To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; the Wes Craven classic…
While looking through the Child’s Play series, there was a name who kept cropping up in terms of comparisons to Chucky as a character – the dream stalking, finger-knife wielding Freddy Krueger. They were both cocky, self-assured characters who had a wit as sharp as the tools used to kill their victims so the comparisons were quite apt. But how does the Nightmare on Elm Street series hold up?
During the mid-1980s, the slasher craze was it at its highest with seemingly every couple of months a new contender showing up to challenge the giants of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. However in 1984, struggling studio New Line Cinemas took a gamble on young director Wes Craven’s vision to create a movie that would transcend the slasher genre into the pop culture Zeitgeist and make an icon out of its lead villain. While other slasher movies were copying and pasting the Halloween formula, A Nightmare on Elm Street tried something totally different.
Although her home life might not always be great, Nancy has everything going for her – she’s smart, beautiful and has a great set of friends and a young Johnny Depp as a boyfriend. However things start to go bad for Miss Thompson when she and her friends start to have similar dreams about a man with a dirty red and green sweater and knives for fingers. As the nightmares become more real and her friends start to die in mysterious circumstances, Nancy discovers that the man is Fred Krueger – a child murderer who the parents of Elm Street burnt alive in an act of revenge when the justice system let them down. Now he’s stalking their dreams and making them pay for the sins of their parents.
A whole portion of today’s entry could be taken up by a comparison piece to the 2010 remake (which remains to this day the biggest example of ‘missing the point’) but instead we’re just going to focus on why this movie has stood the test of time.
While it is a classic of the genre, Friday the 13th has not aged well at all. The low-budget nature of the the movie holds it back slightly, the pacing doesn’t work for a modern-day audience and the late 70s haircuts give the movie an unwanted retro feel. A Nightmare on Elm Street may reek of the mid-80s in terms of style, but the film doesn’t feel like a product of 1984. Even in 2013, it feels fresh and original with a great cast of characters, a wonderful script and some brilliant performances (Ronee Blakley’s scenery chewing notwithstanding).
Craven came up with the idea for the movie when reading an news story about a young boy who was afraid of his dreams and felt that he would die if he fell asleep (not unlike The Twilight Zone episode Perchance to Dream). When the kid eventually did fall asleep, he died. By manipulating this idea into a slasher movie, Craven created a scenario which invokes a huge amount of fear because dreams are not something we have little control over. What makes this genius is that our Dream Master Freddy is able to take away what small amount of power we have, but allow us to think we still stand a chance of survival. This isn’t like Halloween where a trip in the road could lead to him catching up with you – in A Nightmare on Elm Street if you fall asleep, you’re as good as dead and Freddy is going to toy with you every step of the way.
But what really cements A Nightmare on Elm Street as a classic of the genre is the central relationship between Nancy and Fred Krueger. Nancy, along with Ripley from Alien, is one of the all-time great Final Girls but unlike Ripley, Nancy is not simply a survivor – she’s a fighter. She takes the fight to Krueger without any help from anyone and single-handedly brings about his doom (save for the final shot of the movie) using her own wit, intelligence and strength. Heather Langenkamp sells this role perfectly but is given a lot of help by the heavily made-up Robert Englund as Krueger as the two bounce off each other incredibly well and Englund’s leeriness really adds to Langenkamp’s performance.
The early to mid-80s saw a lot of slasher clones, but A Nightmare on Elm Street broke the mould and saved New Line Cinemas and Robert Shaye by turning it into the House That Freddy Built. Just like he’d do in 1996 with Scream, Craven breathed life into an already tiring genre and the series would spawn a whole host of new imitators with monsters trying to be like the wise-mouthed Fred Krueger. But with the name and character now the property of New Line Cinemas, dollar signs rolled into their eyes as this genre-defining movie was about to become a franchise…
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 22, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
