Originally Posted November 16th, 2006
I recently had the pleasure of watching Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street in a theater, something I never had the chance to do first run. After years of watching the murky Media VHS, it was a revelation to see Freddy's antics on the big screen, with a freshly struck print digitally projected, natch. Despite some derisive laughter from some kids who were scarcely blastocysts when the film was first released, it was a fantastic screening.
Growing up, the only type of films that were strictly verboten were horror films. Despite living in a small town in southern Mississippi, I had access to a handful of excellent mom-and-pop video stores. My mother was a cinophile and we frequently came home with stacks of tapes. (From a Curtis Mathes store! Man, that makes me feel old.) Yet, scary movies were off limits, dismissed as the worst kind of corrupting trash. Occasionally, mitigating circumstances would intervene, such as the presence of an Oscar winning actor or some genre hybrid, like Aliens. So no Poltergeist. No Friday the 13th. No Silent Night, Deadly Night. (Skipping the last one turned out to be a good idea, as it turns out.)
Nightmare was the proverbial fork in the road for me. Sliding into early adolescence, renting Nightmare was a big deal. After months and years of "no" I worked my way up to a reluctant "fine." I remember my parents having a hushed conversation in the next room about my youthful transgression as the tape unspooled in our clunky VCR. Despite some grumblings to the contrary, the floodgates were open. I was enthralled. It was the subversive manifesto for my young life and Freddy was its author, carving up banal suburbia one perfectly manicured lawn at a time. Its heroine possessed rare pluck, trying to stay alive despite every adult's stubborn refusal to listen to her. It was violent and inventive and has one of the greatest "high concept" premises in the cinema.
Soon after, I was "five-for-fiving" my way through the horror sections. To my parents, I was wasting my time, but what I was doing was forming a lifelong obsession with films. I was busy falling in love with everything about the cinema, with horror movies as my singular obsession. They were rebellious and dark. Low budget and perverse. Off Hollywood products of the underground. Unlike so many gore fanatics, I quickly branched out, developing interests in other genres, but I would always circle back to my first genre crush.
In the forward to his excellent, long-out-of-print genre survey "Nightmare Movies," Kim Newman frames his critical point-of-view through the prism of his age. His adolescent horrors were from Hammer and Universal. Despite his admiration for some of them, he distanced himself from the then-recent crop of slasher movies, stating that "when Freddy says, 'You are all my children now,' he's not referring to me."
That's right, Kim. He was talking to me.
3 comments:
'Hey, up yours with a twirling lawnmower.'
Yes, but what about the previously hidden secrets of NOES that were revealed by this freshly struck print for the first time in decades? Like why would there be a poster of kittens on a trolley in the sleep disorders clinic? What was Craven trying to say? And more importantly, is Craven a cuteoverload.com fan?
I imagine during the chaotic and rushed production schedule that Craven wasn't paying attention to the set dressings. During the last few days of production, they had three or four units shooting simultaneously to meet their deadline; he might not have even shot that scene himself.
Or, he loves cute fuzzy animals and shit. Who knows.
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