A Nightmare on Elm Street

Rating: R

Run Time: 91 minutes

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund 

Even now, after the passage of three decades, I can vividly recall the first time I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street.  A group of my friends and I had gone to the mall.  By 6 p.m., we had already hit the bookstore and the record shop and then struck out with the girls, all in about, oh say, fifteen minutes.  With nothing else better to do, I suggested the flick.  As I remember it, I did so with a rather bored air and a shrug.  Not once, never, in my short sixteen years had I ever, ever actually been scared by a horror movie.  Sure, I had been on the receiving end of a jump scare or two when my grandmother, Ev, had taken me to see a reissue of Jaws five years earlier (Richard Dreyfuss losing his shit when Ben Gardner’s head popped into the frame at the bottom of Verna Fields’s swimming pool; Roy Scheider’s first intuition that a bigger boat might be a good idea after seeing that monster head emerge from the waters of Martha’s Vineyard while he was ladling chum).

Never had a movie frightened me, much less left me witless with fear for its entire running time.  Yet, from the first moment of Nightmare, as Fred Krueger’s feet menacingly shuffled into the compressed frame on the larger rectangular expanse of the screen and he began to fabricate that awful glove of knives, I was scared shitless.  The eerie musical accompaniment of Charles Bernstein’s score, that short seven-note motif, heightened the effect.  Later relentless pulses of synthesizer at odd moments underscore the tension that inheres to the story.  That tension, for me at least, didn’t cease for an hour and a half.  I was at least figuratively on the edge of my seat from beginning to end, constantly concerned that that goddamned Freddie Krueger was going to pop out again unexpectedly. 

It was in his ability to do so with such frightening regularity that lies the genius of director Wes Craven’s idea.  Fred Krueger is a dream demon, and in a dream world, of course, anything can happen.  A slasher movie villain can even teleport without leaving us with that “WTF, I thought he was on the other side of the lake” feeling (you know what I’m talking about).  And let me tell you, Freddie does a whole hell of a lot of teleporting in the movie, and every time he did it back in 1984 when my insecure, pimpled sixteen year old self was nailed to my seat with hands clenched to the cushioned arm rails at my side, I jumped six inches.  Neither before nor since have I ever been that freaked out by a movie.  It was one of the best times I’ve ever had in a movie theater.

Being a bit more knowledgeable about the horror field now, I find it hard to believe that Wes Craven, a guy with a proven track record of putting butts in seats who had already directed a genre masterpiece in The Hills Have Eyes, would have had such a hard time peddling a “high concept” idea with the potential resonance that A Nightmare… clearly had, but fickle Hollywood time and again honors the greedy philosophy that you are only as good as your last picture.  Thank goodness for Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema, a production company with about three employees who wanted to extend themselves into the film business more by actually making their own movies.  And as far as New Line is concerned, thank goodness for Wes Craven.  The rest is history.

The story, while elegant, is a simple one: A small group of teenagers are experiencing a shared dream about a very nasty man with a severely burnt face, a filthy fedora and red & green sweater, and a glove made of knives.  Each unbeknownst to the others are finding it increasingly difficult to sleep at night.  The first of the friends whose experience we share is Tina (Amanda Wyss), who dreams she is being stalked along a long corridor that inscrutably leads to a darkened boiler room.  For a brief moment, she shares the corridor with a lamb, either an indication she is asleep and counting sheep or that she is being led like a lamb to slaughter: perhaps it is both.

Once Tina is in the red and black-shaded boiler room, she begins to see glimpses of the man who is stalking her.  As she meanders through the basement, his shadow plays across the walls of the furnace room and his awful glove screeches along horizontal metal pipes, producing that awful nails-blackboard sound that is so ear-piercingly irritating.  Just as she thinks he has left her, he (of course) leaps up from behind and she bolts upright in bed.  It was only a dream.  Her nightgown, however, has four parallel slash marks in it, a token of the power of this particular dream. 

In the next scene, we are watching a group of girls on the lawn who are playing jump-rope on a neat suburban lawn and hypnotically chanting a singular rhyme in a sing-song monotone (one, two, Freddie’s coming for you; three, four, better lock your door; five, six, grab your crucifix; seven, eight, gonna stay up late; nine, ten, never sleep again – trust me, its fucking creepy).  The town is Springwood.  A hazy patina of gauzy white envelops the screen, as if a thin film of misty fog had settled over the camera lens. The eye shifts to the right as three of our four leads drive up in a red convertible driven by Glen Lantz (a very young Johnny Depp in his film debut) and occupied by Tina and her bestest friend in the whole world, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). 

