Thursday, October 3, 2024

Nightmare Week: Screw sleep


A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

1984
Written and directed by Wes Craven

Spoilers: severe


In the midst of death, we have, well, more death.  But also new life: on April 13th, 1984a FridayJason Voorhees died (he got better, but let's treat this with the solemnity that a contemporary could have), and the tide of the slasher subgenre looked like it was unequivocally rolling back.  It was already three years since Halloween II had put Michael Myers in the ground, John Carpenter and Debra Hill making it clear they wanted him to stay down there.  As for Friday the 13th, with its so-called Final Chapter, Frank Mancuso Jr. had declared an end to the other great name of slasherdom.  Maybe somebody could've brought the Miner back (that is, the killer from My Bloody Valentine, not Steve), but probably not.  Then on November 9thand I find it funny that was too late to even properly capitalize on the spook season, and it didn't mattercame a new slasher movie, surpassing everyone's expectations for any late entry into a dying fad.  This was A Nightmare On Elm Street, and even the title sounds far too unimaginatively descriptive to be properly good (consider A Long Night At Camp Blood, the bad original name for Friday the 13th).  Yet somehow it's exactly right, fulfilling the slasher film promise that horror lurks in suburban shadows as readily as in Gothic fastnesses, or, for that matter, isolated woodlands, and turning that "unimaginative" description into a strength by virtue of not, as the case would usually be with a word like "nightmare," actually being a metaphor.

It likewise added a new name to the pantheon of horror, by which I mean Freddy Krueger, though if you thought "Wes Craven," that's perfectly correct, too: he'd striven for years, but this was and might still be the writer-director's career-defining film.  It's probably too much to say his movie revivified slashers all on its own: The Final Chapter's box office resilience helped, so that the next Friday, at least, owed nothing to Craven.  But even industrially, Nightmare was doing the more valuable work.  I get the impression that, for a dead teenager horror flick, it was even well-regarded critically upon its release, though it's always a little hard to tell without devoting much research to the question.  Of course, for my entire adulthood, it's always been a legitimated classic, and even with our latterday open-heartedness, slashers just don't manage that very often.


I have some mind to argue they still didn't here, for A Nightmare On Elm Street's great innovation upon the slasher movie was to not make a slasher movie, or at least cheat a lot at it.  It properly resembles a slasher to only this extent: it has a young cast who die in extremely gory setpieces spaced out across its runtime, and (while this is more of an option than obligatory, it's a perennial feature of the subgenre) their deaths are rooted in a sin of the past.  None of the rest of it even follows slasher structure that closely (hell, even the deaths don't really, with its young cast of only four people).  Meanwhile, the obvious huge departure is that it's unambiguously supernaturalit's a bona fide ghost story, not just a legend of a big man who unaccountably fails to die when axes get planted into his skullwhich in turn depends on some significant special effects work well beyond the usual gore tricks, and though it has those, toosome of the bestits signature kill is as abstract as you can get while still being hard-R-rated, almost the exact converse of stereotypical slasher gruesomeness.  It presented a new template: a lot of this would be copied, and as much as I adore the blunt simplicity of the early Fridays, a list of my favorite slasher films would be weighted heavily towards Nightmare movies and Nightmare knock-offs (and who knows, by the end of this branch of our Freddy 'n' Jason retrospective, perhaps moreso).  Put straightforwardly, Nightmare opened up the slasher knock-off to a bit more narrative and visual imagination than the previous modes available, "the implacably big man, usually silent, with the sharp implement" or "the Agatha Christie riff."  Hence, on one end of the post-Nightmare scale, something as clever as Slumber Party Massacre II could exist, a Nightmare knock-off sequel to a knock-off of Halloween; on the other, spirited nonsense like the Nightmare knock-off about the haunted gym, Death Spa.  But, to the jaded, even the fundamental reason for its vast influence can feel like it takes Nightmare out of its generic pigeonhole: Wes Craven made it because he actually had an idea.

