A Nightmare on Elm Street

Sins of the mother

1984

Review: April 27, 2006

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langencamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon, Amanda Wyss

A definite plus.

THE SETUP:

Killer comes after kids through their nightmares.

DISCUSSION:

I had never actually seen this movie, having been way too far above slasher movies when it came out, but upon reading Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, wherein this movie is discussed heavily, I figured I had better slide this one between my synapses.

The movie begins with a nice opening sequence showing Freddy making his infamous glove. Then we are introduced to Tina running around, having a nightmare. She tells her friends about it the next day, and there are indications that they are all having similar dreams. Her friends are Nancy, Nancy’s boyfriend Glen, played by Johnny Depp in his first film role, and the requisite asshole dork Rod.

Having not seen the movie before and not knowing much about it, I fell for the trick of the film in setting up Tina to be the main character. Thus I thought it was a litle unusual for us to hear the girl who should be our heroine having aggressively lusty sex upstairs, after which she turns to her boyfriend and says that she is no longer angry with him, having been vigorously fucked; “Jungle man fixed Jane.” She falls asleep and has a nightmare, after which in the real world she is killed, which, it is implied, stands in for a rape, as she is being bounced around in bed while in her panties, and the killing follows with shocking brutality. Her body is thrown against the wall, she is pulled up to the ceiling, then her body dropped in a huge pool of blood. It kind of points out how bloodless more current horror movies have become. Anyway, it looks like Rod killed her, so he takes off and Nancy goes to the police, the chief of whom is her dad, played by John Saxon.

During this time we have also set up the kids’ parents as clueless, especially in a scene where Johnny Depp plays a ludicrous sound effects tape for his mom to prove that he is at someone else’s house. Nancy’s mom, who suffers every day under the crushing burden of horrific hair, is also set up as home alone, helpless and ineffective, her husband most often away from home.

Anyway, now the focus shifts to Nancy. She has a nightmare in which she is chased while inappropriate disco music plays, complete with little laser sounds, and a nightmare in class. Everyone assumes that she’s gone nuts after her friend has been killed. The sexual nature of Freddy’s attacks is brought to the fore again as Freddy’s fingers come up right between her legs in the bath. So she concludes that what she needs to do is stay awake, or recruit Johnny Depp to guard her and wake her if she has a nightmare. The theme of everyone in her life being utterly ineffective continues as Depp falls asleep as she is attacked. After this they run to the police house, Nancy sure that Rod is going to be killed, wherin Depp’s Glen observes: “We have reason to believe that something very strange is going on here.” Oh, well thanks for the intelligence.

So it seems that Nancy’s Mom has been hitting the bottle. Nancy confronts her mother and asserts her own power, after which her mother appears with her hair down in a sudden perm, and smoking a cigarette. She tells Nancy that Freddy Kreuger was this child killer from years ago, and Nancy’s Mom was part of a vigilante mob that burned him alive and killed him. The script makes clear that it was a mob, but the idea is conveyed that it was her mom herself who did the deed: “He’s dead becaue Mommy killed him.” Well, I guess once more, Mommy didn’t get the job done, and now the burden must fall on her daughter.

SPOILERS! > > > Throughout all of this we have seen Nancy grow more and more self-reliant and aggressive. She reads a book on setting booby traps [upon seeing which I thought: “I should get a book like that. You never know when you’ll need to set a booby trap.”], and recruits Depp to come by at midnight in order to whack Freddy on the head once she brings him into the real world from her dream. Johnny once more proves to be the utterly useless boyfriend as he can’t even manage to stay up for 20 minutes and come over to his girlfriend’s house, who is in obvious serious distress. This is the second time he has just fallen asleep and not been there for her when she desperately needs him. Thanks, Johnny. Poor Johnny falls victim to a homage to The Shining.

So anyway, then Nancy calls her dad, at the murder scene [of Mr. Depp] across the street. She tells him that she will once more try to bring Freddy into the real world and that he should be sure to come over in 20 minutes. Then she does about four hours of construction work in just under five minutes, as she still has lots of time to reflect and relax before falling asleep, finding Freddy, and bringing him out 20 minutes after hanging up the phone. Girl is efficient! And all of that without multitasking. She brings Freddy out, but we mustn’t foget that we are in a world of ineffective males, and her desperate screams simply are not enough to get the yokel cop across the street to even bother sauntering inside to fetch her dad, if only to say “Your nutcase daughter is cracking up again.”

Anyway, so you know what happens. Nancy has rigged up a bunch of booby traps and springs them on Freddy one by one, finally setting him on fire, just like Mommy did so many years ago. But of course he’s not dead, and after Dad finally comes home, they see flaming footsteps leading upstairs. Note the weird flame effect “pointing” upstairs, that I assume was just an accident of the air patterns while they were shooting. Freddy’s there, killing Mommy, and she and he disappear into the bed, vanquished once again, leaving clever little Nancy living all alone with her handsome cop Daddy, who just happens to look like John Saxon. Nice work, Nancy!

But oh dear, there is a shocking coda. The dream is over—Mommy and all of Nancy’s friends are once again alive. but as they drive off, the top of the convertible, now sporting the trademark Kreuger pattern, closes on the kids, and Nancy’s mom is killed again, the end.

So, what’s really going on here? It seems obvious that everyone in Nancy’s life, particularly the males, are startlingly ineffective and/or absent. Her mother WAS effective in the past [killing Freddy and all,] but now is a useless alcoholic who is no help to Nancy. Both of these situations force Nancy to mature fast and take reponsibility for herself, stand up to her parents, and finally turn from victim to attacker against Freddy.

But I think there’s this whole level of stuff going on with Nancy’s mother, but I can’t tell if I didn’t get it or it just isn’t clear. I kind of think it just isn’t clear. Nancy is the focus of the murders because her mother killed Freddy. Nancy then switches places with her mother, becoming effective while her mother becomes helpless [Wes Craven acknowledges that this was his intention in the commentary]. But there’s this implication that Freddy is specifically targeting the mother and her kids because of the mother’s past, and it also crossed my mind that the mother IS Freddy. In the film the horror ends once Freddy has taken the mother, and ends again after its brief coda by killing the mother AGAIN.

Let us also not forget the Elektra complex factors that find Nancy, after the mother is gone, standing in her father’s embrace at the foot of the marital bed. Please also note that the father, whose problem all along has been that he’s never home, “comes home” to Nancy just before this. I’m just saying.

Overall, this one is good to tuck away in one’s mind as it sets the template for so many films that followed in its wake. You might also want to check out Part Two, Freddy’s Revenge, which layers a not-so-cleverly-disguised gay coming out story under its surface of slasher horror. If this whole series is about teen traumas personified by this evil man that toments them, I don’t know, I might have to check more of them out.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Why not? It’s amusing and it’s definitely one of the benchmarks of a certain breed of horror film.

RELATED FILMS:
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET II: FREDDY’S REVENGE is a thinly-veiled gay coming out parable and is SOOO amusing.