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. However, 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.
Executive producer Sara Risher's original pitch to New Line Cinema for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) was for Freddy to have a baby. Risher states, "I went in, one of the executives was pregnant at the time, and I said, 'Picture Freddy clawing his way out of the womb.' No one liked my idea. So then I got a call for Nightmare 5, and when they came to me they said, 'Remember when you wanted Freddy to have a baby? Well, we like that idea now. What if Alice was the mom?'"
New Line Cinema gave Stephen Hopkins just four weeks to shoot this film (even less than the 8 weeks or so that Renny Harlin got for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (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 continually; in the meanwhile, 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 payed 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.
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.