The wall-to-ceiling drag was accomplished with a rotating room created by mechanical special effects designer Jim Doyle. In the essential making-of documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, Doyle explains that "Wes wanted something really big and fantastic and out there for the first death so I suggested a rotating room." Craven described the room as a "hairy situation," with no wires just vertigo and panic attack-inducing rotations, with all items nailed down and the cameraman strapped into an "airplane seat" attached to the wall. The room itself was not mechanical; it took several crewmembers on either side of the contraption to manually flip the room around. Even though it was a nightmare to shoot in, when it came time to film Glen's death, the filmmakers went back to the rotating room. The pressure was on, not only because the blood effect was complicated (working with water always is), but because they had one take to do it. The room was flipped upside down and the crew prepared for the effect. A sheet-lined shoot for the blood was carved out of the middle of the bed, with crewmembers positioned "above" on the outside of the room, poised to pour in the gallons of blood-colored water. With the bed now positioned at the "top" of the room, Craven, strapped into a camera chair, gave the word "go." As cinematographer Jacques Haitkin explains in Never Sleep Again, when the crew began to dump the water through the hole "as soon as it hit the ceiling and hit the light it immediately electrified the water. So the guy pouring the water got electrocuted." Or, as Doyle puts it: "oops." Not only was the water now electrified, but as Haitkin describes, the water began to slosh from side to side, which threw off the weight of the room, causing it to shift and the operators to lose control. The room rolled all the way over and crew members lept out of the way as cables and ropes ripped out of their rigging. As Craven recounts in the documentary, the water "went into all the lights and there were these huge flashes in the dark we were spinning in the dark with all these sparks going on." The wall had a window in it and of course, the blood poured out onto the operators desperately trying to regain control of the room. The room finally stopped rocking once all the liquid poured out, leaving the crew still attached to the structure suspended, upside down, for around 20 minutes in the dark and covered in blood. The up-is-down and vice-versa rationale of the original geyser is easy enough to wrap your head around, but thanks to the series of unfortunate events, the blood didn't just pool on the ceiling. After the initial splash, the liquid slips and streams at angles that just don't make sense; it's a lurch that defies all logic. Miraculously no one was hurt and even more miraculously they got the shot. as detailed in the Larry Cohen biography Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters, the cult director employed the Nightmare crew to pull off a rotating room stunt for The Stuff: "I was lucky that nobody got hurt," Cohen explains. "But the scene looks great." Such is the gamble of a manually operated rotating room, it seems.

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