A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Tagline: ‘Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep’
UK Running Time: 91 Minutes

Film Quality: 4.5/5
Gore Content: 3/5
Entertainment Value: 5/5
Originality: 4/5

Introduction

Back in the early 20^th century, the old Universal American horror movies usually saw the ‘horror’ as being overseas, European such as ‘Dracula’ or ‘Frankenstein’ or later in the Caribbean as we saw in ‘I Walked With A Zombie’. Slowly we saw that horror move into the US backwaters with films such as ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ before the slasher movie brought it into small town America and Suburbia. Cronenberg took it one step further by bringing the horror into our own bodies and it seemed there was nowhere left to go, especially with the slasher film a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. That was until Wes Craven invented Freddy Krueger and we were no longer safe in our own beds or in our own little dream world.

In a nutshell

The teenagers of Springwood are terrified of going to sleep, sharing horrific nightmares with a common theme…a man, horribly burned, wearing a red and green jumper with knives for fingers. As they start to die one by one the parents themselves refuse to accept the fact that their past actions are to blame for this nightmare as a secret they kept from their children comes back, not only to haunt them, but to take their own children’s lives.

What’s good about it?

The beautiful poster art

Wes Craven invented a character that has become iconic, not just within the world of horror but the cinematic universe. Freddy Krueger became the bogey man for an entire generation, invading teenagers’ dreams and killing them whilst they slept, there was no defence. Craven came up with the idea when hearing of a case in Cambodia where a number of people suffered terrible nightmares and were too scared to sleep. In one particular case, a child was screaming and was found dead in his bed, a post mortem revealing no health defects, no heart attack, he seemingly just died. Now of course this could be an urban legend, sub-standard autopsy techniques or a shared hysteria but it got a young Craven thinking about what could be so terrifying that it prevented somebody from going to sleep and had the power to kill. Krueger became that ‘thing’ – slasher films love to make people as vulnerable as possible before terrorising them, when are you at your most vulnerable if not when you’re asleep?

Freddy’s character would become diluted as the series progressed, famous for a dark sense of humour and some terrible one liners but in Craven’s original he is genuinely frightening. You don’t really see him for a quite some time, a screech of metal on metal, a disembodied laugh, a shadow in the corner of the frame. Craven takes his time with the first death being shown, for the most part in the real world outside of the dream as her body is slashed by unseen blades…we see his power and what he can do before we see him, kind of like in ‘Jaws’. Unlike subsequent instalments, he stays pretty much in the shadows.

Introducing the character of Freddy gave Craven the kind of license that his earlier, more traditional slasher films didn’t allow. His imagination is allowed to really run wild and tap into a number of images and fears that we can all relate to and have all dreamt about. Not being able to run away because our feet are stuck are weighed down, the illogical jumping from place to place, the non-linear nature of dreams that we accept as normal until we wake up. We never know we’re in a dream until we wake up, this ensures that the blurring of reality and fantasy is genuine and adds to the on-screen terror. It also follows that the manner in which our ‘Final Girl’ is able to survive makes perfect sense within the Elm Street mythology

But that nightmarish imagery is superb. Everyday objects invade the screen to disorientate and confuse such as a kids tricycle, a lamb, a telephone which grows its own mouth. And the places as well…Nancy’s home suddenly becomes Freddy’s boiler room as any sense of geography and logic disappear. The violence…a very young Jonny Depp in his big screen debut experiences the ultimate wet dream, Tina is graphically assaulted, almost to the point of rape as she is flung across the room, scaling every wall and even the ceiling. The mechanism of allowing dreams to become reality is a masterstroke and Craven proved time and again that he has the vision and eye for horror to be able to pull it off. At times he out-Cronenberg’s Cronenberg in terms of surreal body horror.

Finally we come to the depiction of adults. In a similar vein to your traditional slasher they’re not there for their kids. We have an alcoholic pill popper, parents who aren’t there for their kids, parents happy to leave their kids to be babysat by MTV, all the while hiding a nasty little secret for which their children will pay the price. They aren’t able to protect their children which is a pretty nihilistic view of the world, that our parents create a world which is unsafe for the next generation…who knew that Wes Craven would turn out to be such an accurate prophet!

What about the bad?

