Harefooted Halloween: A Nightmare on Elm Street

What I Liked: The concept of a killer who murders you in your dreams is fantastic.  Everyone needs to sleep so putting yourself in harms way is unavoidable.  Plus everyone has had nightmares which makes the situation very relatable.  What Psycho did for showers this does for sleep.

Freddy Krueger, or simply Fred Krueger (Robert Englund (The Phantom of the Opera (1989))) as they call him in this installment, has a wonderful design.  The burnt face, knife hand, ratty red and green sweater and fedora all fit perfectly together.  It’s remarkable that this character is fully formed from the get go.  The only thing is he doesn’t speak very much here compared to later films which makes him more mysterious.

The dreams are nicely restrained to relatively straightforward setups like a boiler room maze, an alleyway outside a house, a school, etc.  Everyone else takes the approach of having crazy shit go on all over the place ‘cause you know, anything can happen in a dream.  Wes Craven (My Soul to Take) reigns it in so it’s only slightly off from reality and I appreciate that.  He also lets you know when you’re in a dream with certain giveaways like pumping in some fog or having someone mouth words but not say them aloud.  It’s a tad annoying when a filmmaker tries to fool the audience into thinking they’re in the real world but then something wacky happens and they realize they’re actually dreaming.  Only once does Craven pull this so I’ll count that as a success.

*Spoiler on this paragraph but I’m about to reference the two most famous scenes from the movie (and maybe the entire franchise) so there isn’t much danger to keep reading*  The deaths of Tina (Amanda Wyss (Silverado)) and Glen (Johnny Depp (The Ninth Gate)) are spectacularly imaginative and frightening.  Tina gets slashed and dragged up the bedroom wall and onto the ceiling but in the real world you can’t see Krueger so it seems like demonic possession.  The effect holds up very well and has such a spooky look to it.  One of the most amazing deaths in all of cinema in my opinion.  Glen gets sucked into his own bed and a fountain of blood streams up from it and pools on the ceiling.  It’s another great unforgettable setup that reminds me a little of The Shining blood elevator.  These two scenes alone are worth watching the movie for but at the same time they don’t overshadow the rest of the production which speaks to the quality of the entire piece.

What I Didn’t Like: Those damn booby traps are kinda stupid.  Wes Craven has admitted to having a thing for them and has used trap devices in several of his films.  Here they feel really out of place and make Krueger look like a bumbling fool.

The music is inconsistent.  While the main theme is spot on and has good atmosphere the rest of the tracks are cheap 80’s synth and drum machine schlock.  The ideas in the picture are operating at a higher level but the music falls short and doesn’t fit all that well.

Ok this is a very slight nitpick but I always found the title a bit of a mouthful and oddly specific.  I suppose it’s better than something more generic like Nightmares, Don’t Fall Asleep, Wake Up Dead or some shit.  But the name of the street isn’t totally important to the plot so it’s a strange choice to highlight it.

Overall Impressions: Yea, it’s a masterpiece.  You can tell this wasn’t someone’s first rodeo because there’s a measured feel to the approach of the material.  Craven knew how far to take the dream sequences without making them cartoony, how to make a mundane task like sleeping terrifying, how Krueger should look and act, what his backstory should be and how to craft characters you care about.

Maybe the most impressive aspect of this movie is how it turns the slasher genre on its head which had fallen out of fashion by 1984.  You don’t have your usual group of obnoxious teens behaving badly and being punished for it.  In fact one of them gets falsely arrested for Krueger’s first murder and that drives the rest of the story.  And the villain isn’t a straight ahead ghost or demon exactly but someone who lives in your dreams.  He can interact with real world objects, like the bedsheets that turn into a noose, but ultimately you need to be asleep for this guy to strike the deathblow.  Not only is this all interesting stuff but it all works too.