A Nightmare on Elm Street

Well we’ve waved goodbye to October and Halloween passed by without incident, but we’re continuing on with these horror series blogs. This time we’re moving on to one of the more popular ones with one of the most iconic horror series and characters of all time. We’re venturing into Wes Craven territory, which is interesting territory. The late Wes Craven was a great horror director with an interesting output, with every phase of his career, from his humble low-budget beginnings to his later successes, producing enduring horror classics. While he’s had misfires aplenty, they’ve been far outweighed by the iconic films and characters he’s created, and the big influence he had on the horror genre over the decades.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is most likely Wes Craven’s most iconic film, and that’s saying something from the man also responsible for horror classics like Scream, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left. But ANOES (an easy abbreviation) is likely to be what he’s most fondly remembered for, a creative, frightening and fun horror movie that played with horror conventions of the time and gave a unique twist on the slasher genre. The movie itself, and its sequels, also have an ingenious premise – a group of teenagers are stalked by a killer in their nightmares.

 

The story is deceptively simple – a group of teenagers, Nancy, her boyfriend Glen (an early Johnny Depp), Tina and her boyfriend Rod, are having the same horrible nightmares about being stalked by a violent killer wielding a clawed glove. The nightmares reach a peak when Tina is killed during one, and it becomes clear that the sinister nightmare figure is responsible. As the teens try and figure out who the killer is and why he’s targeting them, they have to content with their disbelieving parents, including Nancy’s police officer father, while also trying to stay awake.

In the end the teens discover that they’re being attacked by Freddy Krueger, a child killer who was burnt alive by their vigilante parents and who has returned as a malevolent spirit to get revenge by killing the children of those that killed him in their dreams, the one place they can’t protect them. Nancy, our resourceful heroine, is determined to stop Freddy once and for all.

It’s a very creative, original movie, essentially taking the slasher genre and subverting it. It works because Wes Craven understood horror. He understood the conventions, the expectations of the audience, how rules should work, the importance of the killer – he knew all the elements, how they worked, and how to play with them – that’s basically the entire premise behind the Scream franchise, the playing with horror tropes. ANOES did that a lot earlier and less self-consciously and self-aware (or ‘meta’ since that’s the word we use now). This is a movie with rules, but the rules make sense and add to the horror of the movie. In fact I’d say rules are a big part of why the movie works – how Freddy and dreams work is well thought out. Freddy is only able to attack and hurt you in your sleep. If you get hurt in your dreams you get hurt in real life. The later movies will expand on nightmare logic, but the original keeps things pretty simple. Its rules are a bit inconsistent – Nancy manages to pull herself out of a dream by burning her arm on a hot pipe, but when other characters are being stabbed to death they don’t wake up? I guess you could explain it as Freddy’s powers, but it’s still a bit odd.

The film actually does an early fake-out, playing with audience (and horror fans) expectations early on by killing off what seems to be the main character early on. Initially Nancy isn’t the focus of our attention, it’s Tina – she dominates the early scenes focus and seems poised to be our heroine. So when Tina dies, horrifically, in the first twenty minutes, it’s a genuine shock to the audience and horror fans who thought they were genre savvy.

They do skip over a few things – Nancy apparently goes a full week without sleeping but we never really get that impression. Funnily enough, Johnny Depp’s character, Glen, really doesn’t seem to believe or care if Freddy is real. He just seems to be humouring his girlfriend. Even when Nancy warns him not to fall asleep he does anyway, and pays the price. The other characters are alright. Tina is rightfully freaked out by her nightmares, and her initial plan for dealing with them (having a sleepover with her friends) makes sense, but she doesn’t last long. Her boyfriend Rod is a bit dull – when Tina’s killed he bolts because he knows everybody will think he’s the killer (they do, and he’s arrested).

Nancy’s parents do everything they absolutely can to deny Freddy is responsible. Her mother (who, by the end of the film, has become a ridiculous alcoholic) goes as far as having the windows fitted with armoured bars (for ‘security’), ostensibly to trap her daughter in the house. I understand wanting to hide the truth about vigilante street justice, but her mother had already witnessed her daughter being injured in her dreams, yet is still in such aggressive denial that she just gets drunk and pretends everything will be fine. Nancy’s policeman father, played by horror film mainstay John Saxon (who seemed to be in every low budget horror movie in the seventies and eighties), is an oddly sparse presence, rarely seen and not really doing much. Even at the end, after seeing Freddy kill his wife, he just sort of stands around and doesn’t’ do much. I will say that, uselessness aside, ANOES at least uses the parents in the story in a big way – they killed Freddy and that’s why he’s getting revenge on their kids. That’s a big difference from the usual non-present parents in horror films.

