One

A Nightmare on Elm Street

So a couple of weeks ago, I said that I was going to revisit the Nightmare series as an adult and see how they still hold up.  This was what I said about the first one:

"Genuinely scary, well made movie."

 It pretty much sums it up.  Strong writing, directing, FX; acting is pretty decent (especially compared to some low budget horror at the time).  And it is a lot scarier than I remember.

I think that because Robert Englund had such a strong personality in later films, you almost forget how dark the original was.  Freddy's a lot more lecherous, and really doesn't have any funny one-liners.  The dream settings are more realistic, but the imagery is way more abstract.  Even the deaths are a bit more brutal, and not as goofy.

In the same way that subsequent films changed my perception of the character, they also changed my perception of the film as a serious horror movies.  As good as this film is I always equate Craven's biggest contributions to the genre as The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left, but Nightmare really deserves a lot more credit than just being remembered as Craven's biggest commercial success.

There were a couple of things that bothered me:

1)  At the end, Nancy builds traps, booby traps the house, puts her mother to bed, sets her alarm, and goes to sleep all within the span of ten minutes.  Now, to call this a stretch is being a bit liberal, but what bothers me even more is that even though Nancy's mother is pretty sauced and in bed, what's to say that she doesn't  get up and go to the bathroom or kitchen or something?  She could very easily get blown up or crushed by one of Nancy's traps.  Nancy's asleep and won't be able to stop her.

2)  My other problem is something I see a lot in ghost stories, and Freddy Krueger is essentially a ghost.  Although originality is good, it helps to have a preexisting mythology.  Vampires are killed with wooden stakes or sunlight.  Werewolves are killed by silver.  Frankensteins are afraid of fire bad.  When dealing with a new monster, solutions are pretty much arbitrarily made up by characters as they go, and seem to work for no other reason than that the film needs to end.

In this example, Glenn mentions halfway through the film that some Eastern religions believe that to take away a dream's power, you have to not believe in it.  Why does he have any reason to believe this would work with Freddy?  Who knows?  There is no absolute when dealing with dream-mythology, but in order to build towards a climax, there needs to be some kind of resolution.

Anyway, to further convolute this, Nancy pulls Freddy into the real world before she makes him disappear by not believing in him.  At this point he's no longer a dream, so why does this still work?  And why doesn't she just stop believing in him when he was still a dream?  It seems that making him real and having him chase her through the house is just a lot of unnecessary work.

The final scene doesn't really make any sense plot-wise, but its weird and scary, so I think it works.

Even with these complaints, its still a very good movie.