By Ben Bussey
What are you afraid of? It’s a simple enough question, one which tends to prompt the old list of usual suspects: spiders, snakes, rats, heights and so on and so forth. But is the answer really as simple as that, for any of us? When it comes right down to it, I’m not sure any of us really know what we’re truly afraid of until we’ve had to confront it directly – and we may come to find fear in places we had never anticipated. I didn’t consider myself at all claustrophobic until I got trapped in a small lift (that’s an elevator to you transatlantic types) with more people than it should have been carrying; it was probably for five or ten minutes at most, but with the air getting thin and the temperature rising by the moment, it felt like a whole lot longer. Nor did I ever consider myself particularly afraid of heights until my first attempt at rock climbing, when dangling on a rope at about a hundred feet I was overwhelmed by the sense of being a speck in an infinite vacuum.
Those, however, were fairly rational moments of fear and panic, for which little explanation is necessary. One rather more potent moment occurred more than a decade before either incident, when I sat down to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street for the very first time.
(Yes, this is going to be one of those autobiographical accounts of my first experience of a film. I’m just saying that upfront as I realise this approach isn’t to all tastes; but what can I say, we’d letting the side down if we didn’t mark the thirtieth anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street – which first opened in US cinemas this week in 1984 – and I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find something to say about it which hasn’t been said innumerable times before. At the end of the day, the only relatively fresh angle I could find was the personal one. That disclaimer out of the way, let us continue.)
If I remember correctly I was eleven years old. I’d not long since caught the horror bug and was eager to see as much as I could – and, being a child of the 1980s, there was one movie series above all others that I just knew I had to see. As Heather Langenkamp would later say in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, “every kid knows who Freddy is; he’s like Santa Claus or King Kong.” This was never more true than in the late 1980s, when the popularity of the hideously burned child molester with a crumbled brown fedora, red and green striped jumper and knive-laden gauntlet was at its peak. True to form, as a child I knew the nature of Freddy’s power and was afraid of him long before I’d seen anything of the movies beyond their VHS sleeves; I remember being particularly startled by the Freddy’s Revenge cover, the antagonist’s head thrown back in an evil scowl, his claws held high.
However, I’m happy to say my first experience of Freddy was in his first, and I’d say far and away best film. I saw it at a friend’s house on a summer afternoon, on a little TV in his bedroom. The curtains were open, sunlight was pouring in and reflecting off the screen, the whir of the video recorder was almost as loud as the film itself. Nonetheless I was utterly transfixed from the opening frames, as the unseen figure crafts the deadly glove, grunting sadistically to himself as he did so; this flowing seamlessly into Tina’s first nightmare, with the sense of imminent danger following her every step, and just those few fleeting glimpses of Freddy himself which leave the viewer both eagerly anticipating and mortally dreading his every appearance.
A Nightmare on Elm Street really pushed me out of my comfort zone. At that time The Monster Squad had not long since become my favourite movie of all time in the whole world ever; as such, my few horror movie experiences were somewhat milder than what I was getting here. As much as I loved Fred Dekker’s 1987 magnum opus, the truth was that it had never truly frightened me – but A Nightmare on Elm Street did. It really unnerved me. Not only was it loaded with potent jump scares, it had at its core a genuinely scary idea: a man who could enter your dreams and kill you while you slept. There could be no escaping such a thing; we all have to sleep sometime whether we want to or not. And that night, after watching A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, I really didn’t want to. It was one of the few times in my life that I chose to sleep with the light on.
And the thing that has most stayed with me from that first experience was the fact that it was not Freddy himself that most haunted me. Yes, I found him terrifying; and yes, it freaked me the fuck out when his invisible form ripped Tina’s stomach open and dragged her bloodied form across the ceiling, and when his claw dragged Glen down into his own mattress and made like Old Faithful. Yet it wasn’t those images that lingered most heavily in my mind’s eye.
Rather, it was the image of dead Tina appearing in Nancy’s nightmare, standing aloft in a dirty back alley in a partially unzipped body bag, as she opens her mouth as if to speak – and a centipede falls out.
This was a whole different kind of scare. Freddy leaping up suddenly out of nowhere with a roar; that kind of straightfoward shock I could understand. The deaths of Tina and Glen, the sight of blood; again, no mystery as to why that would be scary. But seeing an insect (and not one I’d had any particular fear of beforehand) crawl out of a dead girl’s mouth for no readily apparent reason: this just did not compute. I didn’t understand the image – and more to the point, I didn’t understand why I found it so frightening. To this very day I can’t find a rational explanation.
This was quite the revelation. If I could find something frightening without having the slightest idea why, how well could I truly know myself? And perhaps even more importantly, what did it say about me that I actually enjoyed this feeling of total terror? (What can I say, I was a very deep 11 year old.)
This, I think, is the key to A Nightmare On Elm Street’s endurance: its exploration of the nature of fear. It works on both the simple jump-out-of-your-seat, spill-your-popcorn level, but it also stays with you and comes back to haunt you when you least expect it, in ways you don’t necessarily expect. It was this approach which both endeared the film to the slasher crowd, but also appeared to pave the way to a more sophisticated future… though it is of course highly debatable whether the subsequent sequels delivered on that promise.
Not unlike the original Godzilla (which recently turned 60), the cinematic franchise and marketing empire spawned by A Nightmare on Elm Street make it tricky to approach the original film in isolation today. Watching it again now, there are certain things in the film that frighten me more than they did as a child, such as Johnny Depp’s hair and wardrobe, and John Saxon’s grammar (“what the hell were you doing going to school today for anyway?”) The little errors and tell-tale signs of its low budget stand out more to me now, too; not just that godawful mannequin in the final scene, but a couple of instances of stunt performers landing on clearly visible crash mats, Freddy seemingly gaining about three stone in weight the moment he gets set on fire, and indeed Robert Englund’s make-up and costume, which looks pretty amateurish by comparison with that of the sequels (though still infinitely better than that cartoon witch look they gave him on Freddy’s Dead). But while the later films might have delivered a more polished veneer, few of them came anywhere near capturing the same genuinely nightmarish effect of the one that started it all.