A Nightmare on Elm Street – A look 20 years later.
In 1984 New Line Cinemas distributed it’s first film after a few years of co-productions. Behind young, Cleveland-born director Wes Craven, New Line introduced the world to Freddy Krueger with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven had been trying to get the film made for years; however, no one wanted to take a chance on it. Craven had limited success in the past, mainly with his film The Last House on the Left. Elm Street was originally based on a series of articles from the L.A. Times concerning a group of young immigrant children who were having nightmares so terrifying they would die before waking up. When police searched the room of the last child to die they found hidden coffee pots and caffeine pills, which turned up as a part of Craven’s screenplay.
Looking back on Elm Street it is a film that has so many different elements. It came during the age of slasher films and was made after the Halloween and Friday the 13th films had been produced. But Craven’s film was really something different. A Nightmare on Elm Street is clearly a surrealist film first and foremost. While not in the vein as the masters of surrealism, Luis Bunuel or David Lynch, Craven was working in a world where dreams and real life cross back and forth and eventually become one in the same.
Freddy Krueger, named after a bully in Craven’s childhood, was truly frightening in the first film of the series. Only later on would he turn into a wise cracking jokester, more known for sayings than for fear. Like all good horror films, Nightmare was followed by sequels that ruined the quality of the original. Craven’s film took the audience into a place that no other horror film had. Jason and Michael Myers were living (or living dead) killers that could easily be gotten rid of from within the natural world. Freddy, however, was not like that. He came to his victims from within their dreams, a safe, personal place. How can one get rid of something that comes from dreams?
The surreal threads in the film are what make it really scary, and smart. Craven knew that this was not just another slasher film, as the sequels would be. Even the first sequence has a nod to Bunuel, with a goat running across the screen. That image, within the first two minutes of the film, let the viewer know this is something different. In the first “non-dream” sequence the image starts in slow motion, with diffusion on the lens. As the image gets clearer, the speed picks up and we find ourselves in real time and are soon introduced to Nancy, our hero. That segment is what the film is all about, the melding of the dream world with the real world. The end of the film, which could be interpreted any number of ways, is one of the most surreal closings to any film, especially mainstream works.
Now that is not to say that the film isn’t a slasher, because it certainly is. Nightmare was one of the bloodiest films of its time. To this day there are various cuts of some scenes that were trimmed to get an R rating. Gallons of blood are spilled when Johnny Depp, in his first role, is killed near the end of the film. Blood and guts were the way horror films were made in the 1980s, even Craven couldn’t get away from that.
As I said before the awful sequels of the film made it’s impact lessen powerful. Craven was only involved with one of sequels, The Dream Warriors, as an executive producer and co-writer. That was until 1994 brought us Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. New Nightmare, which was produced after Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, was also written and directed by Craven. New Nightmare was a postmodern surrealistic horror film that was based largely on its self-reflexivity. In the film, Craven plays himself, as well as original stars of Elm Street Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon. At the end of the film the real world turns itself into the original film, with the actors wearing the exact same costumes they had worn ten years earlier. Craven won praise for reviving horror films with 1992’s Scream, a film that was applauded for being reflexive on the history of horror cinema. But Craven had achieved that better and earlier with New Nightmare.
It is easy to cast aside horror films. They are often seen as not being true works of art, but as a way to show massive blood and guts and topless young girls. While that might be true, there are a handful of horror films that challenge the mind, as well as scary it. Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (not to be confused with the awful remake) is one of those films. John Carpenter’s Halloween is another. And who could forget the social commentary via bloodbath that is George Romero’s original films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. A Nightmare on Elm Street could be the one that really takes the cake as it uses techniques and genres that other horror films never tried to use. These are films that should not be written off as fluff or simple genre pieces. Looking underneath the gore there lies themes and issues within these films that are just as important as those dealt by Kubrick, Ford or Godard.
Written by David Bohnert
Copyright 2004.