I Remember Freddy: A Nightmare on Elm Street Revisited, 25 Years Later

by Fearless Young Orphan

The 25-year anniversary of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (November 9, 1984) makes me feel incredibly old but cheerfully nostalgic (or maybe that's senility sneaking in on me). Perhaps one must be somewhere around the age of 40 to really appreciate NoES. I watched it again a few years ago and enjoyed it, but realized that what I was enjoying more was my memory of the good old days.

Not that it's a bad movie, far from it. NoES is a solid, fun horror movie, more imaginative than most, with some unforgettable imagery. Still, it's not brilliant or perfect, and cobbles on an ending that is a real head-scratcher. Younger viewers may wonder what all the fuss was about, so I will try to provide a little perspective.

In 1978 John Carpenter made Halloween, the original slasher movie (though it is, by today's standards, a model of restraint using long periods of suspense-building and comparatively little actual onscreen gore). Then, in 1980, Friday the 13th appeared, upping the ante and the body count on the dead teenager movie.

As is always the case, the commercial success of these movies spawned a legion of imitations. In the years between 1978 and 1984, 800,000 copycat slasher movies were released and they varied in plot somewhat less than the usual Harlequin romance fare. A group of teens are picked off, one by one, in various states of undress with various sharp and improbable objects until finally one sobbing virgin makes it out alive. Most teens during this time watched these more as body-count comedies rather than horror movies, because they were never scary. My friends and I watched almost every damned one of them. This was the marvelous new age of the VCR and you could rent these things and watch them at home!

But even idiot teenagers can have common sense and taste, or at least a craving for something new and different, so A Nightmare on Elm Street arrived in our world as a little miracle. This was a dead teenager movie, yes, but with a three-dimensional plot that was actually frightening. Freddy Krueger, the evil spirit of a child murderer, wreaks vengeance on the children of the vigilantes who killed him, picking the kids off one by one as they sleep.

Recently I saw Paranormal Activity and I understand why that creepy and rather understated little film has become a horror hit: because it's about things happening to people while they sleep. You're never more vulnerable than when you're snuggled up in bed and unconscious to the world.

Freddy Krueger operates under these terms, killing teens in their ookiest nightmares with some cheesy but effective FX. Robert Englund plays Freddy with a good deal more menace in the original film than he did in later entries, when Freddy became a lousy murderous comedian spouting off puns like "Don't lose your head!" Our heroine is Nancy, who is smarter, braver and angrier than your average teen screamer, and she fights Freddy on his turf with admirable ingenuity. And yes, a very young Johnny Depp is in it. He is the prettiest girl in the film, up until he dies horribly in a geyser of blood.

Teen horror fans ate this movie up. We loved it. In my personal group of friends I am sure that we watched it six times. The movie made the horror genre take a left turn from our desensitization. People younger than me may recall that director Craven performed the same trick again with Scream in 1996, but I believe that NoES's impact was larger, not least of all because it made Scream possible.

I cannot judge the real quality of NoES without factoring in how much I loved it as a bloodthirsty kid. The power of nostalgia is formidable, which is why we hear so much howling about the raping of childhoods whenever anything is revisited and changed. I was very skeptical when I heard they were remaking NoES and I was particularly horrified to hear Michael Bay's name involved. Learning that Jackie Earle Haley is playing Freddy Krueger gave me hope, because he's scary just standing there. Regardless of how that turns out, the original NoES is a prominent landmark from my early teen years and it will always be indulged as one of my favorite horror movies.