#22. A Nightmare on Elm Street

Two 31 Days of Horror a go (so, like, 2014), I caught the second half of A Nightmare on Elm Street on a cable movie network in HD. The image blew me away. Let me qualify that last statement. I hadn’t seen the film since I first watched it in a friend’s basement when his parents thought we were playing video games. In other words, like how many teenagers smoke pot. We watched a VHS tape on one of those 13″ TV/VCR combo jobbers. My baseline for this film: tiny and square.

This year, I decided to put this movie to bed, so to speak. I’d never properly seen A Nightmare on Elm Street or any of its sequels except, oddly enough, for New Nightmare, which came out on video at roughly the same time I first started watching Italian horror. Very loose causal connections at play.

With proper viewing conditions, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains an effective horror experience, despite the ways in which the formula has been ripped off and regurgitated throughout the 30+ years since its original release. I won’t suggest that Nightmare provides an experience in pure terror. The story undermines its own ability to terrorize by playing fast and loose with dream logic and Freddy’s ability to reach beyond his dreamscape. By doing so, the Elm Street flicks fostered Freddy as a monstrous personality, rather than a slasher figure as innately terrifying as Leatherface or Michael Myers. If Michael Myers is a Tom Brokaw, Freddy Kreuger is a Ryan Seacrest.

(I’m honestly not sure about that above analogy, but I think it works so I’m moving forward.)

Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978) had set the table years prior with straight-up psycho slashers. A Nightmare on Elm Street landed at theaters rather late in the 1980’s teenage pop-culture slasher cycle to be just another slasher film. Wes Craven understood that his monster needed more personality, that Freddy Kreuger needed to be something a little off center and a little self-aware. A Nightmare on Elm Street never properly breaks the 4th wall (Craven saves up all his proper nudging and winking for the Scream series) but Craven certainly tests the waters with Freddy.

In addition to Kreuger’s slice of self-awareness, Craven further inserts a twist in the Kreuger mythos. Freddy Kreuger assumed the role of “boogie man” because the community parents had tracked down the serial child murderer and burned him alive. Everyone on Elm Street became complicit in the murder and mayhem. When the film plays the “parents just don’t understand” card to cater to its teenage audience, this makes sense because the parents have already been established as a source of negative energy.

The primary conflict isn’t actually “Teenagers vs. Freddy Kreuger,” but rather “Teenagers vs. Parents.” Freddy Kreuger serves as the physical manifestation of teenage angst and anxiety. The burden of escalating sexuality, pending assignation of adulthood and the teenagers’ inability to confront their parents with mature conversations about their fears. The teenagers lack the maturity to palatably present these concerns, and parents, well, lack the maturity to address their teenagers as near-adult human beings rather than children.

The communication divide is Freddy Kreuger.

Now, let’s move on to those sequels.