The Slasher Series: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Sweet dreams with Freddy Kreuger
A few years back, I published a series of Halloween-related articles about the first appearances of iconic movie slashers. That site is no longer around, but I enjoyed the articles that came out of it, so as a special October treat, I’m going to publish them until Halloween.
As iconic as they are, horror villains tend to be fairly interchangeable when it comes to the men behind the masks.
Nick Castle returned for the 2018 Halloween, but this was only the second time in nearly a dozen films that he portrayed Michael Myers (and he shared the duties in the reboot with James Jude Courtney). Likewise, Kane Hodder might be the most famous Jason Voorhees, but he only portrayed the slasher in four films and a videogame. That’s a solid streak, but it’s still less than half the Friday the 13th movies.
But Freddy Krueger? He’s synonymous with Robert Englund. The actor played the madman in eight films (as well in a rap song and an episode of “The Goldbergs”). That puts him in league with Hellraiser’s Doug Bradley and Saw’s Tobin Bell, but even those roles were eventually consigned to direct-to-video purgatory or glorified cameos. But Englund? He’s been front and center in all the “Elm Street” movies, so much so that when Jackie Earle Haley tried to take on the mantle, moviegoers stayed away. There’s only one Freddy Krueger, and if any horror villain is an icon, it’s him, with his burned face, green-and-red sweater, tattered fedora, and finger knives.
But there’s a big difference in how Englund has played Freddy over the years, taking the character from sinister threat to over-the-top wisenheimer. What makes him so scary in some films and silly in others? How did he turn from a nightmare into a punchline?
To understand, we need to look at his first appearance, in Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Are you ready for Freddy?
Krueger is, of course, the dream master who stalks and kills teenagers. A former child murderer, he was tracked down and killed by vengeful parents after a technicality kept him from justice. He was burned alive, but he returns to haunt those parents’ children in their dreams.
It’s a fantastic premise for a horror film. In most scary movies, eluding the killers is possible. Duck in a closet, run out of the house, don’t stay at haunted camps. But sleep is a physical necessity; sooner or later, your dreams are inescapable. And for anyone who suffered through nightmares as a child, few things are more horrifying than the fear of what awaits once your eyes are closed.
Freddy is iconic, but we actually don’t see much of him in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Englund has less than 10 minutes of screen time, and he’s rarely seen straight-on. Freddy stalks in the shadows, and we catch glimpses of his charred face peeking out behind walls, his raspy voice coming from around corners, his sharp knives dragging across metal.
The truth is that Freddy, on his own, isn’t scary. In the few instances where we see him full-on, running at someone, he looks kind of silly. Englund runs in a jagged, clumsy stutter, hands raised, legs shuffling back and forth. There’s a dream-like eeriness to it, but I wouldn’t call it threatening.
No, what makes Freddy formidable is the power he wields, the fear that he could be anywhere in your dreams; when you’re asleep, he controls your reality. It makes sense, as Freddy, it’s revealed, feeds on fear. So what makes him terrifying is not the physical threat he poses, but the idea that he can be anywhere and do anything — and he knows it.
Later films would turn Englund’s character into a cartoon, but here his taunts are sadistic. He toys with his victims, slicing off his own fingers, cutting his chest, letting his face slide off and even, in homage to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, briefly wearing one of his victims’ faces as a mask as he peeks through a doorway. Englund veers away from the silent, hulking killers of Friday the 13th and Halloween and makes Freddy a presence who lures teens into his trap and then plays with them before going in for the kill.
In the wrong hands, this can be silly, and you can see how the character devolved into self-parody as the franchise went on. But when Englund collaborates with the right director, the results can be truly eerie.
And let’s state the obvious: Wes Craven was a hell of a director.
Nightmare on my street
I imagine getting an Elm Street gig must be a great opportunity for directors who are big on style (at least, they probably were when the franchise was still hot). I’ve wondered what a director like Gore Verbinski might do with the franchise’s nightmare scenes.
So it’s surprising to go back to the first Nightmare and see that Wes Craven doesn’t really go crazy with the visuals. He adds more fog and some cool effects (the stairs turning into quicksand are pretty great), but he leans more on the power of the uncanny than the surreal. The nightmare world is just slightly off from our own, with no change in lighting or colors to alert that we’ve entered another realm. The effect is unsettling; we’re constantly questioning whether we’re in the waking world or not.
When building the nightmares, Craven goes with visuals that are more creepy than horrifying. Freddy’s outstretched arms lengthening to encompass an entire alleyway. A lamb running down a corridor, out of place in the suburban setting. A figure standing in a body bag in the middle of a high school. Rather than go overboard with nightmarish visuals, the terror comes from the way nightmares and reality blend together. We never know if we’re safe.
Freddy is used sparingly, as tension release instead of the source of all the fear. But, crucially, he’s felt even when he’s not seen. Whenever we venture into a dream, we can sense him just out of frame, manipulating victims into his trap. Craven’s use of gore is also effective. The film is more graphic than Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Halloween, but it’s not the over-the-top sadism of Friday the 13th. Craven isn’t afraid to show blood, as the film’s infamous “bed scene” proves. But he’s calculating; we’re scared before the violence begin. Like Freddy, the blood is used as an exclamation point.
It also helps that this is another of the slashers like Halloween where we care about the teens. They’re not sex-obsessed jerks, but instead feel like real high schoolers. They’re afraid of the nightmares they’re having, so they stay together for solidarity; it doesn’t matter, one of them still dies. The film famously gave Johnny Depp one of his first roles. He’s fine, if unmemorable, but I appreciate that he feels like a real kid, well-meaning if a bit clueless (it’s refreshing to see Depp play someone who feels like a real person). It’s also worth mentioning that this is one of the rare slasher films where parents are present, although they don’t provide much safety. Where most slasher movies have an absence of parental figures to isolate the teens, here the parents only make matters worse. John Saxon, as Nancy’s police officer father, is the stereotypical hardass who doesn’t believe his own daughter. Ronee Blakely is Nancy’s alcoholic mother, whose previous history with Krueger reveals that even good adults keep dark secrets.
Heather Langenkamp, as Nancy, is a fantastic hero. She’s smart and funny; Langenkamp creates a character, not just another vapid bimbo. The deaths of her friends means something to Nancy, and Langenkamp also ably captures the character’s sheer physical exhaustion. Most importantly, she doesn’t simply defend herself against Freddy. Nancy, perhaps the most badass of the Final Girls, goes on the offensive. It’s a nice inversion to have her be the one laying a trap for him in the climax.
Granted, that climax doesn’t quite work. Even though the film came out six years before Home Alone, one can’t help but be reminded of that comedy when watching it today. What should be cathartic too often feels slapstick in the final moments, and what Freddy is capable of in the dream world versus the real world is a bit confusing (sledgehammers hurt him, but he can apparently pull Nancy’s mom into some netherworld). I get that the point is to rob Freddy of his terror so Nancy can turn her back on him; it just doesn’t completely work. There’s the suggestion in the film’s final scene that this was all a dream, but that feels like cheap sequel setup, not an explanation for the film’s tonal inconsistency.
It’s small potatoes, though. A Nightmare on Elm Street is still one of the great horror films of the ‘80s. I’m happy to make it a recurring nightmare every few years.