Nightmare Retrospective: A Nightmare On Elm Street

Nightmare Retrospective | #1 | A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

In the next couple of months, in honor of Halloween season, I want to do a retrospective on the seminal A Nightmare On Elm Street franchise. I will be watching and reviewing all six films as well as Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason and the 2010 remake. At the end, I will likely be ranking the lot of them.

Wes Craven's 1984 horror classic A Nightmare On Elm Street was always the most interesting, if not the best, of all of the slasher classics. John Carpenter's Halloween is a fair contender, with an impeccably creepy soundtrack, innovative camerawork and minimalist simplicity executed to near perfection, but I've always preferred the somewhat campier yet more creative Nightmare. Friday the 13th doesn't even come close to either of these.

I hadn't watched Craven's classic since high school, and it still holds up today. Sure, there are a number of distinct 80's flourishes that date it - but only as a product of its time, and what it lacks in immediate relatability now it makes up for in a sort of time capsule essence, carrying with it a certain portion of the essence of the Ronald Reagan era of white picket fences, crazy haircuts and slick leather jackets - and all of the latent anxieties that came alongside this era of personal repression. Many of these anxieties aren't quite as lost to time as we'd like them to be.

It also isn't quite as scary as it once was - if it was ever truly frightening at all. A Nightmare On Elm Street isn't an utterly harrowing experience like something like 2018's Hereditary; it's goals were never quite the same. It's essentially a teen movie, showing them some fear that they can relate to, but also letting them have a bit of fun with it too. Freddy Krueger, played in a legendary performance by Robert Englund, is an excellent villain for this; both fun, creepy and a little bit horrifying when you look deep into it but not so much that you'll be up for nights on end thinking about him.

A Nightmare On Elm Street is the most fun of the classic slashers, with it's creative imagery and inventive set pieces, as well as it's unique concept of a slasher who comes after you in your dreams. There are a number of classic scares in this movie - the attempted bathtub drowning, the fountain of blood, and Tina being dragged up onto the ceiling are just a few of them. The initial shot that we see of Freddy Krueger, with his artificially extended arms, would be utterly ridiculous were it not for the overall atmosphere of the film; the campiness isn't just for fun, it's to make it seem like the characters are at the mercy of someone's cruel joke.

Craven also paces out the scares excellently, allowing for an atmosphere of unease underlying this idyllic neighborhood to settle in alongside a delightfully synth-ridden soundtrack, and the story turns into from schlock into a genuinely gripping mystery populated by legitimately likeable characters - such as one of the best "final girls" of all time, Nancy Thompson, played by Heather Langenkamp - and of course, one of the most memorable horror movie villains of all time, Freddy Krueger.

Make no mistake; it is Freddy that is tying this film all together, and it's not just because he looks creepy and kills people. He doesn't even necessarily look creepy, even in spite of his intense facial burns; he looks sleazy. He looks like he's getting off to every bit of misery he puts himself and others through. This is what makes him more uncomfortable and memorable than villains like Micheal Myers or Jason Voorhees, who are mostly silent forces of nature who just wear masks. He cracks jokes, he laughs, he has a personality, and all of it suggests that the act of tormenting and killing children is just about the most pleasurable thing in the world to him.

It's not just Freddy that's killing them either; it's their parents. As strange and seemingly unstoppable as Freddy is, it's the teenage victims' parents who are the strongest obstacle to their success. Suburbia is a place where keeping up appearances is the highest priority, and when kids act out, or act strange, the most important thing is to get them to stop. Anything that makes these adults uncomfortable is to be locked away and ignored. So when their children come to them begging them to listen, they don't; not because it's difficult to believe their stories - though one can imagine they would be - but because they seem to think that the best way to solve their children's problems is for them to be ignored, and for appearances and normality to be kept up.

This speaks heavily to the way in which the idyllic picture of the American dream is rooted in comformity and repression. The titular Elm Street is just about the most generic white middle class collection of homesteads imaginable, and just like any of these places, there is a darkness lurking underneath the surface. Freddy Krueger is the darkness that lurks within and is pushed down, repressed and ignored in a way that only lets him grow stronger, because when evil isn't confronted, it festers - thus making dreams, a manifestation of our unconscious ideas, desires and anxieties, from which we can't ever truly escape from, the perfect hunting ground for him. The fact that he is coded as a child molester as well as a child killer only makes this hit closer to home. The 80's slasher film movement was essentially the schlocky, pulpy underside to the more artistic explorations of this theme put forward in films such as David Lynch's 1986 masterwork Blue Velvet, and never has this been more apparent than in A Nightmare on Elm Street.