Well, with the release of my New Nightmare review, I really don't have any Nightmare films to review. This is a weird feeling. Sure, I could review Freddy vs. Jason, but I really want to save that for when I finish the Friday the 13th reviews, of which we still have quite a few to get through... including my least favorite one this year. However, this creates a gap in my reviews for Horror Month that hasn't existed since at least 2015. What exactly could I fill it with?
...
...
...what do you mean I only reviewed the remake, not the original?!
Yeah, I have no idea how I could have overlooked this. I guess my brain must have overlooked it when going through the list of films I've reviewed and my brain said "Oh, I already did that" and thought nothing else of it, going on to Freddy's Revenge and thus further on into the series and now having gone through all of them... except for the original.
I will never be able to forgive myself for this faux pas.
Even so, what the hell could I even say about the original that hasn't already been said in the almost forty years since the film first hit theaters? It's groundbreaking even within the genre that it comes from. In an era where silent killers like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees were ruling the box office, along comes A Nighmare on Elm Street with something... different.
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| "How many fingers am I holding up?" |
Granted, much like the second film, the first film isn't too different from the slasher films of the day. Freddy isn't the pun-spewing, chattering jackass that he becomes in the later movies, but there is definitely a great deal more personality than either Michael or Jason were able to give. With those two, they feel more like forces of nature or people carrying out the business of the day. Freddy, though, he is a man who loves what he does and he does it with a song in his heart. Even if that song is the screams of dying teenagers.
While he does talk in the movie, it's very rarely and always with a surprisingly devastating effect when he does so. Robert Englund is, I'm just gonna say it, scary as hell in this movie.
I could recap the plot, but I'm pretty sure everyone knows it by now: A girl named Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends are all having the same terrible nightmare about a man in a red and green sweater, with knives for fingers, who stalks them through a boiler room. Kind of creepy how they're all having the exact same nightmare, isn't it? With her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp), Nancy attempts to assuage the fears of her best friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) with a sleepover. With the return of Tina's on again, off again boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri), all seems well... until Tina is thrown around like a rag doll in her sleep and severely cut apart. Rod flees, pursued by the Springwood Police, but there's no way that he could be the killer... right?
The marks on Tina match those terrible knives that they've been seeing in their dreams, and Nancy begins to unravel a dark secret that the parents of Springwood have been keeping from her and from all the rest of the teenagers. A man by the name of Fred Krueger, a child murderer who got off on a technicality, was burned alive by the parents of Springwood. They thought he was dead, and they were right... and he became something much, much worse. With her friends being murdered one by one, Nancy must find a way to stop Fred Krueger once and for all, before this nightmare becomes her reality.
Director Wes Craven wanted to do something different from the usual slasher films of the 1980s as I said above, and this is what he came up with. Burned skinned rather than a mask, and the now-iconic bladed glove as Freddy's weapon of choice rather than a machete or a kitchen knife. So, from the jump, Freddy was intended to be unique and that indeed did show. Even details about him like the sweater's colors, red and green, were chosen because of how those two colors together are more difficult for the eye to process and so added that subconscious edge of discomfort to the character for audiences.
As Red Letter Media put it: "You may not have noticed it, but your brain did".
Given that this was the early days of the franchise, the kills are a little more simplistic than they would be in later entries. No roach motels or nails on a chalkboard to the deaf kid or (god help us all) the power glove. Instead, the deaths are a little more straightforward save for that of Glen. The being pulled into the bed only to be spewed out in a shower of blood and gore is not only fantastically done, it's probably one of the best deaths in the entire series and done all with practical effects as well.
Now, of course, there is the matter to consider if this is better than the 2010 remake. Definitely yes, obviously, but it's important to note something here. Wes Craven's original script called for Freddy to be a child molester as well as a child murderer, but New Line apparently vetoed him on that and basically up until Freddy vs. Jason all we had was implication. This is why that particular revelation in the 2010 remake doesn't bother me at all. Why? Well, let me apply a quote from my review of the 2010 movie to explain:
There's also people who take issue with Freddy being changed in this version from a child murderer into a child molester. I don't. The fact is this - Freddy Krueger is a deranged, murderous, psychopath. He was that was in the originals, he's that way here, and it's amazing that people seem to think that a man who was burned to death and kills people in their dreams for the hell of it has anything remotely resembling standards. I know why, of course. It's because - as I said before - people have fallen in love with the representations of Freddy in the sequels where he's all witty an charming, rather than the original. The joker and pun-maker who kills rather than the former child killer who kills.
I'd say it's like the mindless devotion that Batman gets, but at least that can have an argument made for it: Batman's ultimately (for the most part) heroic...if he's not being written by Frank Miller. People who are screaming "Betrayal!" at the portrayal of Freddy in this movie, saying it's nothing like the original, are trying to defend the "good name" of a deranged psychopath.
Hope that clears it up for everyone. The fact that that was Craven's original intention kind of makes the complaining about it even more ridiculous. Now granted, my attitude on the remake has soured somewhat upon reviewing the film, but I will still hold that that change is not a bad one. I will say that the overuse of CGI for effects that don't need CGI was bad and shouldn't have been done.
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| Another case of practical being better than CGI. |
Getting back to the original, it's a classic and for very good reason. It broke the mold of the then-hip trend of slasher films with their silent killers like the aforementioned Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises. Instead of a faceless, voiceless killer that killed simply because it was what they did, along came Freddy with not only some personality, but a more intense (if direct) motive: revenge.
You feel for Nancy and you want her to succeed against Freddy as she contends with not just him, but also her alcoholic mother falling into a talespin, her father (the legendary John Saxon) not believing her, and - of course - her friends getting picked off one by one.
The only thing I don't really like about it is the ending, which is something I have in common with Wes Craven himself. Craven intended for this movie to be a one-off. Literally a nightmare that the main character wakes up from at the end, and that seems to be what is happening in the film's final sequence after Nancy has turned her back on Freddy and taken away his power.
...and then she gets into a car with Glen, Tina, and Rod that the top comes up over (looking now red and green-striped) and the doors lock before their driven off to who knows where while a mannequin of Nancy's mother is pulled through the small window in the Thompson's front door by Freddy's gloved hand.
If you didn't know the franchise that was going to spring up from this, it just kind of feels remarkably cheap to have Nancy overcome such odds just to have it all snatched away again in the end. Honestly, even knowing where it goes from there, it still feels very cheap. Ultimately, the series would go through some highs and some really, really bad lows. I hate to be the one to say it, since I know a lot of people put a lot of work into the movies (I've reviewed all of the currently existing Nightmare films as of this writing), but this is a concept that has worked all of three times - the original three movies, after that (with the exception of New Nightmare) it's just... not good.
Next year, being that I have - again - reviewed all of the films in this franchise with the exception of Freddy vs. Jason, we won't be seeing Mr. Krueger again for a little while, at least within Reel Thoughts. I'll have to find something else to fill the gap, I wonder what it will be...
...but, while I'm debating that (and maybe seeing a merchant about a puzzle box), you get ready for next week, where we'll be getting into another slasher film that is actually a complete lie.
In 1989, Jason Voorhees finally made the move from Crystal Lake... to Vancouver. Sure, there was actual New York for five seconds, but it's otherwise a complete and utter lie. Also, the movie sucks harder than the vacuum of space - which Jason will ironically be going to in a few films' time and it will be far less of a lie than this piece of trash.
Next week... it's Jason Takes Manhattan.
God help us all...
A Nightmare on Elm Street, of course, is brought to us by New Line Cinema.
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