Viking Night: A Nightmare on Elm Street
By Bruce Hall
September 8, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Batman should be grateful the latter was chosen.
Freddy Krueger is either the McDonald’s or the Burger King of the horror universe, depending on where you come down on the whole “Freddy vs Jason” argument. Obviously, Michael Myers is part of this conversation, so I suppose one of them has to be Wendy’s. Then again, you’ve got to consider Leatherface, whom I would encourage you to compare with whatever regional burger chain is popular where you live. But my point is that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a genre-defining event of the first order, and Wes Craven is the brains behind it. So, Wes Craven is kind of a big deal.
So with his passing, I decided to take a look at his best known piece of work, and I wondered how well it would still hold up. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I call the slasher genre “outdated,” so I was prepared for this to be a potentially childhood ruining experience. But then as I’ve just implied, I’m not exactly a casual observer here. A Nightmare on Elm Street took a badly shopworn genre and breathed new life into it, and I wasn’t too young to appreciate that when I first saw it. So, I was equally prepared for the possibility there might be a Freddy fanboy inside of me, all too forgiving where bitter mockery would be more appropriate.
The shocking fact is, I managed to watch the whole thing from an almost completely subjective point of view. Almost. A Nightmare on Elm Street is absorbing in the same way as a John Hughes film. It's implausible almost to the point of self awareness, but as an exercise in symbolism, it's almost impossible to look away from. What's great about Elm Street is that this involves a supernatural place somewhere between the realm of dreams and the waking world. And, also, teenagers getting butchered like cattle. And it all starts with a notorious child killer named Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund).
I'm going to go ahead and lead with that. The story is that Krueger killed about 20 neighborhood kids but beat the rap because "someone signed the search warrant in the wrong place." While you might be surprised to hear there's a "wrong" place to sign a search warrant (thanks for nothing, Law & Order reruns), you won't be to hear that concerned parents took it upon themselves to right that wrong. I won’t spoil all the film’s secrets, but let’s just say it involves a fair amount of rage and some gasoline.
Problem solved, everyone lived happily ever after.
Except, of course, they didn't. Smash cut to an unspecified number of years later, after some of those parents have replaced their old kids with new, unmurdered ones. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) Glen (Johnny Depp), Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Rod (Nick Corri, now known as Jsu Garcia) are two teenage couples who are also BFF's. They've also all been suffering from severe nightmares involving a knife-wielding maniac in a striped sweater and battered Fedora. One night, the gang crashes at Tina's to offer moral support to their now insomniac friend. That night, they experience Freddy's revenge firsthand, setting in motion a series of events that hopscotch the line between dreams and reality.
And that’s really the best part of the film. Somehow, Freddy exists in the ether somewhere, able to inhabit the dreams of his victims (it’s a leap of faith, no explanation is given) and control both the environment, as well as their perception of it. In other words, Freddy is in your nightmares, waiting to murder you in the most horrifying and ironic way possible. And if you die in the dream, you die in real life. Once the kids realize this, they take countermeasures, which consist of basically not sleeping for days at a time. The great thing about that is when you’re sleep deprived, you tend to doze off without realizing it - which means that at any time you could find yourself in Freddy’s world without knowing you’ve fallen asleep.
The movie toys with this skewered perception to some extent, and when it works, it’s pretty effective. Unfortunately, most of the time it’s pretty clear when a character has fallen asleep, so for the viewer, the element of surprise is lost. One of the best assets a story like this could possibly have is the fact that we don’t always know when the characters are asleep or awake, but unfortunately, this isn’t utilized often enough. Still, watching the characters try to make sense of their situation and master the “rules” of Freddy’s universe and turn the tables on him is interesting. In that regard, Elm Street still does a great job of taking the standard issue “slasher” formula and breaking new ground with it.
That said, a couple of things kind of bothered me.
Like most slasher villains, Freddy seems to favor killing off the promiscuous kids first, and he doesn’t seem to have a problem doing it in sexually aggressive ways, as well. This leads me to wonder - was Freddy just a child “killer” or was there more to it than that? And if there was, I can’t help but recall that these are supposed to be high school kids so...yuck? What’s more interesting though, is the fact that each of the children in this story come from highly dysfunctional homes, where either the adults are absentee, or the parent-child dynamic is reversed. Tina’s mother is a hard drinking gambler, Rod and Glen don’t seem to have parents at all, and Nancy’s father (John Saxon, sadly not punching anyone) is obsessed with his job as the town’s stereotypically jaded police chief.
The parents, of course, are all quite familiar with Freddy, and reluctantly share what they know at one point in the film. But the kids remain more or less on their own when it comes to dealing with the problem. What I took from this is that while these parents are no doubt still grieving for the kids they lost, they all seem to be extraordinarily shitty parents to begin with. So, now that Freddy is back in action, it’s hard not to see him as doing these children a favor, in a way. Maybe he’s less of a villain then some kind of supernatural Dr. Kevorkian for disaffected teens. it’s also hard to believe that even the youngest members of this community didn’t already know about the distinctly dressed madman who brutally sliced up almost two dozen of their peers less than a generation ago - but if you’re willing to accept the story’s internal logic up to this point, I can’t imagine you’d be in the mood to complain. In the end, as with any slasher movie, the biggest issue you’re going to walk away with is the acting.
For the most part, it’s about what you’d expect from a slasher picture. Veteran actors like Saxon are able to phone it in without issue, and a talented up and comer like Depp clearly was not challenged. My main problem is with the main character - while I’m sure Heather Langenkamp is a nice person, watching her try to act is like watching a three legged cat try to use the sandbox without falling on its face. When part of you is kind of hoping for the protagonist to be put out of her misery, it doesn’t bode well for the story. And to make things worse, there’s an angry looking zit on her forehead that appears and disappears at random points throughout the movie, drawing unnecessary attention to the continuity in a film that doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny as it is.
Still, she gets off the best line in the film when her father contemptuously describes Rod as a "delinquent lunatic,” and she responds (without a trace of irony) “Rod is not a lunatic, dad!”
Good stuff. A Nightmare on Elm Street still works well, primarily because it has the vision to exercise restraint. There’s only one particularly bloody death, and it’s staged in such a shocking and unexpected way that it may be the most effective scene in the whole film. And while Englund famously makes the most of his appearances as Freddy, he’s actually on screen very seldom. This allows the film’s atmosphere to do its work, and forces your mind to go much darker than the story probably intends. As someone who grew up on this stuff, I still had a lot of good, creepy fun revisiting this world so many years later.
He may no longer be the cutting edge of horror, but Wes Craven’s most famous creation became the (partially melted) face of the genre and redefined how scary movies were made for over a generation. While subsequent installments in the series were of varied quality, and a poorly received 2010 remake fizzled, this is a universe I wouldn’t mind seeing explored more seriously in the future.