Next up on our films for Halloween is Wes Craven’s masterpiece: A Nightmare on Elm Street. This is a rather hard film to review because…well, this could have been by far the greatest horror film of the eighties and one of the finest of all time. In fact, for most of the production it was well on its way to being just that. Then Robert Shaye, head of New Line Cinema, demanded the ending be changed to allow for sequels. The result is a great horror film that finishes on what is quite possibly the single worst ending (relative to the film that precedes it) in movie history. So to sum up, they decided to severely damage a great film to allow them to make a half-a-dozen lame ones.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold the film industry in a nutshell.
Disregarding the ending (judicious usage of the ‘stop’ button is recommended here), Nightmare is, as I say, a simply wonderful horror movie: smart, scary, and totally engrossing. More importantly, it gives us likeable and well-written characters to root for and a thoroughly despicable villain to hate.
The story is fairly well known, at least in the outline. Four teenagers discover that they’ve all been having the same nightmare: about a heavily burned man with knives for fingers. Then, one night, one of them is brutally murdered in the midst of it. From there the teens try to figure out what’s going on and how they can escape their dream stalker. I hesitate to give away too much, since the film has a lot a twists and revelations to it and part of the pleasure is discovering the ‘rules’ along with the characters.
And the film gives us a simply excellent lead character. No, it’s not Freddy (he actually has comparatively little screen time). It’s Nancy Thompson, played by Heather Langenkamp, and hands down the best ‘final girl’ of all time. As far as I’m concerned, she really makes this film. We see most of the movie through her eyes; she’s the one who starts really suspecting something horrible is going on, she’s the one who takes the steps to uncover the truth, and, finally, she is the one who faces Freddy one-on-one. I’ve spoken in another post about why I think she’s such a strong character, so I won’t repeat that now. Suffice to say, she’s smart, brave, sympathetic, and the ideal person to experience this movie with (and I’m not usually one to “crush” on actresses, but in this case…yikes, those eyes!).
That’s the interesting thing; the first film isn’t really about Freddy. It’s about Nancy: her struggles, her fears, her decisions. Freddy is the obstacle, the challenge for Nancy to overcome, not the star. I think it’s this focus on the heroine, rather than the villain, that is a key reason why this film is so much better than any of its sequels.
One of the guidelines I use to judge the writing in genre movies is the question “Would a straight-up comedy or drama featuring these characters be worth watching?” This film delivers on that front in spades. The four teens are all believable, well-sketched, and likeable enough that you could easily imagine a movie focusing just on their personal lives. Frankly there’s enough material indicated in single lines of dialogue to fill an entire film with. For instance, Nancy’s boyfriend Glen lives right across the street from her, frequently climbs up the rose trellis to visit her, and has parents who don’t like her very much. That right there is enough for a simple teen romance (Glen, incidentally, was played by a young newcomer named Johnny Depp in his first film role. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t had much of a career since).
As this indicates, the writing here is extraordinarily deft. This film could be shown in a screenwriting class on how to do narrative shorthand. For instance, we’re made aware early on that Nancy’s parents have a strained marriage. Her mother and father have barely any scenes together and we never learn the history there. How do we glean this information then? Simply from the stiff, overly polite greeting they give each other in their very first scene. That one moment tells us pretty much all we need to know. In lesser hands we might get entire scenes expositing what Craven shows in a single bit of stage direction. Craven simply provides a few small indicators of the character’s histories and trusts us fill in the blanks while he moves on to more interesting things.
All this doesn’t just make the scenes of characters simply talking to each other as interesting as the stuff with Freddy. By grounding the characters so well, by indicating that they have actual lives outside of the confines of this story, the film becomes that much scarier. These are characters we like, characters we believe in and feel we know, characters we could imagine meeting on the street or seeing in some harmless romantic comedy, facing down a supernatural serial killer. It’s as if a John Hughes film got hijacked by a demon (Some Kind of Horrible).
