When director Wes Craven dreamed up “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” his classic horror film, he picked an address that would evoke a kind of Everywhere, U.S.A.  “It really fits what he was going for, which is that horror can happen anywhere, even in residential neighborhoods that we all think are safe,” says Thommy Hutson, author of “Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy—The Making of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street,” a chronicle of the film that incorporates interviews with Mr. Craven, who died in August.  In real life, the house where Freddy Krueger invaded Nancy Thompson’s dreams is on North Genesee Avenue in Los Angeles. But the ubiquity of Elm Streets is indisputable. Seventeen of the country’s 25 largest cities have them, and there are 2,376 Elm Streets across the U.S., with a total of 92,225 homes, according to real-estate listings website Zillow. (The October data is based on Elm Streets, including its directional variants, with at least 10 homes.)  If you want your own slice of the American nightmare, you can choose from 1,410 homes for sale with a median listing price of $129,900—less than the country’s median price of $227,400, Zillow said.  The most expensive, at $4.75 million, is a five-bedroom house in Greenwich, Conn. The street is among the town’s most desirable, says listing agent Richard Breglia.  So, too, is Chicago’s East Elm Street, an enclave of rowhouses in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood. A townhouse there priced at almost $2.7 million recently went into contract, says listing agent Brad Lippitz.  Elm Streets pop up in areas where developers want to evoke stability and community, says Mitchell L. Moss, an urban-policy professor at New York University. With its echoes of thick leaves and arching branches, Elm is a much more popular street name than Spruce or Birch, he adds.  It may also explain why a horror movie on Elm Street is so chilling. “The elm tree represents a kind of Americana,” says Mr. Hutson. “It was really about the kind of protection that an elm tree provided.”
Wes Craven’s classic scary movie, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ uses the common street name to heighten the horror