There’s a razor-thin line between Star Trek and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Numerous actors and other talent have crossed from one franchise into another, including a married couple, though more on them in a few moments. There’s Leslie Hoffman, who played the hall guard in the original Elm Street fright fest and worked on both Deep Space Nine and Voyager as an actor, stunt performer, and/or stunt coordinator. Mimi Craven, who portrayed Jisa in the Voyager episode “Dragon’s Teeth,” appeared as a nurse in Elm Street 1. David Andrews, who made his big-screen debut in Elm Street 1, later guest-starred as Lorian, the son of T’Pol and Trip Tucker in an episode of Enterprise.
And the list goes on and on. Makeup impresario Mark Shostrom worked on Elm Street 2 and 3, and later won an Emmy Award for the Voyager episode “Threshold,” sharing it with Michael Westmore and several fellow collaborators. Matt Craven co-starred in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and recurred as Agent Daniels on Enterprise. Lisa Wilcox starred in two Elm Street films (4 and 5) and guested as Yuta in the Next Generation installment “The Vengeance Factor.” Scan the cast lists from Elm Street and Star Trek and even more names ring a bell: Elinor Donahue, Robert Rusler, and Craig Wasson.
As for the married couple? That would be Heather Langenkamp and David LeRoy Anderson. Langenkamp starred as Nancy Thompson opposite Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger in several of the Elm Street horror films and played Moto, the Starfleet security officer with a watermelon-like head, in Star Trek Into Darkness. Anderson, via AFX Studio, the company that he and Langenkamp run together, handled makeups on Star Trek Into Darkness.
Interestingly, the family connection with Star Trek goes even deeper.
“My father-in-law, Lance Anderson, who started my husband in the business, actually worked on Star Trek IV,” Langenkamp told StarTrek.com in 2013. “One of the first jobs my husband ever had was to make the whale for that movie. Those were some of the first pictures I ever saw of my husband working with his dad. They were making this gigantic mold. They even took a wall out of the studio so they could accommodate the length of that piece. I remember thinking to myself, as a person who was brand new to the industry, ‘Wow, I had no idea how any of that was made.”
Anderson and his father worked together on The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, and Pet Sematary,” as well as other films. They even shared an Oscar nomination for their makeup on Cinderella Man. “Finally, his dad started to retire and there was a void in the shop,” Langenkamp said. “I really wanted to participate and there was definitely a need in there for a person to do the books and sweep the floor at night. So, I kind of wormed my way in, and the first job in which I really became an active participant was Dawn of the Dead. We went to Canada and I was the coordinator of the shop in Toronto, where we made the film. I went really well and the film turned out great, and I really fell in love with the whole process. Since then, we’ve done a lot of movies (and television shows).”
AFX Studio’s most recent projects include several seasons of American Horror Story, The Boys in the Band (which starred Zachary Quinto, Star Trek’s current big-screen Spock), Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and Your Monster. And Langenkamp, most recently seen in The Midnight Club, The Life of Chuck, and Plea, revealed in March that she’s co-starring in an upcoming horror-thriller called Last Chance Motel with Shane West, Danielle Harris, and Scout Taylor-Compton. Harris and Taylor-Compton co-created the story and are producing and directing the film as a tandem.