Now, you might notice that I’ve gotten rather far into this review without giving more than a passing mention to the character everyone knows from this film. Well, as presented in this movie Freddy’s a rather different character than he came to be known to the public at large (it frequently happens that movie monsters that become ingrained in the public consciousness do so in a very altered form from their original concept: see also Godzilla, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Mummy among others). For one thing, as noted, he has surprisingly little screen-time. Of course, a little goes a long way and Freddy’s presence hangs over the whole film, but he probably clocks in at barely fifteen minutes that he’s actually on screen. What’s more, he’s usually seen in the shadows or cloaked in darkness: only rarely do you get a good look at him. And he doesn’t have a lot of dialogue either. Later on he became most famous for the stupid puns he cracked while dispatching victims, but here, thankfully, they are entirely absent. He taunts his victims, to be sure, but more by his actions than his words.
That’s another key difference between this film and the later entries: at no point here do they even try to make Freddy funny. He’s mean, nasty, and scary throughout, as he ought to be (as other reviewers have noted, there’s something really disturbing about the way a child-murderer morphed into a buffoonish clown).
I must admit, I’ve never been very taken with Freddy as a character; he’s basically just a rotten old bully who’s gotten his hands on too much power. Not a whole lot to sink your teeth into. No, Freddy’s not too interesting as a character; he’s fascinating, however, as a symbol.
I think there’s a tendency among movie critics and commentators to interpret all horror movies, and especially those from the 1980s, in Freudian, sexual terms. I’m not necessarily condemning that approach, since I’ve seen it used to draw out some interesting interpretations, but I think it’s more often used as a kind of critical cop out: rather like calling all science fiction films from the 1950s metaphors for the Cold War. It often stunts the examination of a film by making the viewer assume he knows what it’s about and therefore not put any effort into looking for other themes in the movie.
There certainly is sexual symbolism in Freddy, with the way he uses his tongue and the rape-like manner he attacks his female victims. But I think that’s only a part of it. Freddy feeds on the subconscious frustrations and fears of his victims, just like any dream. His victims, it is implied, are vulnerable to him partially because of their disordered lives: Tina’s mother is neglectful and lives with an asshole boyfriend, Rod is a delinquent, Nancy’s mother is an alcoholic, etc. (it’s significant, I think, that Glen is the character with the most stable life and he’s the one who seems least affected by the whole situation). What’s more, Freddy doesn’t just feed on this disorder, he makes it worse. For instance, Nancy’s mother, Marge, who already drinks too much, retreats further and further into the bottle as the film goes on and the truth becomes increasingly hard to face, until she has practically lost all contact with reality.
Sexual expression, of course, is the partial result (and origin) of this disorder (the first murder occurs right after the victim had sex), but so is violence (Rod’s temper and switchblade, for instance, which lead to him being arrested for the first murder), neglect (as shown by Marge’s drinking), soured relationships, and ruined reputations. Freddy grows stronger on this increasing disorder and fear in his victim’s lives, and as he does so the nightmare extends more and more into the real world. Freddy, therefore, could be said to represent the unconscious frustration the characters are feeling, which, if allowed to, will eventually consume and destroy them.
But there’s another aspect to him. Freddy was created in the first place by the sins of the parents (his back-story is fairly well known, but just in case you haven’t heard it I’ll leave it unsaid). He is, quite literally, a bad memory come to life. I’ve noted elsewhere that Slasher movies are primarily about the fear of the past and Freddy is the clearest expression of that fear. One of the reasons, I think, that he’s such a potent figure here is that we can easily imagine him representing any number of mistakes which parents in the real world pass on to their children: the drug addiction or sexual history that ruined the child’s health, the financial mistakes that mean the child has no inheritance, the past crime that might suddenly come up again, the long-ago infidelity that robbed the child of an intact home. The scene of Marge telling Nancy who Freddy is could easily be imagined as a very different “I need to tell you something” conversation.
