Image source: Photo by Lucas Pezeta on Pexels
I saw a TikTok today of a woman inhaling deeply and saying, only in New England can you smell fall in the air. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, and it is only the middle of August, but with no humidity in the air, I can definitely feel that autumn is just around the corner. And I’m not just saying that because spooky season is my favorite season ever.
With Halloween fewer than 70 days away, I think it’s the perfect time to start up my scary movie watching. Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve fallen into the nostalgia trap, and I keep wanting to revisit the scary movies that terrified me as a kid. I’ve written about my rewatch of Stephen King’s IT, which held up, somewhat. Today, I got around to watching the 1984 version of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, now showing on Max.
I first watched Nightmare a few years after it first hit theaters. I was obsessed with Johnny Depp after his stint on 21 Jump Street, a mid-80s police procedural where a handsome and way-too-old Johnny Depp went undercover as a high school student. I tracked down everything that he was in, and that included his movie debut, Nightmare. But, a few minutes in, I quickly realized that I was going to be putting myself through quite the horror ringer to catch a glimpse of my crush.
I remembered being terrified when the movie first came out. I mean, it was a movie where you could get slashed to death by a horrifically burned maniac if you went to sleep. It was ingenious, really—take something that we all have to do, go to sleep, and turn it into the stuff of nightmares.
I wanted to see if the scares held up after all these years. Well, the answer, after my rewatch, is yes and no. The first thing that stuck out like a rusty razor blade was the dated music. Chock full of 80s synthesizers, the main theme no longer had the power to frighten me. Why? Well, everytime I heard it, I could only think of the Will Smith version, “A Nightmare on My Street,” which sampled the main theme liberally. I mean, how scared could I really be if I kept hearing the lyrics, “He’s burnt up like a weenie, and his name is Fred”?
But aside from the cheesy music, I had also forgotten that this was the epitome of 80s slasher flicks, and I honestly was never a huge fan of those. Horror movies full of half-naked teenagers getting brutally murdered after sleeping with each other? Blech—I was always going to be grossed out by the weirdly sadistic puritanism of these horror movies.
As the movie went on, however, the parts that truly spooked me as a kid came back to haunt me again. When the heroine, Nancy (played by the “scream queen,” Heather Lagenkamp) struggles to stay awake in English class, she starts to nod off at her desk. A student, who had been reading at the front of the class, starts intoning in monotone, and then you see Nancy’s dead friend Tina standing in a bloody body bag at the classroom door.
This sequence, where Tina is dragged through the empty school hallways by an invisible monster has always terrified me. The idea that you could be experiencing this extreme terror in broad daylight in a classroom full of kids and your teacher curdled my blood. It exactly replicated those night terrors I used to get where I would dream I was waking up and then couldn’t breathe or scream. Being terrified despite the bright sun shining is a theme illustrated masterfully by Ari Aster in the brilliant, Midsommar, a horror movie that creepily unfurls in the sunshine- and flower-filled fields of rural Sweden.
As Nightmare proceeds, the line between dreams and real life begins to blur. Nancy goes without sleep for seven days (she notes in the movie that the record is eleven), and her sanity and reliability as a protagonist begin to waver and shimmer. Is there really a serial killer back from the dead? One that can kill you in your dreams?
The final set piece has Nancy reading up on ambush and booby trap tactics, and with this movie, we see the burgeoning “badass” final girl trope; you know, the girl who doesn’t actually die in the slasher movie. Of course, it’s implied that Nancy is virginal, so by the rules of 80s teen slasher movies, we know that she won’t die. This theme of punishment for premarital and nontraditional sex is explored in the terrifying 2014 horror movie, It Follows, a movie that I highly recommend.
If it seems like I keep bouncing forward to better, more recent horror movies, I guess it’s because A Nightmare on Elm Street, as cheesy as it was, has actually inspired quite a few horror movies. It spawned eight more sequels (and I’ve really had no desire to see any of them) that each became sillier and campier as they went along. Its director, Wes Craven, actually revisited the slasher genre in 1996 when he released Scream, a revamp of the genre that was much more meta and self-aware. And Joss Whedon took a satirical look at the slasher movie with Cabin in the Woods, a horror/comedy that came out in 2011.
Nightmare was the culmination of the slasher genre that began with Halloween and Friday the 13th, movies that played in the background of my 80s childhood. I’d say it’s worth a rewatch or initial watch if only to see a young Johnny Depp get sucked into a bed wearing gigantic 80s headphones.
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