Tina tells them sketchy details about her dream and we get the first intimation that she is not the only one plagued lately by troubled sleep and vivid nightmares.  She is clearly apprehensive, so Glen and Nancy agree to spend the night at her house the same evening when Tina’s mom goes out of town.  The three are startled by the sudden appearance of Tina’s greaseball boyfriend (and heir apparent to the throne of Arthur Fonzarelli…..aaaiiieee Ritchie), Rod Lane (Nick Corri, or at least he was then).  Our quartet is complete. 

The same night Tina dreams of the pizza-faced boogeyman again.  Unfortunately, this dream interlude ends with her brutally violent death as we witness her writhe in pain and fear all over her bedroom (including the walls and ceiling); the scene has aptly been compared to a rape.  Rod, with whom Tina had just finished up engaging in some of the most vigorous fake sex moaning I have ever heard, also witnesses her death.  Realizing that, hey, he’s a bit of a hood, and knowing how exactly that will go with the Five-O when he tries to explain that he had nothing whatsoever to do with her death, Rod expeditiously gets the fuck out of there. 

I am going to take a brief pause to talk about the scene: it is a tremendously creative exercise in replicating dream logic and then translating it effectively to the screen.  There are five or six different aspects of just weird-ass dream structure here that all seamlessly blend to leave the viewer unsure of what exactly is happening and if it is real or not.  Just one instance occurs when a crucifix drops off the wall for no good reason above the headboard where Nancy is sleeping in Tina’s house.  Immediately after this, the as-yet unknown killer stretches through the wall and appears bent on grabbing the teenager; the figure then recedes into the wall.  She wakes, places the crucifix back on the wall, and knocks on it to assure its solidity; it’s as if she had sensed Krueger or the intrusion of the dream world into her sleep.  This small part of the larger scene focusing on Tina’s plight is a great symbolic representation of the unreality of dreams and the confusion they engender; inversely, though, it would seem that reality is itself no more logically navigable than the surreality of the dream world.  Nancy is looking for reassurance in the realness or solidity of tangible things.  She and the rest of her friends are right to question both the walking and unconscious world and to probe just how secure they really are, awake or asleep.

Whatever else may be true, one thing is certain: Tina’s graphic death is quite real.  This whole scenario ends at the police station, where we meet Nancy’s father, Lieutenant Donald Thompson (played by the great John Saxon), and her mother, Marge Thompson (played by the not so great Ronee Blakley).  Here’s a funny thing I’ve always thought about this part: Donald seems to be running the whole show at the Springtown PD, yet he is only a lieutenant; there’s gotta be a captain, assistant chief maybe, and a chief, too.  Where are they?  I don’t know.  The filmmakers should have just called the damned place a sheriff’s department and christened John Saxon as the High Sheriff himself. 

Anyway, Don’s pissed, Marge is pissed, and neither understand why Nancy was at Tina’s to begin with.  As Nancy tries to explain, she quickly senses her parents aren’t buying this particular line of shit.  There is a bit of that classic fairy tale cum horror movie expression of the idea that parental disbelief in the monster under the bed isn’t merely every child’s worst fear, but there is the further understanding that such disbelief can be as deadly to the child as whatever killed Tina in her sleep. 

After all this, Nancy decides (and you can’t blame her) that sleep is for suckers, so she devises a two-tiered system of stimulant ingestion and alarms to keep her awake so she can avoid sleep for as long as she can, and when she cannot withstand it any longer, she tries desperately to identify her dream attacker so she can prepare for him.  Nancy is no fool, certainly, and she becomes a worthwhile adversary to the phantom killer long before the film ends.  In doing so, she does of course learn his identity and just exactly why it is that his visitations are specific to her and her friends.  