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Nightmare grows scarier and more disturbing the more you think about it: how much is Freddy an expression of the characters’ subconscious? Is it possible that he only does what they unconsciously want him to do? Does he kill them due to their self-loathing (or, even worse, do they subconsciously hate each other)? Certainly he gains his power from his victims, that much is explicitly stated; but is it accidental or, subconsciously, intentional?
Craven clearly shows a familiarity with dream analysis and deploys his knowledge to great effect: there are any number of very interesting interpretations that could be ascribed to this film. Personally, I think of Freddy as a personification of the actual, pure evil that assaults and destroys lives (note what the teacher says about “Hamlet” in the English class scene). The really scary (yet also hopeful) thing is that this evil comes, ultimately, from within ourselves…
As you can see, this is a rich, intelligent movie that rewards repeated viewings and careful attention to detail. Whole essays could be written just about the different symbolism in this film and what it might mean.
Performance wise, this isn’t really an actor’s film but Craven draws some nicely believable performances out of the cast. The stand out, of course, is Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, who sells both her blinding terror and her great courage and strength and really makes her a heroine worth rooting for. The whole film pretty much rests on her shoulders and Langenkamp rises marvelously to the challenge. Sadly, she never had much of a career outside this movie, relegated mostly to TV appearances and a couple more Nightmare films (not coincidentally, the three films in which she appears are widely considered to be by far the best of the series). Add her to the list of beautiful, talented actresses who inexplicably never made it big.
Johnny Depp likewise does a surprisingly good job in his first film role (actually first acting role: he had come to watch a friend audition and was mostly cast because the producer’s daughter thought he was ‘dreamy’).* He manages an interesting balancing act of making Glen somewhat of a loser, but nonetheless letting us see why Nancy likes him. The two have a charming chemistry and are clearly real friends as well as boyfriend-girlfriend. Their scenes together are, in my opinion, some of the best in the film.
The other roles are similarly well done: Amanda Wyss as Tina projects real vulnerability and pathos. Jsu Garcia’s Rod likewise manages to be both a jerk and sympathetic at the same time, and his plight during the film’s first act is surprisingly moving. Ronee Blakley as Marge does a good job of saying one thing while showing that she really believes another (while convincingly growing more and more unstable as time goes on), and John Saxon as Nancy’s dad is blankly skeptical without being wholly unsympathetic. I’m also partial to Charles Fleischer’s brief role as a doctor who examines Nancy’s dreams…and finds them a bit more than he (or his equipment) bargained for.
And Robert Englund? Well, what can be said? He owns the role completely, able to say more with a wicked smile than a lesser actor could say with pages of dialogue. Looking back on his performance in this film, I find I mostly remember his eyes. Like Langenkamp, Englund can wield his eyes to devastating effect. But it’s not just his eyes: Englund does some great body acting here as well, moving in a broad, exaggerated manner that somehow just doesn’t look right. His voice too creates some interesting effects, because it keeps changing: in one scene it’ll be high and breathy, in another deep and guttural. All this serves to emphasize and remind us that Freddy isn’t a real person, but an exaggerated nightmare monster.
It’s the role Englund was born to play, and like with Columbo or Indiana Jones it’s impossible to imagine any other actor playing Freddy (a fact that the recent remake made painfully clear). Interestingly enough, there was originally some debate about whether they should use an actor to play Freddy at all: at first there was talk of using a puppet, and then of just using a stuntman. Craven, fortunately, decided that only a real actor would sell the character and picked out the little-known, but classically trained Englund (fun trivia fact: years previously Englund had auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker. When he was turned down for the part, he suggested to his friend Mark Hamill that he should try for it…).**
Now a word on the effects: it’s an odd thing about special effects, but the complexity involved really has no bearing on how effective they are. Usually whenever I hear some computer technician talking about the effects in a film these days he’ll say things like “yeah, it was so hard to make the muscles move under the skin, and to work out how that should look, and we researched it for days…” and I’ll think “I don’t care, it does absolutely nothing for me.” Whereas here it’s more like “We just had a cloth-covered hole in the wall and had one of the effects guys lean out” and I’m thinking “that is such an awesome shot!” It’s not how complicated or difficult they are, it’s how well they are deployed that makes special effects interesting.
