A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
After seeing the first cut of A Nightmare on Elm Street, New Line Cinema head honcho Bob Shaye turned to the movie’s director Wes Craven and asked, ‘Do you think we have a movie in there at all?’ Hardly an inspiring comment and one that feels on reflection to be unjust, given that Shaye’s studio owes a great debt to this movie. Indeed, if it wasn’t for Elm Street, it’s unlikely that New Line would have become the studio that some seventeen years later forged the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) to great critical and commercial success. Before New Line distributed A Nightmare on Elm Street they were just a distribution company for college campuses.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was almost never made. About halfway through filming, New Line lost its deal with the distribution company. As a direct result, they couldn’t pay the cast or crew for two whole weeks until they found another distribution company, however they managed not to lose one crew member. New Line Cinema was saved from bankruptcy by the success of the film, and was jokingly nicknamed ‘the house that Freddy built’.
During the mid Eighties, commercial horror movies had kind of gotten into a rut. With the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), every studio was jumping on the stalk and slash bandwagon. The genre needed a shot in the arm to stop it flagging under a weight of needless and forgettable sequels saturating the marketplace.
That much needed boost came in the form of The Hills Have Eyes (1977) helmer Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is ironic that as a consequence of its success at the box office, taking $25.5million in the States from a $1.8million budget, followed by a massive audience on home video, it too spawned numerous sequels.
Craven claims that he based the movie’s famous anti-hero Freddy Krueger, or just old Fred as he is known in this first instalment, on a kid that bullied him at school and the look of a disfigured tramp that freaked him out as a youngster. With his script all written and ready by 1981, Craven found no one interested in it until New Line Cinema picked it up.
A British Institution, until he defected from the BBC, film critic Barry Norman was not a fan of horror movies. In fact he hated them. Barry used to wait till the end of his programme to lay into, with barely concealed glee, his contempt for the latest horror flick to be released on the market. Imagine then my surprise when in a quick aside he mentions that – at the time – there were only three horror movies that he felt did something different and break the mould. His three were The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street. He may have something there. After Elm Street slipped into the public consciousness, practically every other horror movie had some scene where a character is killed off only to wake up and realise it was just a bad dream.
Although the film was made in 1984 it wasn’t until around September 1985 that it received a UK release. By this time I had read enough about the movie to know that I definitely wanted to see it. The idea of a nightmare killing you was the ultimate horror pitch – given that horror movies are meant to give you sleepless nights, what’s better than a horror concept where ultimately sleep kills! It brought to mind those tales youngsters tell each other of those dreams where you are falling and that if you don’t wake before you hit the bottom then you don’t wake up at all.
Wes Craven claimed to have drawn inspiration for this movie from three news pieces that ran over a year and a half in the LA Times. They were about teenagers from South East Asia that immigrated with their families to the United States all who suffered a series of extreme nightmares that they told their parents about. As most parents do, they just told their kids to get some sleep, even when one by one their collective offspring began to die in their sleep. One teenager was so convinced that he was right in his belief that something really was going to kill him in his dreams, he elected to stay awake and do his best not to sleep. The lad managed to keep this going for a week, despite his parents best efforts to have him take sleeping pills, which he would always spit right back out. It was another five days before the boy finally fell asleep. During the middle of the night they heard their boy screaming and ran into his room. Their boy was dead.
Being the horror thrill geek that I was back then, and still am although less obviously so, I dragged my friend Simon along to see it. It was the first Friday the movie had opened and there was next to no one in the theatre. This worked out quite well for us, as being two of the first people in Bournemouth to see the movie Simon and I were both given Freddie T-shirts. The T-shirts were white with a silhouetted image of the main man with those long outstretched arms we see him with before the first kill.
Whilst the movie did little at the time to scare Simon and me during the viewing, we both confessed to finding it all a little frightening when we came to go to sleep that evening. The movie failed to find a big UK audience but went on to do a phenomenal trade on the video rental market. My Uncle Paul managed to do me a copy of the movie, which became the best thing I had in the world at that point EVER! I would take the copy of the movie with me into the library of the college I was attending and using their video recorder, meant for watching educational videos, and a couple of pairs of headsets. With selected members from my classes, I would take up this part of the library on a near daily basis as we watched the movies uninterrupted till someone complained about what we were doing.