For my money, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a great horror movie, a classic of its kind.  It is full of surreal set pieces like tongue phones and killer knife gloves appearing between the heroine’s legs as she bathes (and if you can avoid the innuendo in this short scene, congratulations; I don’t know what particular point the filmmakers are making with such a blatantly sexual image, but it is a blatantly sexual image…unless, in terms of visual perspective, that was just the best place to put the camera and the hole in the tub, in which case I’m wrong).  There are nightmare scenes of Tina haunting Nancy, enshrouded and blood-stained in her transparent body bag, a centipede falling out of her mouth and a mass of writhing snakes squirming in the mud at her feet.  We’ve got Johnny Depp dying in an explosively projected ocean of his own blood, its upward trajectory thoroughly defying gravity.  It’s got Freddie crashing through underbrush, Freddie crashing through doors, Freddie crashing through mirrors, Freddie crashing through just about any other fucking thing you can possibly imagine.   

It was Wes Craven’s original idea to tell the story half in a dream state and half in the waking world that is the brilliant stroke which allows these set pieces as dream images to exist in the film.  Whether or not he be an auteur, he is a canny guy whose output and continued work is always worth checking out.  And that dream idea, it’s inescapably arresting both for its visual and textual possibilities.  Freud’s ideas regarding the significance of dreams, involving recognition of actions like displacement or condensation, latent versus manifest dream content, are there in some form or another. In dreams, content (familiar to us when we are awake) becomes condensed, compressed, transmuted, irrevocably changed, altered.  People are other people; the female student hall monitor becomes Krueger.  Things are other things, both places and objects.  Phenomena occur that could not in the “real” world; a pebble used to wake a sleeper is thrown with such force as to become embedded in the glass of a bedroom window.  So there can be a killer who not only kills you in real life by invading and assaulting you in your dreams and who can only ever harm you when you dream. 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

THE ACTING

I must deal with what I consider to be a big elephant in the room here.  Many reviewers have absolutely raved about the performance of Heather Langenkamp over the years; she is consistently mentioned by a wide number of critics as one of the top Final Girls in slasher movie annals.  I cannot conceive of what it is these people see in the performance.  She wildly overacts when a little subtlety is the clearly preferable choice and she blandly underplays scenes where she ought to emote a bit.  It’s snotty of me to write this, I know.  I’m pretty sure I can’t act and I would embarrass myself trying.  But, motherfucker, neither can Heather, and someone should have done her the tremendous favor of telling her.  Why do I feel catty about opining on the subject?  It is generally known that the actor unfortunately acquired a very real stalker after this movie premiered in 1984 and she decided to stay away from acting to avoid just that sort of unwanted attention ever happening again.  Good decision; wrong reason.  (Still, I must admit that her acting in Part 3 is a quantum leap forward in quality from the original.   She had improved immeasurably between the two films and she improved even more for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.  Perhaps folks review her first performance with a retrospective generosity born of a consideration of the latter two films.) 

Even so, however bad she was in the first movie, even she cannot descend the depths of just the worse source of atrocious acting quite as adroitly as Ronee Blakley.  Simply, the woman is a fucking train wreck.  From her very first appearance, she looks and acts like a zoned-out druggie (the 19th nervous breakdown kind)…picture soccer mom and then imagine her antithesis.  In every scene she shared with Heather Langenkamp, a tiny part of my soul died.  Admittedly, perhaps Ronee was playing to character; Marge is clearly an alcoholic: in fact, if she had found one more bottle of stashed vodka around that house during the course of the movie, I had considered constructing a drinking game around it.   I understand we are to construe her intoxication as symptomatic of her daily struggle with the weight of Freddie’s death on her soul.  Well let me tell you what:  Never have I seen guilt wasted on a more unworthy person in all the annals of film I am personally aware of. Freddie?...the motherfucker had to go.  Marge, you’re a candidate for sainthood.  But that tan? She looks like a stoked orangutan.      

Wes Craven must share credit with Robert Englund for the film’s initial success and enduring status.  It is, apart from Nick Castle’s original Michael Myers, the best slasher villain turn in modern slasher history (a nod here for Tony Perkins and Carl Boehm).  The way he moves, that creepy low chuckle, the skulking motion when he walks, the scuttle-like run, the shoulder slouch and all-around bad posture, and his dramatic flourishes with that signature weapon, all are mannerisms that distinguish the character from the typical slasher monster.  The genuine glee he clearly derives from stalking and murder is chillingly appropriate to the characterization.  That first film’s performance is iconic for good reason.  It looms large over the majority of the sequels, where he so quickly devolved into the stand-up quipster most associate with the role now.  It’s a great role, and the relish with which he attacked it and the characterization that is uniquely his are brilliant, formidable, and all sorts of other hyperbole.