Anyway, there are a lot of effects in this film, but most of them are fairly straightforward if you stop to consider how they were done. But they are deployed so well that you don’t really bother to think about how they were done, you’re just mesmerized by the spectacle (one scene in particular stands out effects wise: it’s basically a grotesque parody of Fred Astaire’s “You’re All the World to Me” number). There’s an energy and creativity here, like what you see in a stage magician: a real sense of the innovation that went into creating this illusion.
The question everyone asks about horror films “is it scary” is hard to answer, as is “is it funny” regarding comedies. Both are very individual reactions to things. However, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that yes, this is a very scary movie. The fear of the nightmare is a universal terror, and the thought of a nightmare coming true…Well, anyone who’s read Voyage of the Dawn Treader knows what I’m talking about. The film provides some shocking jump scares, creeping dread, extreme suspense, and just simply horrific sights in its attempt to frighten the audience. As another reviewer has noted, it touches nerves most movies don’t even seem to know are there.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that in my opinion this movie contains one of the all-time scariest single scenes in any movie. I won’t reveal what happens, of course; all I’ll say is that you will know it when you see it.
Now to address the ending. I’m going to try to be vague here, but consider this a SPOILER WARNING.
As the film stands now, it ends with a brutal triumph of evil over good. The ending makes zero sense in the context of the rest of the film, is highly unpleasant, almost painful, and renders the entire film nothing more than a nasty shaggy dog story: a complete waste of time.
The original ending, on the other hand, now that is a thing of beauty. As originally conceived, the movie ends with the total triumph of good over evil. In most movies, especially most horror movies, even if good ultimately triumphs it’s less a vindication of good and more a relief from evil: no greater good is accomplished, the happy ending means that a particular evil can’t cause anymore harm (The Exorcist is a good example of this type of ending). Not so here. Here good is not only vindicated as more powerful than evil, evil is shown to be, ultimately, nothing. It has no power of its own. The evil isn’t just defeated, it is undone (although the film does end with an ambiguous warning that the evil might not be permanently eradicated). This is an INCREDIBLY satisfying ending, fitting perfectly with everything that was implied or stated outright before it. It is a happy ending, but still a little creepy and ambiguous: the ideal ending for a horror film.
So, you have an artistically resonant, satisfying, and audience-pleasing ending on one hand and a stupid, cruel, pointless ending that makes the audience feel like they’ve just been kicked in the gut on the other. Which do you choose? Why, the one that allows you to make lame sequels for the next decade, of course. Oh, and Robert Shaye? You aren’t fooling anyone with that story about how ‘this was the audience preferred ending’ you know.
There are two ways to watch this film to get the most out of it: the first is to stop the film before the end (about when Nancy is walking towards the car is a good spot). The other is to do what I do and use editing software to splice the correct ending on instead.
In any case, ending aside, this is a marvelous horror film; smart, thought-provoking, scary, and completely engaging from beginning to end. Watch it when you don’t plan on going to bed anytime in the near future.
*Another fun trivia fact: that friend Depp went to watch audition? That was a young actor named Jackie Earle Haley. Two-and-a-half decades later he was the actor picked to replace Robert Englund as the new Freddy Krueger. To be fair, he probably was the best choice they could have made, though this just serves to further emphasize how wrong Krueger-without-Englund is.
**Which begs the question: Lucas, my boy! What about that “Star Wars/Nightmare On Elm Street” crossover the world’s been clamoring for? Surely you can see the artistic merit in a scene in which Freddy Krueger meets Jar Jar Binks?
Final Rating: 4.5/5. Even with a truly horrible ending, it's one of the best of its breed. Highly recommended.
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