I don't know that when he started writing it in 1981 he thought of it as a slasherprobably, as some recognition of the similarities would've been inescapablebut as far as structure goes, the slasher flick is usually built more like a collision between an established normal and the rupturing abnormal.  (Even Predator, whose "normal" is blowing up developing nations, is somehow more classically "a slasher.")  In more general terms, though, it means slasher films are middling ensemble comedies where you wait for people to die, and eventually enough do so that somebody notices.  I mentioned another mode, that of a murder mystery, and Craven is tacking more towards that, though it's a mystery solved by the thirty minute mark.  In either case, the supernatural distinction permits Nightmare to begin immediately, without anybody's idea of normal ever taking hold, when we open with Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, credited as "Fred" but he's already called both) already engaged in his campaign of nocturnal terror, stalkingI think it's implied not for the very first timehigh school student Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) through a hellish boiler room.  Moments away from death at the bladed hand of this monster, hideously burned and scarred (and, going by the green gunk that spews out of him when he demonstrates the razor-sharpness of his clawed glove upon himself, a fetid corpse), Tina wakes up.  This is a dreama nightmarethough what that means reality is here is already in question, when Tina notices her nightie has four slices torn through the belly.

The next day, she vaguely relates her dream to her friends, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), Nancy's boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp), and her own giant-sized paramour Rod Lane (Nick Corri).  What none of them are ready to speak aloud, yet, is that they've all had the same dream, but it will become clear enough, soon enough, that the man in the hat and rotting red-and-green sweater is grinding them down, either savoring their fear, or else actively drawing his strength and, indeed, his physical reality from their growing belief that he can really hurt them.  Freddy provides an object demonstration that night when Tina hosts a sleepover, and before Rod's eyesNancy and Glen only discover the aftermathTina dies, incredibly hard, by means that should be entirely impossible.  The cops, especially Nancy's own dad (John Saxon), assume Rod did it, but when Rod mentions the dream, Nancy knows he didn't, and that none of them are safe.  First, Nancy endeavors to stay awake forever; this proves infeasible, so Nancy goes into dreamland to confront her foe.  To anyone else, she looks crazy, and she's probably getting there, but this isn't a psychothriller and Freddy's as real as they come.


I sometimes compliment slasher films for being efficient, but I mean "for a slasher film."  A Nightmare On Elm Street is efficient for anything, possibly too efficient, so we barely get to know our cast before Tina is obliterated and Nancy commits to her own supernatural theory of the case; but then, a 91-minute horror movie from 1984 erring on the side of high-impact terror isn't a sin.  Its flaws are found within that decision, nonetheless: it does a decent job with the kids, despite its handicap of not giving them a first act (or some of them a second); but the adult Thompsons are simply not good, Saxon's dad coming off better as the divorcĂ© no longer fully integrated into his daughter's life, so it's a pity he doesn't have custody, because Ronee Blakely's mom is somewhat actively bad as a drunken stereotype and exposition dispenser.  (I may be unfair to her because it's her job to dump Freddy's backstory onto Nancy's head: it's vivid, but "Krueger somehow managed to kill twenty children in the same suburban neighborhood, got off because of bleeding-heart liberals, and then a tightly-knit conspiracy of us eight not directly impacted by the murders went out and lynched an infamous criminal in the most brutal manner we could think of, and for some reason it happened in a boiler room" makes for some aggressively implausible "dark, unrecorded lore.")  Anyway, they're more useful as avatars of grown-ups' condescension and mistrustfulness than for anything they actually do.  As for the kids, we're operating at around 75%, with Corri unfortunately snagging on a character that I think Craven meant to be a subversion of a dipshit 80s bully alpha male, except that aforementioned efficiency means that we only get the stereotype-confirming dipshit bullying and the loud voiceover indicating he's alphaing all over Tina's womb, then one scene where he's interestingly vulnerable (as it turned out, a scene where Corri had shown up high on smack, but whatever works).

