Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

One, two, Freddy's coming for you...

Three, four, better lock your door...

Five, six, grab your crucifix...

Seven, eight gonna stay up late...

Nine, ten, never sleep again...

    By 1984, Friday the 13th was on its quote, unquote "Final Chapter".  Halloween had bitten the dust until 1987 due to the disappointment of Halloween III, and the slasher craze was at the beginning of a fast descent into self-parody and censorship woes.  Enter Wes Craven.  Wes Craven had already made a name for himself in horror, even before the slasher craze was started in 1978.  He'd directed two drive-in movie type hits that shocked critics and censors already.  In 1972, he and Sean Cunningham, (the director and creator of the original Friday the 13th in 1980) made a sort of anti-hippie film called Last House on the Left.  Now, I must admit, I've never seen it, but it did make an impact when it originally came out.  Sort of a show that the hippie era was dead, this was the era of Vietnam and the Manson family.  It was basically a goried remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.  It brought some name recognition to both Craven and Cunningham.  A few years later in 1977, Wes Craven made what is in my opinion his best film.  It was about a family in a RV getting broke down in the desert... and they are terrorized by inbred wild cannibals.   It was called The Hills Have Eyes.  After that, Craven did a few lesser films like Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing along with two horrible TV horror movies.   Let's just say thank goodness Nightmare on Elm Street happened.  Because the movies he did right before and after this film were downright bad.  

     Craven had remembered reading in a newspaper somewhere about Cambodian teens who had fled the US bombings there in the Vietnam War having nightmares so bad, they refused to sleep.  And when they finally did sleep, the died.  Boom, there's a good plot.  Dying from nightmares.  Okay... Keep going Craven.  When Craven was a boy, one night he looked out of his window to see a disheveled man walking past... Stop... and look right at him suddenly.  Craven got scared and hid.  A few minutes he went back to the window, and the guy was still right there just looking.  This would be the inspiration for Freddy.  And finally, the name came from a bully who used to beat Wes Craven up in middle school named Fred Kreuger.   Yes folks, this is how movie writers get ideas sometimes.  Being treated like the cowards we are when we are young.  

    Now the funding had to be found.  Disney liked the idea but wanted to make it more kid-friendly (but this was the same time they made some really dark stuff like Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, so it makes sense), but Craven didn't.  Paramount wasn't interested because they'd just done the similar and not too successful Dreamscape.  Finally, Bob Shaye, head of distribution company New Line decided to finance the film.  (Mortgaging his house and basically everything else to do so.)  So with a budget of under $2 million they were ready to start filming.  And for the most part it went well enough that I don't have to tell you about that.  The only significant thing about it was it was Johnny Depp's first film.

     The film premiered on November 9, 1984 as a limited release in only 165 theaters.  Remember, New Line was just a distribution company at the time, mostly for educational films.  This was their first big release.  The move ended up making back almost its whole budget in its opening weekend.  I say this is partially due to the two posters for the film, shown above, as they are both totally awesome.  (I must say, I wish posters would go back to real artwork instead of photoshop and pictures of the actors.  They worked much better in giving you the feel of a film.)   The film was instantly critically acclaimed unlike most other horror films at the time, and unlike Friday the 13th.  Were the critics right, do I think?  Well...  It's no Halloween.  However, it's better than the vast amount of horror films from the 1980s as well.  And it made over 12 times its budget!

    One of the issues I have with this film is the acting.  You have just three good actors in the whole movie as anything more than bit parts.  John Saxon as Nancy's father, Johnny Depp as Glen, and Robert Englund as Freddy are good actors.  You believe them and they don't seem to over or underact much.  Heather Langencamp is just okay.  There's a reason she hasn't had much acting work outside of the Nightmare series.  She's not movie star beautiful, but more the girl next door type, so she was never a star.  She is better in the two other Nightmare films she's in though.  The bad acting award goes to Ronee Blakley, however.  She was a musician and was well known for her starring role in Robert Altman's Nashville about ten years earlier.  I hated Nashville and have tried to push it out of my memory, so I can't tell you about her acting there, but good god is it horrible here...  If it's possible to underact and overact in the same film, I think she's done that here.  She shows no emotion in scenes where she should emote.  And in others she turns into Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Blvd.  Sure, it works sometimes as her character is supposed to be a depressed, alcoholic, secret hiding mother.  But really it turns out to be unintentionally funny whenever she's on screen.  Even Wes Craven and Heather Langencamp in the commentary poke fun at Blakley's acting, saying she acted as if she was in a different film than everyone else.

