A Nightmare on Elm Street: Horrifyingly Smart

I think what struck me the most about Wes Craven's horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street was the amount of creativity I perceived went into the sheer variety of scary things Freddy Krueger can do. He isn't always the unseen figure that gets the unenviable job of skulking around going bump in the night. Rather, he invades dreams, and in a dream, anything is possible. Freddy can morph through the ceiling. He can suddenly appear behind impossibly thin trees. He can even appear in the bathtub while characters are taking a bath, that pervert. This movie takes the memo of nightmare and runs a cinematic marathon with it, testing the limits of creativity.

The horrific tale of Nancy Thompson, the high school kids of Elm Street, and the murderous man in the hat haunting their dreams has gone down in cinema history as the ultimate underdog story of a movie that could against all odds, becoming legendary when, for all intents and purposes, it should have been hamstrung by it's tiny budget. I'm late to the game, but having just watched it today, A Nightmare on Elm Street certainly lived up to the expectations I had of it as a smart, intoxicatingly unique horror movie whose creativity carved out a niche for it. I loved how this movie didn't shy away from making bold choices. One such choice was the escalation from Freddy being able to hurt people in their dreams to being able to hurt them in real life. I never got the sense that any one character in this movie was safe from Freddy, a wonderfully uncomfortable position to be in as a viewer.

Similarly satisfying were the rules of this world, rules very clearly demonstrated and mostly followed faithfully, rules explained not through long-winded expository sentences, but instead by subsequent scenes of visual show-don't-tell explanations, one of the basic rules of good cinema. And despite being bound by these cinematic rules, Freddy is never a predictable foe. While I personally prefer the cold, silent, seemingly unstoppable Michael Myers as far as big bads go, Freddy Krueger's unpredictability is his greatest asset as a villain. I was equal parts repulsed by how horrible and intrigued by how spontaneous he was. On the hero side of the coin, I was drawn to Nancy's resourcefulness. Her elaborate plan to defeat Freddy obviously had thought put into it by Craven and his writing crew, and it's nice to know exactly what she's planning to do to defeat Freddy and be able to gauge a level of success and failure in our own minds. This creates a much-needed sense of apprehension for the final showdown between the two, a valuable thing for a horror movie to have.

Now, if you've seen Nightmare, you'll likely be able to predict my biggest complaint about it, and to the surprise of hopefully no one, my biggest beef is with the movie's ending, a horribly conceived plot twist antithetical to every goal it had set out to accomplish. I did some digging on the matter and, unsurprisingly, discovered that studio interference had indeed changed the original ending, in some ways cutting the legs out from under A Nightmare on Elm Street. To state it bluntly, I hated this twist. I hated, hated, hated it, partially because it completely undercut everything that the movie had been working toward for an hour and a half, and partially because it accomplished next to nothing in the grand scheme of the narrative arc. But to be fair, the twist wasn't Craven's doing, and I'm reviewing his movie, not Robert Shaye's. But please, never let Robert Shaye within five miles of a screenplay ever again.

I wasn't aware that studio interference was a problem in 1980s cinema, at least not to the level I saw in this film. But otherwise, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a great movie, and it's easy to see why it's become a classic. Its scares are both effective and creative, its story a simple but enticing one. Once again, for as much as I love Michael Myers and for as much as I will always love Halloween, Michael is predictable. Not so with Freddy Krueger, who is much more difficult to anticipate. The fact that he operates through dreams gives him a lot of unique weapons to put in his scares arsenal, and the simplicity of this movie's story helps it maintain focus on what about it really works and what about it really matters. Moreover, this movie is simply smart, and just when you think it can't possibly mine its premise for another smart setpiece, it does. I can't honestly say that it surpassed my expectations, but given the legacy of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it probably didn't have to.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - 9/10

Psalm 91:1-6