on Tracy Street, so admire the main building from outside rather than wandering in.

The Springwood police station is really a Carnegie library on Santa Monica Boulevard, its exterior standing in for the department where Nancy's father works. Don Thompson arrests Rod Lane after Tina's death, and Nancy later visits Rod in the station and listens to him describe the nightmares that came for Tina. The branch opened in 1916 and is still the third-oldest in the Los Angeles Public Library system, so the 1984 facade is easy to recognise.

Visitor guidance: A working public library at 4591 Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.

Freddy's boiler room was filmed inside a real jail: the Lincoln Heights Jail, a 1927 Art Deco complex beside the Los Angeles River. The jail also played the police station interior, where Freddy walks through the prison bars to threaten Rod and then kills him in his cell, staging the death as a suicide. The jail closed in 1965 and is now a city Historic-Cultural Monument; a redevelopment scheme stalled, so the building still stands shuttered.

Rod Lane is buried at Evergreen, founded in 1877 and the oldest surviving cemetery in Los Angeles. The funeral is a short scene in which Nancy's parents grow worried as she describes her nightmares. More than 300,000 people are interred across the grounds, and a 1.4-mile jogging track runs around the cemetery's edge, which makes it one of the odder places in the city for a run.

The Katja Institute for the Study of Sleep Disorders is the American Jewish University's Bel Air campus on Mulholland Drive. Marge drives Nancy there for help; in a nightmare at the clinic, Nancy grabs Freddy's fedora, the name "Fred Krueger" written inside, and pulls it into the real world. The Familian campus was sold to the Milken Community School in 2024, so the buildings now belong to a school.

Glen Lantz lives across the road from Nancy, at 1419 North Genesee Avenue. This is the house from Johnny Depp's film debut, where Glen falls asleep and is killed by Krueger; the blood-geyser effect was shot on the same revolving room set used for Tina's death. The exterior still looks much as it did on screen.

1428 Elm Street is a real house at 1428 North Genesee Avenue, and its green roof and Colonial shape are still easy to spot. Nancy barricades the place, rigs booby traps and drags Krueger out of her dream into the real world, then sets him on fire and locks him in the basement. The film ends with Glen's convertible, its roof striped green and red, speeding away. It is a private home, so visit from the pavement.