From the moment I opened my wife's Christmas present this past Christmas Eve, I realized I was dreaming. We decided to open up our gifts on the evening of Christmas Eve instead of the next morning, because I had to be at work early. The gift was wrapped in gold, if I recall correctly, and was shaped like a blu-ray. I just couldn't quite figure out what it was.
It turns out that my wife is a frickin' evil genius. The gift was something I wasn't really expecting, but which I could appreciate very much: My wife had bought for me the complete Nightmare on Elm Street Collection. I'd practically watched the whole series before, more or less. I've seen the first film many times, and I'd seen the third, Freddy's Dead, and New Nightmare, and bits and pieces of Freddy's Revenge, but to have them all to watch and enjoy at any moment was almost a child hood dream come true.
I know I always go into great detail about those precious moments, when, as a kid, I would accompany my mother to the grocery store where they had a movie rental in the center. While she shopped for her food I always rushed to the rentals to look at horror movies. It was almost like pornography for me, because I had to make sure for some reason no one in my family knew what I was looking at, lest I get into trouble. Looking around making sure I'm not watched, I would peruse the different horror movies on the shelf, seeing movies that would actually haunt me for the rest of my days until fairly recently: Return to Horror High, the many Friday the 13th movies, Night of the Living Dead and its two sequels (since Land hadn't been released yet) and of course, Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
The three movie series that made up the biggest parts of my horror movie Muse were the Halloween series, the Nightmare series, and the Friday the 13th series. I was fascinated with the different movies, and in my head I always imagined that they got scarier and scarier and more mind-bogglingly terrifying as they went along. Of course, what I realize now is that some movies can actually be quite hard to swallow in terms of their subpar quality, and indeed past a certain point these series kind of fell from their high mountains.
However, the one that is the most consisten in terms of actual good quality are the Nightmare films. Their sequences of dreams and Freddy's nightmare land that makes an appearance in almost every installment is still kind of terrifying despite the fact that the movies get a little bit cheesier as they go along. It's the imagery, and not Freddy's countenance that carry the sequels as they continue. Despite his character becoming less frightening, his mind is still a terrifying place where he puts each of his victims, and the moments where he shares with the horrified characters the souls of those he has imprisoned in torment forever are still very frightening.
Jesus, this is just an introduction and its gone on far too long. Anyway, the point of all this is that I have committed to sitting down and watching the series in order over the next couple of nights. I've watched through the third installment, so I'm going to try to write up some thoughts on the films for now and then continue my watch, but I'm having a blast so far, and when I get to talking about each movie individually I'll be able to better bring up some key talking points I want to discuss.
I hope that you'll look forward to: Inception: The Horror Series.
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