One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…
Halloween’s almost upon us, so it’s time to take things in a
more macabre and spooky direction. We continue the Class of ’84 with a little
film that managed to stand out among the onslaught of eighties slashers in the
wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th. It’s a film that terrified
little kids into trying to skip bedtime, it’s the one that immortalized the
four-bladed glove—it’s a Nightmare on Elm Street.
Director Wes Craven was no neophyte in 1984, having already
done the classic The Hills Have Eyes—the quintessential hillbilly horror
alongside Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the latter of which we’ll
get to soon). But this film would perhaps ironically be the one that truly
baptized him into the mainstream—appropriately, it drew from his childhood, and
like many of his future flicks, took place in a seemingly wholesome version of
American suburbia with monsters perhaps literally lurking in the closet. A school
bully called Fred Kruger was combined with all those paranoias of creeps on the
street and murderers lurking behind curtains and well-painted doors, and an
icon was born.
Freddy was designed to contrast masked mute movie killers
like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees—his face, even if severely deformed, is
on full display, and he’s not afraid of chatting. People might remember him for
his wisecracks and one-liners from the future films, be it joking about
Nintendo Power Gloves or exclaiming “what’s the prime time bitch?!” as
he slams someone into a TV—but in this film, that’s not really the case. Robert
Englund, an icon to horror fans, plays Freddy—well, ‘Fred’ Krueger for most of
the film—as a soft-spoken sadist, gleeful but not exactly joking, and mostly
kept in shadow.
Once you see Freddy’s claws out, you know it’s time for things
to get real. There was a certain terror to Freddy that made him a legitimate nightmare
for kids then and now—you never really saw as many Halloween costumes of him
compared to say Jason. With brutes like the latter Mr. Voorhees and Myers, even
if they were indestructible, you could still physically knock them down, slow
them, or just run away. Not so with Freddy—once you’re asleep, and unless you
know exactly what you’re doing, you’re done for. No physical bravado will help
you, no hiding place will stick. As he himself notes in this one…in the dream
world, he is God.
But it’s time to talk about the rest of the film. Heather
Langenkamp plays Nancy, a young girl living on a very disturbed street. And
just like Donald Pleasance in Halloween, there’s a veteran actor to balance out
the young cast—namely, John Saxon, having moved genres after the kung fu craze
of Enter the Dragon a decade earlier died off. Also, yes, Johnny Depp makes his
debut here—and no, amazingly, he doesn’t put on a weird accent nor mug the
camera. But let’s just say he makes for one of the most memorable and deliciously
grisly scenes of the flick.
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| "Hey, I heard this guy Tim Burton wants you to play every slightly awkward role in everything he does and--" "SAY NO MORE." |
People have praised Langenkamp as Nancy, putting her
alongside Jamie Lee Curtis from Halloween or even Sigourney Weaver in Alien…and
I gotta say, I don’t really agree. Nancy definitely has her moments, especially
in the latter part of the film, but Langenkamp has a kind of vacant fishlike
expression to me for a lot of the film. Saxon and Ronee Barkley as her parents
do however give the necessary gravitas to lend believability to everything, what
with the dark secrets they’re trying to keep covered.
What made Nightmare so interesting was the variety in the shocks
and scares—Freddy can warp your dreams into anything, switching environments
with but a blink of the camera, creating imagery surreal and stylish. Not all
of it holds up visually—his stretched arms look kind of funny, and other
effects seem awkward now. But it doesn’t go as ridiculous or extravagant as the
future films, keeping that balance between the surrealistic and ambiguity
between dreams or reality. There’s a unique atmosphere that I can only really
compare to other somewhat trippy films of the time like Phantasm.
Regardless, between Depp being turned into a river of blood and
people being thrown against ceilings, there’s lots of spectacle to entertain.
The ending is a divisive one—originally it was meant to be a happy, self-contained
conclusion, reflecting perhaps Nancy fighting past the terrors of growing up
onto the road ahead. Instead…well, the studio smelt the opportunity for
sequels, and Craven was overruled, leaving it down to the viewer to judge if it
works.
And the sequels indeed came—Nightmare Part 2 is an even
weirder flick, dealing, as many have interpreted, with teenage homosexuality of
all things. The others cranked up the elaborate dream sequences and Freddy’s
jokes, eventually crossing the line into self-parody. There’s schlocky
entertainment value in all that and it did make for more interesting visuals
than the eleventy billion repetitive Friday 13th instalments, but by
the time Freddy was killing people with an NES game, something had gone a bit
too far somewhere.
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| To be fair the actual Power Glove was by all accounts an actual nightmarish abomination to sully your dreams. |
Craven’s career had its ups and downs—he did what was an
attempt at A Nightmare on Elm Street 2.0 with 1989’s Shocker, which isn’t
anything special but has Skinner from the X-Files absolutely chewing the
scenery as a body-hopping bad guy. He did get back to this franchise with New
Nightmare, taking things in a self-referential meta direction with a demonic Freddy
terrorizing the production of an actual Elm Street film, with people like
Englund playing themselves. It’s either self-indulgent wank or a refreshing take
depending on how you ask, but Craven had a much better time deconstructing the
horror genre he helped bolster with a little film in ’96 called Scream.
Inevitably, Michael Bay of all people produced a remake in
2010 starring Jackie Earle Haley as Kruger. Though Haley did his best to
present the four-fingered murderer as a genuinely chilling horror once again,
it was just another boring shot for shot redo for the most part. You’re better
off sticking with the Simpsons parody.
Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t quite the perfect classic some
make it out to be—parts of it are somewhat hokey and I’m not entirely sold on the
lead, but there’s definitely highlights to enjoy and bloody shocks to excite on
a Halloween movie marathon. Drink a million coffees to stay awake, and why not
give it a watch…
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