Then again, Corri is barely "secondary cast," and Wyss (good and game) and Depp (fine enough, though possibly his own most important function is also dispensing exposition, re: dreams) don't rise above that.  This will be another way that it doesn't feel "slasher-y": slasher movies have their Final Girls, and you usually don't have to guess who they are, but, in Nancy, Nightmare just has a straight-up heroine, actively engaged in her story from almost the beginningpreparing for combat, unraveling her villain's mysteries, and eventually coming up with a frankly dumb plan to snare a dream monster that seems perfectly reasonable while she's executing it, and, if you enjoy watching me fanwank, it was a plan she might've even been baited into, as a means of locking down her belief in Freddy's objective reality, hence sealing her fate.


I don't actually like fanwanking that much, but Nightmare somewhat asks you to, and so before we move on to the it's-all-superlatives part, I'll make my last real complaint: Nightmare has a good ending that, nonetheless, I disagree with.  Worse, you can tell that Wes Craven disagreed with it while you're watching it.  If you can't, just watch the four slightly different endings he shot, demonstrating the trouble it obviously gave him.  My favorite is the one where Freddy is driving the car that is also Freddy, precisely because of why it was nixedit was "stupid"but maybe that should've told them something.  My own impulse, after all, is to call producer Robert Shaye a dumb dummy for senselessly forcing Craven into a bog-standard horror film nihilistic reversal, while in the movie they'd actually made, everything has been set up to feel like Nancy Thompson has absolutely earned her terrible victory by finally comprehending her enemy.  But when Shaye, the founder of New Line Cinemaa role that, in a sense, he shares with Freddy Kreuger himself thanks to Nightmare's financial successwas the only person in Hollywood willing to take a chance on this, it's hard to stay too mad at him.

That's it for any significant flaws, and thanks to how the movie is structured, rather than how it's "supposed" to be, it barely matters what Wyss, Corri, and Depp are doing, because it has Heather Langenkamp, as important to the movie as Englund himself, and arguably exceeding his contribution.  She's cheating, too, by virtue of some strikingly violet eyes that make her look like a mystic voyager who shall evolve into what one might call "a dream warrior," along with seizing the physical opportunity the role offers to credibly evoke a lot of wired exhaustion.  But even in the absence of much biography (quick, what does she want to do when she grows up? does she not fuck or just not, at present, fuck Glen?) or even much character outside of pure embroidery (this largely-dead-serious movie is not humorless, or at least I thought her hiding an entire coffeemaker under her bed was hilarious), we get a good sense of who Nancy is, enough that I'm not sure we needed that arc-concluding line from her mom telling us out loud.  Determined and tough, she's also very willing and indeed eager to receive help, from adults or from Glen, only to be disappointed but not discouraged when it turns out she can never count on it.


So it helps that Langenkamp's great, though this is not what Nightmare is about, even if it'd sound fancier if I called it "about adolescence" or whatever: Nightmare is about what it says it's about in its title, excessively frightening bad dreams that genuinely seem to work on dream logic and on Freddy's own tulpa-like operating principles, with the more scared you get the scarier he can still be.  They have the juice to make you wonder how this only cost $1.1 million, with frequent recourse to shapeshifting for Freddy (our first look at him involves wavering, distorted arms the breadth of a street), though I suppose Craven and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin, production designer Gregg Fonesca, and set decorator Anne H. Ahrens are just hiding their slim budget extremely well, with just several nicely lived-in domestic spaces turned into threatening nightmares; ultimately, there's still a lot of psychic resonance to something as simple as that basement beneath the basement where Freddy lives.  Then sometimes Charles Bernstein's synth score will come along and it'll sound exactly like a movie that cost $1.1 million, though I love this score with very few reservations: the baseline is very mordantly atmospheric stuff, and even when it gives way to some dubiously disco-y chase cues, well, Freddy is supposed to be having fun.  Of course Englund is a lot of it, too, resplendently gross beneath Haitkin's shadow work and David B. Miller's make-up; he's not yet as "on" as pop culture recalls, but he's already exquisitely fully-formed as a movie monster, so jolly in his malevolence, and playing Freddy with as much sexual menace as you'd expect from an omnipotent child molester, which he obviously still is, whether or not Craven pulled back to "child murderer" in dialogue.  It's my own personal suspicion that the Venn diagram of sleep paralysis sufferers who've encountered the "hat man" and sleep paralysis sufferers who'd previously seen this movie is a perfect circle.