Nightmare imagery is given a fairly consistent basis here – Freddy’s boiler room is the main haunt, as victims are drawn into Freddy’s territory. Dream logic also rears its head in, as many nightmares begin in pretty mundane areas, usually wherever the character was dreaming (school, their bedroom) before transitioning elsewhere. There’s some creepy imagery – boiler rooms are always freaky, but the most horrific for my money would be Nancy seeing a dead Tina, in a body bag, spewing up a centipede. We don’t actually spend much time in the nightmares at all, with a lot more time spent seeing characters asleep and writhing around. It works pretty well in suggesting something is happening, and makes the idea of those nightmares more frightening than showing them might have. Freddy is also a bit of a dick in his nightmares, often disfiguring himself to freak people out. He cuts off his own fingers and at one point his entire face falls off. It’s goofy but freaky.

Some of the effects are weak, a bit dated or just plain goofy looking. Freddy’s arms stretching looks silly, as does when a telephone turns into a mouth and tongue, while Rod’s low-budget death might be a spark of indie film ingenuity but it’s still a bit silly (sheets wrap around his neck and hang him). But there are effects here that are still astounding and effective – Freddy pushing himself out through the wallpaper is a great effect, and something as simple as his claw emerging from a bathtub is iconic. The best effects are the kills. The deaths are few (barely a handful of characters die), but they’re violent and occasionally pretty horrific. Tina’s death in particular – she’s cut and dragged across the room by an invisible force, pulled up to the ceiling until she drops in a bloody splash on the bed. Johnny Depp is dragged into his bed, with a massive geyser of blood signalling his gory demise. It’s pretty awesome and one of the more memorable pre-celebrity deaths in a horror movie (Kevin Bacon’s F13 throat arrow has nothing on this).

 

Nancy proves to be a resourceful girl, coming up with a plan to drag Freddy out of her dreams and into the real world where he can be hurt. She rigs her house with make-shift traps (I’m quite fond of the sledgehammer hanging above the door), and sets up a timer to wake herself up. The plan works – she pulls Freddy into the real world for the finale and injures him, but the second part of her plan (getting her parents to see that Freddy is the killer) backfires – Freddy kills her mother and disappears while Nancy and her father watch on hopelessly. Weirdly Nancy ‘defeats’ Freddy by deciding to not believe in him – apparently belief/fear is what powered him (an idea that will reappear in later movies). It doesn’t work though, and we get a final scare (and a bunch of sequels). I will say that Nancy totally beats the crap out of Freddy – she hits him with the sledgehammer, knocks him down stairs, blows him up (she even manages to make homemade explosives) before setting him on fire. Even after that she hits him with a chair. It sort of takes the threat out of him a bit really.

The final scare is silly, if only because of the effects. Nancy wakes in a dream – everything is bright and happy and everybody who died is alive and well. She gets into a convertible with all her friends while her mother watches on smiling. The car’s hood (the same red and green as Freddy’s sweater) closes suddenly and the doors lock themselves and as Nancy gets driven away screaming, her mother is dragged into the house through a window. That final part, the ‘dragged through the window’ part, is silly because of how fake and obvious it is – it’s clearly a bad dummy being pulled through the window.

The Freddy Krueger rhyme is here, appearing once at the beginning and once at the very end. It’s a series mainstay, almost always played and sung by little girls skipping rope.  While it’s a familiar callback in the later movies, along with the creepy ANOES theme, this first time it is pretty creepy, especially since at this stage we don’t really know much about Freddy at all, and the rhyme builds him up pretty well (‘One, Two, Freddy’s coming for you’ is a damn effective line).

 

Freddy Krueger is a horror icon, but his look is almost wilfully silly in concept. Besides his horribly burnt appearance and his claw hand, the rest of his attire is a bit goofy and feels like it was slapped together by what costumes they had on hand – he wears a fedora and a red and green striped sweater. Weirdly it all works – while we don’t actually see much of Freddy, the look is memorable. Robert Englund plays the role to perfection, completely inhabiting the character. While original Freddy might not have the wisecracks and humour the character is known for, he’s still got the look and the deranged menace and is honestly a lot more frightening and threatening than his later appearances. Compared to a lot of other horror characters of the time, most of whom were hulking, silent, faceless killers, having a face, a voice and something of a personality really gave Freddy an edge that has allowed him to endure. In an interview Robert Englund said that, wanting to get the part, he didn’t blink at all and maintained full eye contact with Wes Craven when they first met so as to appear as creepy as possible. It evidently worked, and it’s really hard to imagine Freddy Krueger without Robert Englund.

A Nightmare on Elm Street still stands up, and it’s easy to see why it’s endured in its popularity. IT’s creative and effective, and it played with established horror conventions of the time. While it can be rough at times with some of its effects, it’s an excellent horror film. In a weird way it never really got many copies, clones or rip-offs – it remains pretty unique with its dream-based killer. The movie was a big success, critically and financially, and as is always the case with a successfully horror movie, a sequel is sure to follow.