A Nightmare on Elm Street opens with images of finger knives being sharpened as an unseen sicko shuffles along. Teenager Tina is having a bad dream. She is being pursued through a boiler room by the same unseen sicko. This sequence was filmed at the Lincoln Heights jail which was later condemned due to asbestos – the same location was used for a later Wes Craven shocker called um, Shocker (1989). Tina awakes from her nightmare with slits in her clothes. As Tina assesses the damage her mum comes in to see what all the noise is about. She notices the slits in her daughter’s nightgown and recommends that she get her fingernails cut or stop that kind of dreaming. All the while her mum is being pawed at by her latest boyfriend to come back to the sack. Tina grabs the crucifix from her bedroom wall for solace. Like in the story Craven based it on; the parents offer no safety net for their young, dismissing it as just a bad dream.
Soon Tina discovers that her friends Nancy, Rod and possibly Glenn have all shared the same dream and one by one the man in their dreams, Fred Krueger, comes to claim them. After Tina is killed, her partner Rod flees the scene and becomes suspected of her murder. Something that is soon squashed when he becomes victim number two, dressed up as a suicide in his holding cell. Nancy looks to be next, but after surviving her nightmare by burning her arm within her dream, she sets out to try and bring the killer Fred Krueger out from her nightmare and into the real world so that her daddy, a cop (John Saxon) can arrest him.
One of the strengths of this low budget movie is how effectively Craven manages to blur dreams with the real world. Scenes such as the crucifix flicking off the wall prior to Fred trying to break into this world through the wall above Nancy are both effective and chilling – God cannot protect these kids! Tina’s death, as she is pushed around the bedroom ceiling sliced and diced before Rod’s eyes, is still shocking to watch all these years later. The American censors also thought so, asking for cuts to the scenes where the cuts appeared on Tina’s body and the sound of the blood sploshing as she hit the bed. So too are the scenes where Nancy follows Tina’s body bagged corpse, a trail of blood down the corridor, a corridor monitor who happens to be wearing a red and black sweater – ‘NANCY! No running in the hallway!’
Fred Krueger makes for a very scary bad guy. When he drags his finger knives across surfaces to elicit fear from his intended victim it isn’t only the victim that cowers. (Apparently to get the sound of the finger knives scraping they dragged a steak knife along the underside of a metal folding chair). Krueger was never this scary again!
Indeed so effective are the frights that you tend to overlook details – such as why Tina, in just a shirt and knickers, would venture out into the backyard at night, when she has three friends sleeping over, to find out who is outside – dream or no dream, it just wouldn’t make sense. Would boyfriend Rod sit so helplessly in the corner as his girlfriend is sliced to death in front of him, regardless of whether he himself thought he was dreaming again or not? Hm! And why is Nancy so tired the morning following Tina’s murder? She hasn’t been deprived of sleep yet, so why on earth would she be nodding off in class and later in the bath? Maybe it’s a reflection of the standard of teaching in the class or in fact the reading of Hamlet from Darryl Hannah’s brother John at the front of the class. Maybe Nancy always falls asleep in class, it’s a thought!
There’s a couple of neat jumps such as when Fred comes through the door mirror or when Fred’s tongue flicks out of a disconnected phone – ‘I’m your boyfriend now Nancy’ and there’s some satisfyingly dodgy stunts that add to the fun too – revisit the scene where Fred is hit in the stomach by a hammer. As he falls over the banister and onto the stairs there is a VERY visible mattress. The ending though is a little dodgy as, after asking for her mother and friends back, Nancy and her three buddies are driving away in a car with a red and black top and mother is unconvincingly pulled through the door. Quite how Nancy survived to return in Part 3 is never made clear.
There’s a nice nod to Sam Raimi, who had a poster of Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977) in the Evil Dead cabin, by having Nancy watching that same shocker as she attempts to stay awake. Look out too for the man who provided the voice of Roger Rabbit – Charles Fleischer – who plays Nancy’s doctor at the clinic. The movie soon became of more note as the film that introduced audiences to Johnny Depp, as Nancy’s boyfriend, Glenn, in the film. It was quite by accident that Depp got the part as he was there accompanying his friend Jackie Earle Haley to the auditions. Spotted by Craven, Depp went on to read for a part, getting it when Craven’s daughter and friend thought he was the better choice of the candidates there.
And speaking of Jackie Earle Haley, the friend Depp accompanied to the auditions, he may have not secured a part in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street but roll on to 2010 and he’s not only got a part in the so-so remake but he’s also playing the main man. And although he turns in a decent performance in the role that Robert Englund has pretty much made his own, the film is rather flat proving that if you want a decent Freddie flick, as dated as it may be now, there’s no substitute for the original.