What Freddy can do is still more important, and where Craven's movie triumphs above all is how it bleeds nightmare into reality and vice versa, its very first daylight scene still haunted by dreamlike haze and a child's nursery rhyme, mirrored in that "still a nightmare, inside a nightmare, inside another nightmare" denouement.  If it's often obvious when we've only falsely awakened, that works for it, making it only rarely obvious that a scene is "actually" happening.  (So one of my favorite small beats is in the school, when Nancy wakes screaming, not even signposted as a false awakening because she never wakes up againeven though Freddy is still there, in discomfiting high school hall monitor drag, to taunt her.)

It works for the deaths, too, which are incredibly tangible but usually retain the quality of a deeply unsettling dream: two victims are swallowed by beds (in fact, fully three victims are killed by a bed or bedding), and Glen's famed death is the highlight of that motif, spit back into reality as a geyser of blood after having been literally liquefied by Freddy in the space between sleeping and waking, a sequence that involved, if the numbers I've heard quoted for this film and various other films are correct, an order of magnitude more stage blood than an entire Friday the 13th.  It may be worth pointing out the obvious, that a human body does not contain the estimated 300 gallons of blood; but it needn't.  It's sublimely violent, the "abstract as possible" death I mentioned earlier, if only the most famous of Nightmare's evidently infinite store of "purest horror imagery imaginable" moments.


But it's not the best kill, which belongs to Tina and may earn the film the demerit of peaking early, but whatever; Tina's death confirms how supernatural this supernatural horror film is, basically the scene you've always wanted in a haunted house movie, and Nightmare rubs your face in how actually upsetting and nauseating it is, a long drawn-out murder that's as much bludgeoning Tina to death with her own bedroom as it is ripping her open (though the invisible-killer gore effect is outstandingly, unnervingly real-feeling), all of it underlining Rod's (and by extension our own) impotence before the dream-god.  Shot on the same upside-down set, redressed, as Glen's volcanic demise (and with rather fewer visible tells), it could be anybody's pick for the finest (or worst) slasher kill ever.  (Rod's death, unfortunately, is more quotidian, to look like jailhouse suicide; if this were still the complaining section, I might suggest a slightly more baroque death, mocking the grown-ups' lack of belief.  I also assume Freddy's death would've been more involved, had Craven gotten his way.  Oh, and Nancy's otherwise-conceptually-and-visually-perfect bathtub sequence should've been clipped by one second, rather than Freddy's arm slithering away like he's frightened of discovery and actually "hiding" in physical water.)

But that's such minor bitching.  There are so many nightmarish fillips that we could catalogue them all day, and, as noted, the ending's good even if it doesn't sit right (I've forgotten the way it ends every time I've seen it, in part because series continuity dictates it couldn't have, though I don't presently recall how they ever wrote around it).  So let's leave it with this: the 1980s were horror's best decade, and 1984 possibly its best year, and an enormous part of that is that 1984 was the year Wes Craven got to give us his bad dreams.

Score: 10/10

2 comments:

  1. Holy shit you're doing both of 'em! Even I didn't see that one coming.

    (I mean Freddy and Jason, of course).

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    Replies
    1. Aha, but it was your idea. Could I, in conscience, do Freddy vs. Jason without the Nightmares? No. (Plus at present, I've only seen three of 'em, so I at least had to watch 'em.)

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