A Nightmare on Elm Street

Thinking back on it, it's kind of ironic how the first Nightmare on Elm Street film I watched was technically the last. I grew up in a Christian home, and I still profess to be a Christian, but my mother was the kind of person who didn't really allow the stuff of the occult into our home. One day I was watching Psycho III on television and my mother wouldn't let me watch anymore after she caught me pretending to be Norman Bates, stabbing people left and right. So I never got the opportunity to rent horror movies and enjoy them in that manner.

Another point of irony is that I always caught horror movies on the television during AMC's Halloween run. One night, I was lucky enough to catch Freddy's Dead playing on the channel, and I got a chance to watch it from beginning to end, edited for TV of course.  I remember it being a lot of fun back then, but even know it was my first time seeing an actual Nightmare film, I've known all about Freddy from when I was a kid.

Years later, I nabbed the opportunity to see the original, and I was dazzled by how great it actually was. Regardless of what horror fans of old think, these films really do have a place in the pantheon, next to the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s and the atomic creations of the '50s, to the more down to earth, frightening next door neighbor types of the '60s, including Peeping Tom, Psycho, and Night of the Hunter. Freddy is a horror icon, and his terror will survive for years to come.

But lets REALLY dig in. A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns Tina--oh wait she's dead, never mind. I forget this is a Craven film. He always makes you think that the main character is Person A, but then that person dies early and you're left with Person B. In this case, Person B is Nancy. Nancy is an all around nice girl. Maybe she's as promiscuous as Tina, but she's never really given a chance to let her sexuality shine when she is pushed into such stressful circumstances. You see, her friends are dying one by one, killed in their sleep by a man they've all seen in their dreams. And they don't really know why its happening.

And of course, they all die in horribly painful, brutal ways. You see, Freddy gets his powers from their fear, so instead of just killing them out right, he stalks them in their dreams, much like how Jason or Michael would spend the first 45 minutes of each film stalking their films in real life (Craven taking the tried and true formula and evolving it to suit his needs.) He gives them little slashes of pain now and then, and then when he makes them feel absolutely powerless to stop him, he kills them in the most bloody way imaginable. He guts Tina and drags her across the ceiling, he suffocates and breaks the neck of Rod while he is in jail for Tina's murder. He sucks Glenn into his bed, does God knows what to him in there and spits out ALL of his blood...

It's hard to technically "review" a film I've seen before, many times. I was tempted to go off the beaten path and talk about some deep ass shit, but this is a review, and I am planning on going deeper into the films as a whole after I review them all individually.

I give A Nightmare on Elm Street an A+. It's a classic. If you haven't seen it and you enjoy horror movies you've got issues.