31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 15 (A Nightmare On Elm Street)

Welcome to prime time, b-- Wait, wrong one.

It's time once again to delve into a land of dreams and nightmares. Nothing quite as complex as this, though. This is not a world in which we're struggling with anxiety and latching onto the well wishes of trusted friends, letting the words soar us up into the heavens of functionality like a life preserver. No, this is far simpler. There's a monster who's out for blood, a killer who takes great glee in stalking his prey. He skulks about, larger than life, enjoying himself. Taking his time. What separates him from that other lumbering guy or his mother is his method of attack. The knife gloves are novel, sure, but he strikes within the world of dreams. He turns them into nightmares and blurs the boundaries between worlds, creating a liminal space dripping with blood. This is the haunt of Fred Krueger, and this is A Nightmare On Elm Street. Surprisingly, I found it utterly incredible. There's personal history here, albeit fleeting. I knew of Fred Krueger as a child, and he utterly terrified me in the period before I knew about a certain monster clown. He gets you when you're asleep and dreaming! There's nothing you can do to avoid him because sleeping is an involuntary human function that we're all required to do in order to survive! You have to sleep sometime and that's when he comes to get you! The conceptual nature of it terrified me, to a point where I remember walking home from a friend's after they were about to play the movie, humming Queen's "We Will Rock You" to myself as I walked in order to sway away the terror. Years later I saw the movie, and it was really scary! There's all sorts of fucked up shit, people get killed, poor Johnny Depp gets fucking pureed into a geyser of blood! Oh my god! So it was that I threw it on again for this project, expecting to be wincing at the screen like I was at times with Friday the 13th, before giving it a slightly more favorable writeup than that because Reasons.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out to not actually terrify me that much. More to the point, it's actually brilliant in a lot of ways and quite unlike a typical slasher a la Friday the 13th or... I dunno, Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Erase from history all of those sequels that try to up the ante, and what do you have? A weird guy with a burnt face who comes after you in your dreams. That's what you had before, but he's far less goofy and cavalier about it. Oh, he's still having fun, but he's down to business and not doing anything silly like themed kills. More to the point... for an ostensible "slasher" film, the body count is pitifully low. Four. That's it. Even Alien had more, and it took half the running time before it started to kill people. Friday the 13th was constant in its brutality, and also brutal in its brutality. Half of the kills in Nightmare On Elm Street are bloodless, for god's sakes! Granted, it makes up for this by having Johnny Depp's aforementioned death compensate with a literal geyser, but still! It's a remarkable bit of restraint from the late great Wes Craven, one that the people who continue to churn out those sequels we're not talking about lose in favor of upping the ante. But then, what of motive? Pamela Vorhees killed for her son, and Jason Vorhees killed for his mother. Fred Krueger's motives are a lot like Pamela's, borne from a need for revenge... but it's how he does it that makes things a little more interesting and less devoted to condeming sexy teens for daring to fuck in a scary movie. Although, the first teens to fuck are the first two to go, but as said that's half the kills. Mixed reaction there, but Fred still has his reasoning. In life, he was a murderer of children who got off of his conviction on a technicality. A group of parents banded together and took vigilante justice upon him, burning him to death. He has fun killing the teens he does kill, but they're not the true focus of his revenge. It may be stated in a sequel or something, but the implication is there in the original; this is his revenge against the parents. We don't know why Fred Krueger's spirit has come back to stalk sexy teens in their dreams now, in 1984, as opposed to immediately after his death... but I can theorize. Maybe I've played too much Dangan Ronpa, but it seemed like Fred lay dormant in the afterlife, watching and waiting. Those who killed him to protect their children enjoyed their lives of peace, watching their kids grow up. Now they're teens, just about ready to go out into the world and make their own lives! So full of potential! How proud their parents must be! Then, the reaping. Fred is cutting them down at their prime, taking from those who killed him what they value most. Slicing and dicing their hope, in order to drive them into despair. What could stop such a determined monster?

A hopeful and determined teenage girl, of course. Amidst all this despair, she keeps herself awake out of utter abject fear at first. She even has a run-in or three with Fred in the world of dreams, and manages to escape every time with minor injuries. Then Fred makes a mistake. He purees Johnny Depp, and she was sweet on poor Johnny Depp. It's on now. She's armed with the knowledge she needs from her encounters. She knows that reality and the world of dreams are malleable, and that things can pass between them; not just injuries, but objects. Fred's power has made it so, and in swiping his hat she's learned the fundamental rules. Her plot is to grab Fred and haul him into reality, where he can be harmed. Maybe even killed. She even bothers to set up a bunch of goddamned booby traps in her house, 6 years before that little McAllister squirt! Then she goes into her dream, terrified but still defiant of the fearful beast hunting her. She's calling out to him, demanding he show himself. He does, and the fight is on. She can run, but she can also taunt. Then, the plan is successful. Into reality he comes, ever hunting and stalking, absolutely fucking determined to slice her to bits. Her mom dared to steal his fucking knife glove and keep it as a totem of her supposed "defeat" of Fred! Oh, she will suffer for this, and so too will her daughter. That plan changes a bit after he gets fucked up by a few traps and lit on fire again. Fuck this elaborate revenge shit, he'll just do what he should have done and kill one of the ones who did this to him. Which he does! Just for good measure, he'll kill that defiant one as well... but again, she knows the rules. Fear is what he thrives on, and fear is what she must quench in order to stop him. She revokes all of the arcane power that her terror granted him, and turns her back on him, demanding that her nightmare become a dream. Which, it does! At least for Wes Craven, anyway; someone decided it would be better to end on a final scare and have everything be fucked. Makes no sense to me, and just opened the door for those sequels. Ah well.


Even so, it's an effective movie for what's supposedly a slasher! It's not about piling up the bodies, but about building tension and making one fear the conceptual horror of getting fucked up in your dreams. It and its ilk scared me as a child and as a teen when I bothered to watch them all, but now as an adult? It's a great little spooky movie, and one with some rad little synth riffs in it. Fred would go on and on for a time, until Hollywood got tired and blew him up in 3D. Then Wes Craven came back and made him scary again, upping the ante by adding metafiction to the conceptual horror. Then he actually fought that lumbering hockey mask guy, using him to build back up that arcane power of terror and having to wrassle with him once hockey mask guy decided that killing lots of sexy teens was more his style. Then they tried remaking it and bleh. That's all for Fred's influence here, save for one other piece of conceptual horror that we'll cover. It's got nothing to do with dreams, though. Good as the film is, though, it is part of the Evil Power of Slashing that darkens everything it touches. Wes Craven would help invoke a step to reflect that power back at us, imperfect as it was... but we can't get there just yet. Instead we'll go further into the realm of Evil.

How about we tackle the Left Hand Of The Nemesis?