FEarly in his career, when he remade Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Springs into The Last House on the Left, one of the most disturbing (and smartest) exploitation horror films of the 1970s; Director Wes Craven had a unique ability to reconcile high levels of emotion. A mindful idea with an understated genre kick. In fact, before he picked up a 16mm camera, he was a professor who taught English and humanities at various universities in the Northeast, so he actually had the air of a professor. He'll turn The Hills Have Eyes into a cannibal shocker that doubles as harsh class criticism, and give the villainous couple in The People Under the Stairs unmistakable echoes of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. . He understood better than anyone that horror could be a vessel for larger themes, as long as it delivered results.
Forty years ago, Craven jumped on the slasher movie trend that started with Halloween and Friday the 13th, and gave it his signature shrewd, thoughtful ending with A Nightmare on Elm Street. (He then dismantled it with Wes Craven's A New Nightmare, and put it back together with the Scream series, as if following an inventive long-term course he had set himself.) Craven , was not the first filmmaker to imagine such a dreamscape. Enter the real world – the random appearance of goats in this film was a nod to Luis Buñuel’s infamous surreal faux-doctor short story “The Land Without Bread” – but he The Boogeyman is not a dead-eyed sociopathic monster. He is the abominable sin of one generation being passed on to another.
But don't get ahead of yourself. Before Craven exposes the corruption beneath a seemingly idyllic suburban community like Haddonfield, Illinois in Halloween, he discovers a teenage girl trapped in a very graphic nightmare. Introducing the boiler room. Narrowly escapes from a phantom menace with welded gloves with four razor-like blades attached to the fingers. When she wakes up screaming, it might have been dismissed as a bad dream if it weren't for her torn blouse. (“If you don’t cut your nails, you have to stop having dreams like that,” her mother told her unhelpfully.) It turns out she’s not alone.
Following the Halloween template once again, Craven offers a virgin final girl named Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). She's something of a designated driver type, enduring the temptations of her boyfriend (a then-unknown Johnny Depp) while securing a more sexually compliant friend. Tina (Amanda Wyss) , successfully survives a session with slutty suitor Rod (Nick Corrie). It turns out that teenagers have a common nightmare. They're all being stalked by a burnt-scarred man named Fred Krueger (Robert Englund), wearing a tattered sweater with red and green stripes and wearing razor gloves. old fedora hat When Tina comes out of her dream, Nancy's police officer father (John Saxon) steps in to arrest Rod, but it takes him a while to accept her assertion that the culprit is more metaphysical than usual. .
As a concept, an evil ghost that attacks sleeping people is about how the victims share their experiences and try to keep each other alive, and how filmmakers like Craven It remains very effective and flexible in that it allows ghosts to be highly abstracted. Staging. After all, dreams can go anywhere and anything. And Krueger is not bound by the laws of physics. There's no running away from him, and that famous sweater won't prevent you from stretching your arms out like Mr. Fantastic. On top of that, Craven added some of the most memorable and shocking scenes of the slasher era, including a geyser of blood that erupts when a victim is sucked into a bed, and a staircase that turns into a muddy tar pit. Masu. (A modest independent budget had to include an item for 500 gallons of fake blood.)
Langenkamp plays a great scream queen, serious and witty, while also seeming like a real teenager rather than the overt adult that often appears in films of this era. (The actor was actually 20 years old at the time, making the line “Oh my god, I look 20” a funny joke after waking up from a particularly harrowing dream.) But Craven also said the moral to her Increase your stakes. It is revealed that Krueger once existed in the real world as a child murderer until the townspeople, furious that he was released on technicality, burned him alive. Their vigilante justice — secrets some of them, like Nancy's alcoholic mother (Ronnie Blakely), have ruined lives to protect — brings innocent children from beyond the grave to life. visit.
That part of A Nightmare on Elm Street sounds like a dark folktale from centuries past, but Craven brings it to the roar of the '80s and enhances it with the eerie mythology of nursery rhymes sung by girls jumping rope. I'm doing it. (“One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…”) Although Craven isn’t alluding to any specific event, he does highlight how often children have to carry the burden of their parent’s catastrophe. When you think about it, the generational tensions in the film feel evergreen. Despite the proof of Krueger's identity being taken away from the dream world, his parents are still unable to confess the truth. This is partly out of shame and partly out of a misguided instinct to protect their children.
That's the Craven touch. A Nightmare on Elm Street doesn't have to be just a horror movie about violent dreams that break through reality – there are actually eight more – but he adds thematic layers and visual punch. , making movies smarter and more enduring. than it might be. His Freddy Krueger wreaks havoc on the mind, but also lingers on the conscience.
