For the majority of Wes Craven's biographers, the director's film career begins with his 1972 feature The Last House on the Left. A few, such as the documentarian Thommy Hutson, note his early days learning editing while working for Harry Chapin. Craven himself also occasionally revealed his early work on various adult films (see for instance his appearance in Inside Deep Throat [Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, 2005]). However, the filmmaker's first effort was actually a 45-minute student project for which he was Director of Photography while he was a faculty member at Clarkson College of Technology (CCT) in 1968. Curiously, Craven often tells or remembers the details of this experience incorrectly and even inconsistently. For instance, in one interview he recalls the title of this film as The Searchers, when in fact its name was the much more striking Pandora Experimentia. These erroneous details concerning Craven's early filmmaking experiences give us a curious picture of the development of one of the most influential horror auteurs of the twentieth century.

Craven's brief sojourn in New York's North Country is no secret, but certain details have taken on the character of legend, especially locally. In the late 1960s, he was a Professor of Humanities who held an MA from Johns Hopkins University. Although Craven only taught at Clarkson for two years, from 1966 to 1968, his time there has provided fodder for a local story concerning the origins of one of his best-known films, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Like other towns in the United States, Potsdam does have an Elm Street; it is one of the main downtown roads, and it skirts the northern edge of what was the college's main campus in the 1960s. It has long been part of new students’ informal orientation to Clarkson that they hear the story of how Craven helped some undergraduates make a parody-horror film called (you guessed it) A Nightmare on Elm Street; that the boiler room of Old Snell Hall inspired Freddy's boiler room scenes, and that the former Theta Chi fraternity house at 10 Elm Street was popularly known as the “Elm Street House” and had been used as a location in the student project.