So far in writing this blog, I’ve often tackled films that, if not obscure, are at least somewhat off the beaten path, at least enough that I feel there is still something to say about them. But this week in looking for something to write about, I just had such a hankering to re-watch one of the biggies, one about which I’m sure most has already been said. So, standing on the shoulders of horror bloggers, critics, and fans of yore, let’s dig in to Wes Craven’s original Nightmare, kicking off one of the biggest horror franchises.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
As I’ve written previously, I’m not really a franchise kid. My entrance to horror fandom did not revolve around Freddy, Jason, or Michael. That said, in my youth, as in film, they were unescapable. Late night on HBO at my grandparents’ who had cable, it was easy to stumble into these guys. They were on magazine covers, in newspaper ads. Other kids who were more into this kind of stuff (which I was totally not ready for at the time) would recount on the playground, scene by scene, the terrifying events on display. And I think of all of the 80s boogeymen, no one loomed larger for me than Freddy Krueger.
Ubiquitous in the second half of the 80s, Robert Englund’s Freddy was in Mad Magazine, on t-shirts, on a 900 paid phone service, in the toy aisle, and being rapped about by the Fresh Prince. You couldn’t avoid him if you tried. And I tried. He creeped me out. And it wasn’t the burned face or the knives on his fingers (though both of those were disturbing to my young imagination). Rather, it was the essential, perfectly scary idea at the heart of the character: that your dreams could hurt you. That they could kill you. That this evil, laughing sadist could hunt you where you were most vulnerable and that there could be no respite, no egress.
I mean, I didn’t use the word ‘egress.’ I was like 8 or 9. But still, the concept rattled me.
It didn’t matter that I never watched any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies until I was in my 20s, this monster already haunted my dreams, and I didn’t want him there. I never actually believed that this was somehow real, that I could be attacked in my sleep, but I would still avoid images of him, scared that they would cause me to dream exactly what I most wanted not to. But I did – many times. Even into adulthood, drifting into sleep, I might have the passing thought that I wouldn’t like that dream again, and therefore, would be doomed to; aware that I was dreaming, that awareness not allaying the fear, but rather, making it worse. The very fact that it was a dream made it more real, more seemingly dangerous.
It didn’t help matters that in my middle school years, I lived on Elm St.
Eventually, having come to love Horror, I finally sampled some of Freddy’s filmic wares and honestly really like them, but I think it wasn’t until a few years ago when I fully ran the series, including the later entries of varying quality, that I finally overcame my trepidation by means of overexposure. While there is still some value in those later films, such as the endless room for visual creativity afforded by the dream settings, I doubt I’ll ever revisit them. However, the original, as well as Part 3 – Dream Warriors, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which I think stand together as a kind of trilogy, have become strong favorites to which I return again and again.
Craven’s original film really holds up. Though it had a relatively low budget, it really doesn’t look that way at all. The story intrigues, the kill scenes startle, the effects wow. And it is just fun. Just as Goonies would do one year later, this offers the thrill of young people up against terrible odds and unthinkable threats, with no help or support from their parents (though I think fewer kids get eviscerated in Goonies). Really, all of this is the parents’ fault anyway and at this juncture, they are absent at best. (I particularly love when Tina wakes up from her first nightmare, her nightshirt mysteriously clawed open, and her mother offers the helpful advice, “Tina honey, either cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin.”)
But I think the film’s success is largely due to how it offered something different from many other Horror films of the time. Until Nightmare, most slashers had primarily offered non-verbal, looming, stalking killers. Blank, vacant stares, ‘the devil’s eyes,’ or wild madmen whose POV we looked through, but who we didn’t get to know. Freddy, on the other hand, actually talked, joked, taunted, played. This would get taken to further extremes as the series progressed (by the sixth film, he was almost an evil Bugs Bunny, with endless one-liners), but it was already there from the beginning. He only spoke a bit, but it was always playful and cruel. And he wouldn’t stop laughing. It was a wholly different kind of monster. At once threatening and fun. At least he was always having fun.
Additionally, the fantasy element of dreaming really opened the door to something other than a standard stalk and kill scenario. In later films, the dreams got more extravagant, but even in this relatively low-budget first film, the dreams work. Images and sounds drift in and out of them without explanation, but always feeling very natural. Locations come and go around dreamers who smoothly move towards a point of focus, not questioning the impossible geography. Horrible images, glimpsed for a moment in waking life (such as a friend’s arm slipping out of her bloody body bag) resurface in dream, making the events emotionally scarring as well as scaring.
And the other key element, which I am not the first to praise – but that won’t stop me, is Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy. In her, the trope of the ‘final girl’ evolved in a deeply satisfying way into something of an action hero. Now, I’m not enough of an expert in the subgenre to confidently claim no one had done so before her, but she did it so well. The traditional ‘final girl’ was a survivor – the last survivor of the terrible events, the one who, hunted and terrorized, finally could turn on her attacker, take up a sharp implement, and take him down.
Nancy, on the other hand, while certainly hunted and terrorized, is just so proactive. She has these nightmares, starts drinking coffee, learns her friends were having them as well, has some caffeine pills, seeks out their source, avoids warm milk, investigates the sins of the fathers (and mothers), and armed with knowledge of local history, a book on ‘booby traps and improvised anti-personnel devices, and something she heard about Balinese ‘dream skills,’ she goes into the dream to hunt the monster, bring him out again with her, and take him down. All on her own. Because somebody has to. She has to.
And I think the thing that’s really special here is that she is not cool. She is not a badass girl who’s trained in kicking things while wearing improbably sexy tight pants. No. She’s a kid. A nice kid. With nice friends who are being murdered. Langenkamp was 18 at the time of filming and I could have believed she was much younger. She feels like a teen, and not a 90210-30-year-old-teen, but a teen who is still basically a child. In her own words, “she looks like an average teenager. She has ugly hair. She’s wearing a pair of boy’s jeans. All of her clothes are kind of pink. Like, who wears pink?” This normal young person, who is not aggressive or hard, has to walk towards unimaginable danger, and rise to be a legitimate hero. When that happens, it’s particularly rewarding.
And still, while she does go after this monstrous killer of children with the tenacity of Schwarzenegger in Predator, she never stops being a believably endangered horror film heroine. Thanks to this, the final reel takes on something of the charge of an action movie, but without losing the nightmare quality of horror. It is exciting. And scary. And thematically sound (at least until it has to carry the weight of a producer mandated second ending so the series could continue – but oh well, that part’s kinda cool too).
I think every time I come back to this, I appreciate it more. As its own film, I think it is an impressive, nearly perfect horror flick (easily overlooking some occasional shaky dialogue and acting). But it also somehow serves up a kind of nostalgia for my own childhood, bringing many warmly unsettling memories from a time long before I ever watched the film itself.
Life is weird, huh?