By Michael Lyons
Nightmares are an unsettling and ambiguous part of our nightly sleep patterns that have been examined for centuries. As such a disturbing part of a good night’s sleep, many times forgotten by morning, they’re an aspect of our life that filmmakers have had challenges capturing on screen...until Wes Craven came along.
The masterful horror film director gave nightmare images a feel, a place and a persona with his 1984 film “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Additionally, the film gave the world Freddy Kreuger, who has sliced his way into the zeitgeist and pop culture, becoming one of the horror genres most indelible characters.
This fall, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” marks its 35th anniversary, making this Halloween Season the perfect time to drift off and look back at what has become a horror movie masterpiece.
The film, borrowing the horror movie/slasher model of such late-70’s and early-80’s films as “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th,” centers on teenager Nancy Thompson (Heather Lagenkamp) who, along with her friends, finds herself having recurring dreams where she is pursued by a badly scarred man, wielding a glove of razor sharp finger knives. She soon finds that her friends (one of them played by Johnny Depp in his first major film role) are having the same dreams.
Nancy’s mother shares with her that the man is Freddy Kreuger, a brutal child murderer who was burned alive by vigilante parents and now he has come back for the children, coming for them when they sleep, in their nightmares,“picking them off,” one by one. Nancy then looks for a way to fight back and defeat Freddy.
An original and ingenious film, Craven (who was no stranger to horror films at this point, having already directed 1977’s “The Hills Have Eyes” and 1982’s “Swamp Thing”) found a way to make a disturbing aspect of real-life, even more disturbing - “What if you never woke up from a nightmare? What if what happened to you in your nightmare was happening while you sleep?”
The images Craven captures in the film are those disturbing visual gems that make a great horror film great: a grim, unescapable boiler room; feet, literally stuck in the floor, when trying to escape a killer; a chilling nursery rhyme sung hauntingly by children and a room filled with an explosion of blood that is both grotesque and amazing.
Then, there’s the character of Freddy Kreuger. With his scorched and disfigured face, dirty fedora and sweater, the infamous knife glove and gravelly voice filled with demonic glee, he is played brilliantly by Robert England, who has become pigeonholed as the character and is seemingly more than satisfied by that. England has become a main stay at “horror cons” and like Freddy himself, a favorite among fans.
“A Nightmare on Elm Street” opened on November 8, 1984 and was quickly a box-office hit, earning back its meager budget easily and inspiring eight sequels and a remake in 2010. With this success, Freddy has emerged as one of the icons of film horror and an inspiration for parody, cos-players and annual Halloween costumes.
In fact, thirty Five years later, just the mention of the name Freddy Kreuger immediately conjures up nightmarish images...
“...one, two, Freddy’s coming for you...three, four, better lock your door...”
Pleasant dreams, everyone.
Sources:
IMDb
Wikipedia
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