IDEAS  

Regarding the conceptualization of Fred Krueger, it has always struck me that Wes Craven made such a very smart choice by making his antagonist a child killer.  Who among us could conceive of a better poster child for absolute Evil than that?  Not mere villainy or wickedness, not funny, haha, Eeeeevil, but simply Evil.  He is every parent’s nightmare already, so how better to accentuate that vileness than to make him a ghost in the Elm Street children’s dreams, a dream monster that avenges himself upon the sins of the parents by exacting a terrible retribution upon the innocents (and innocence) of their children (as he had once done in life)?  A child killer, the sort of awful monster that lives in a cold and wet, damp place, a place and a state of being impenetrable to light or goodness, irredeemable. 

Well, apparently, there was something worse than a child killer and that’s…a child molester! 

WTF?  It would seem that it was originally intended that Fred Krueger be a molester, but that was apparently a bit too taboo for audiences who craved and slavishly consumed slasher movies like there was no tomorrow because they gave the people (read teenage boys) what they wanted:  voluminous quantities of tits and blood and tits and more blood.  The very morally dubious message would appear to be this: it’s okay for these movies to objectify women, demonstrating an only very thinly veiled misogyny and simultaneously depicting sexualized violence, but by God let’s not talk about molestation.  Here, then is my question for those who felt a child killer was okay but a child molester, well now, that was going just a biiiiit too far:  what the fuck do people think Freddie was doing to the Elm Street kids before he killed them?!?!  (Still, I seem to be in a minority on this one.  My own wife, no one’s dummy, understands this distinction while I cannot, so I’m wrong apparently.)    

Why does Wes use deliberate and specific Roman Catholic imagery in the movie…

Is Freddie a bringer of these nightmares?  Does he create or somehow induce the nightmares?  How, in any event, can he invade the dreams of others?                       

Craven used the red and green as colors for Freddie’s sweater because he had read that was the color combination hardest on the eye; damned if it doesn’t seem to be true.

The original conception for the dream killer arose from the fusion of a very frightening experience he had as a child with a creeper-like character who stared up at him from the street, into his bedroom, and a series of articles about young Southeast Asian males who died in their sleep (healthy young men who suffered heart attacks yet had no predisposition to such or any family history of heart disease; some of the men seemed to fear sleep).

CLASSIC LINES

At one point, Nancy looks in a mirror and says, “My God, I look twenty years old.”  Classic…

Another classic exchange: “What the hell are dreams?”  “We really don’t know.” – thanks, Wes, that clears things up nicely…

“Screw sleep!!” – right on, Nancy!

LOOSE ENDS

Someone needs to talk to Nancy about proper funeral attire, because she stands out like a lemon in a bowl of limes with that blue dress on…

Great value for a buck: on $1.8 million, the special F/X people created wonders with rotating rooms, sleight of hand, mannequin arms, specially-built bathtubs, Bisquick stair steps, and other cheapskate effects that somehow manage to avoid looking shoddy, too.

Earlier in the movie, when Nancy first conceives of the idea of staying awake to combat the dream demon, she asks the moronic Glen to stay alert when she cannot so he can pull her back out before it’s too late.  Well, of course, he fucks it up and falls asleep.  Later in the movie, instead of having learned her lesson the first time that Glen is an unreliable dumbass, Nancy turns around later and asks him to try again…is it sleep deprivation? 

Poor Glen…Balinese dream skills, my ass…

Where can I get one of those tongue phones?       

There’s a neat but long four-hour documentary on the Freddie franchise that covers every film in the series.  There are interviews with almost all the participants from all of the movies except for arguably the two most famous…Patricia Arquette and Johnny Depp.  They couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance in retrospect to acknowledge the films that began their careers?  Wankers…

A FINAL THOUGHT  

I hate the sequels.  Even Dream Warriors and A New Nightmare, highly regarding sequels among many, leave me cold; they are too contrived and the higher quality special effects are somehow incongruent with the DIY ethos of the first film. 

Still, I am so glad the original exists.  And I am very glad that I was there in that darkened dream-world of the movie theater thirty-one years ago, to share with my friends the experience of watching a film that became the cornerstone to the House that Freddie Built.  A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the greatest horror movies of all time.  How’s that for hyperbole.

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 10/10