According to director Stephen Hopkins, they "got lots of tarantulas, hand-painted them green and red, and on the floor of the stage placed a little wall up in the shape of an arm and had trainers come in and around the tarantulas." The plan was to simply drop the wall and film the resulting scattering of the spiders, but after they got the shot they were left with a studio full of around 200 angry tarantulas. Hopkins figures, "We probably carried on shooting on another set, I'm sure. I don't think anyone ever found them again." As far as the director knows, those spiders roamed freely through the studio and escaped into the free world, or maybe it was just somebody else's job to ensure the tarantulas were all accounted for.
Stephen King and comic book writer Frank Miller were offered the job of writing and directing this movie. Alex Proyas was also offered as his his first directed project, but he turned it down because he didn't want to direct sequels and felt it was more fun to make original material.
Stephen Hopkins found out that he got the directing job for this film on Valentines Day 1989, and was given a release date of August that year. To compound things, New Line Cinema gave him a schedule of just four weeks to shoot this film (even less than the 8 weeks or so that Renny Harlin got for Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (1988)) and a further four weeks for editing. This meant that he had to shoot on one stage while the crew dressed the other, so they could shoot almost continuously. In the meantime, he also had to oversee special effects work. He said that he managed because he was 28 at the time, and required little sleep. His efforts paid off, because when 20th Century Fox heard of this, they were so impressed that he was given the task of directing Predator 2 (1990).
The laughter heard at the end, right before the credits roll, is a clip of Vincent Price laughing at the end of Michael Jackson's song, "Thriller". Price's laughter is sampled at the beginning of Kool Moe Dee's song, "Let's Go", which is played during the film's end credits.
Unlike the previous films (with the exception of the first one), this film's main titles do not display the digit "5", just "A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child".
Eric Singer: former drummer for Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Badlands, and then-current KISS drummer, as one of the band members on the television show.