Wes Craven went to such great lengths to come up with something completely different it seems such a shame that some of the annoying horror movie tropes remain. Tina is bumped off very shortly after having sex, Rod is a bad lad and consequently doesn’t last long, Glen gets his kicks from watching Miss Nude America and bites the shiny one. That this film takes such a giant stride away from your average slasher it still falls into some of the same traps and conventions.

Any themes?

"No running in the hall without a pass"

Oh yes! It wasn’t until I sat down and began typing this that I realise what a terrible world the parents had created for their children. It was around this time that people were beginning to wise up about greenhouse gases and the strain we could be putting on the environment. I know this isn’t necessarily a viewpoint shared by some of our American cousins but could there be some subtext about legacy and what we leave for generations to come? I mean they even burn this guy, releasing his troubled spirit and destructive power into the ‘atmosphere’ where it can linger and kill the next generation…or perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Either way, there’s definitely something there about what kind of legacy we leave behind for our children.

As an extension of that, Freddy is a metaphor for the anxieties we all have as teenagers. They spend large parts of the film trying to make themselves understood by the adult world whilst simultaneously trying to make sense of their own thoughts and feelings. The teenagers have no understanding of what their parents do, say or stand for and must figure out their own path and their own way in the world in order to get by.

Release History

‘Nightmare’ has a surprisingly complex release history for a film everybody thinks they know well. It’s also a rare example of a film that was uncut upon original release and has suffered cuts since…this is largely own to the American classification body the MPAA.

Initially there were no required cuts in the UK for its cinema or VHS release. This applied right up to 2001 and included a couple of completely uncut screenings on Channel 4 in the 1990s. In the UK it has never suffered from any cuts BUT it now only currently exists in a cut version.

The MPAA, for reasons known only to themselves, removed shots from four scenes which included two small trims totalling five seconds to Tina’s death and another three seconds from Glen’s demise to obtain an ‘R rating. We’re not talking graphic gore here, just a few blood spatters and an avalanche of fake blood jetting out of a water bed – you’d have to be a gibbering idiot to find that offensive!

The trouble arises when it transpires that this is the only version that has ever been available on Region 1, meaning that when it came time to record the commentary, it was done over a cut version. Consequently, any release with a commentary (that means all of them except, bizarrely, the Turkish DVD release!) is lumbered with a cut version. There are no plans to release an uncut version and subsequent blu-ray releases haven’t seen new submissions.

This means that unless you have an old VHS copy, or were lucky enough to record it on Channel 4, you kiss any current hopes of catching an uncut copy of this superior movie goodbye. What the hell did Freddy do to deserve that!

Cultural Impact

Freddy, along with Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Pinhead, became a horror icon to rival the old Universal monsters. His popularity was, and still is, immense and the number of spin offs from this films, including figures, novelisations, comic book adaptations, not to mention sequels, a TV series and a hit single by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince show that there was no end to Freddy’s influence.

Wes Craven had little to do with the sequels other than producing and writing the, actually pretty good, third film in the franchise until he returned to reboot the series with ‘Wes Craven’s New nightmare’, serving as a post-modern take on the franchise and a precursor to his smash hit ‘Scream’, the second time he revitalised the horror genre.

It’s such a shame you can’t put the original film in the wash to remove the stain of the remake but what can you do?

Final Thoughts

One of THE iconic horror films of the 80s, it’s stood the test of time reasonably well and still stands head and shoulders above the sequels and remakes. Its mix of familiar slasher and highly original fantasy setting set it apart from anything else around at the time and despite being an incredibly dark film, re-set the horror landscape for some lighter moments with a charismatic villain instead of the faceless, largely silent masked killers from the late 70s/early 80s. Great fun and showed exactly why Wes Craven was and is so revered in horror circles.

Memorable quotes

Children: “One, two Freddy’s coming for you…”

Nancy: “Whatever you do…don’t fall asleep.”

Glen: “Miss Nude America’s on tonight”
Glen’s Mum: “How are you going to hear what she says?”
Glen: “Who cares what she says?”

Rod: “Up yours with a twirling lawnmower.”

Freddy (revealing his glove): “This……is God.”

You’ll like this if you enjoyed…

‘Dreamscape’, ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Child’s Play’