     Johnny Depp is quite different here from what we know as Johnny Depp today.  This was even before 21 Jump Street, which is where he became popular.  He's still a pasty faced, skinny boy, but for some reason he's supposedly a jock?  And he's got an odd haircut, but in a different way than in most films.  (More 1980s.)   Now let's get to Freddy Kreuger, the man with the plan.  Now, we find out that more than just some spectral boogyman, he was a real person.  He was a child murderer 10 years back and after being caught by the police and given a trial was let go on a technicality.  So the parents of the area went to Freddy's boiler room and set him on fire, killing him and keeping it a secret.  Now he's back to get revenge by killing his murderers' kids.  Now, that's pretty sick on its own, but originally Freddy was supposed to molest the kids before he killed them too.  This was played down since the McMartin preschool sex scandal was national news during filming.  (You should wikipedia that case.  Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, people thought all daycare and preschool workers were secret satanists that wanted to molest and kill their children...  At least now it's only male teachers in general they think that of... and not satanic ones.)  I don't think I'd have liked this movie at all if they'd kept that in.  There's some element of fun here, but with the molestation angle, which you can still read between the lines to see there, it just turns icky.  It definitely wouldn't have gotten sequels.  (They did ramp that idea up on the remake, and we see where that got it.)  Also, unlike the later sequels, Freddy is still kind of scary here.  He doesn't kill with punchlines yet.  He's not the James Bond of horror icons yet.  Sure, he plays with his victims, but he actually only speaks a few lines here.

  And now for the part you've read all this way for.  The deaths.  The Elm Street films are known for their inventive, special effects laden deaths.  Unlike Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees, death doesn't just come from a knife, arrows, being run over, or something so plausible.  Sure, he uses his bladed glove every once in a while, but the deaths in this series are rather... imaginative.  The first death in the film is pretty startling the first time you see it.  I would imagine even moreso for those in 1984.  

      Now, beyond the rapelike imagery and feel of her final demise right in front of her boyfriend, the lead up to that is also pretty brilliant.   She wakes up to someone throwing pebbles at her window, but there seems to be no one there.  She goes outside to investigate and sees Freddy in the alley.  His arms are like 6 feet long, and he seems to be taunting her and playing with her, laughing as he gives chase and disappearing behind her only to reappear in front of her.  He even comes from behind a tree and tells her "Watch this" and then cuts off two of his fingers, laughing perversely before tackling her as she tries to run back in the house... and that's all a dream.  So it makes sense her going out to investigate a strange sound.  That happens in dreams whether you consciously want to or not.  It explains the teleportation.  Unlike other slashers, this being the dream world, stupid decisions and unreal geography make sense because they don't make sense.  However, dying in a dream means dying in real life too.  Because after that, we see from the real world point of view.  Tina starts thrashing around on the bed as if being attacked and gets slashed in the belly before levitating off the bed and around the walls and ceiling screaming and pleading for help before splashing down dead back on the bed.  (They had her sliding around along the walls by having the room rotate with everything in the room nailed or glued down, including the camera.  That way the actor could move with the room.)

    Then there's the lesser death of Rod Lane, which Nancy sees is getting ready to happen in a dream while Rod is in jail for the death of Tina.  He's choked by bed sheets and hung up to the jail window.  Not quite as interesting as the first death, I know.   In fact, besides Tina's death, there's only one other memorable one in the film.  Yes people, the Depp bites the dust in this one.  Sorry ladies.  But boy is it a cool way to go!    As he put it in Inside the Actors Studio, "I got eaten by a bed.  Not a bad gig."  Yeah, he gets swallowed by his own bed.  (So does his TV, actually.)  Then, it spits out gallons of blood up to the ceiling.  (In a deleted scene it spits his lifeless body out too.)    But actually, this movie isn't about body counts.  There's... 4 deaths in the whole movie.  That's less than even Halloween and much less than Friday the 13th.  

   The movie is very original though.  And it's pretty fun to watch.  I'm sure the jump scares, which there are many of, used to work, but to the trained eye and mind of someone who's studied these films and knows when to expect a jump, they don't work.  The dream sequences are superb.  Nancy keeps seeing dead Tina in a translucent body bag, even with a centipede coming out of her mouth at one point.  Freddy's melted face gets pulled off.  A lamb appears out of nowhere in the boiler room.  The hall attendant that's knocked down by Nancy has Freddy's finger blades and voice when she turns back around to her.  And those are the parts where you know it's a dream.  Sometimes you'll come to scenes that are supposed to feel like real, but a few minutes later we learn are dreams.  Back in 1984, I'm sure people loved this.  I just don't think the film has held up as well as it could have.  I mean the fashions and hair aren't as dated as later in the series, but the movie isn't frightening anymore.   It does, however, work on both a entertainment and psychological basis.

    In the 1980s white middle class people had moved out of cities and into the suburbs where they felt safe and could be with other middle or middle upper class white people.  There was little crime, the houses were kept up, you knew your neighbors, blah blah blah, all that Norman Rockwell 1950s crap they wanted you to believe.  This started in the late 1950s, but I think by the 1980s people had discovered they were sold a lie.  Suburbia held secrets.  Sometimes worse ones than the city.  There were still child molesters, murderers, other races and non-conformists around.  Every town has an Elm Street.  Being part of it just makes it easier to hide your crimes.