A Nightmare on Elm Street Month


Casey Becker: What's your favourite scary movie?
Phone Voice: Guess.
Casey Becker: Um, Nightmare on Elm Street?
Phone Voice: Is that the one where the guy had knives for fingers?
Casey Becker: Yeah, Freddy Krueger.
Phone Voice: Freddy, that's right. I liked that movie. It was scary.
Casey Becker: Yeah, the first one was, but the rest sucked.

Last October I revisited the Halloween series in the lead up to All Hallow’s Eve, and the year before that I found myself back at Camp Crystal Lake as I delved head first into the Friday the 13th films. This year I thought I’d try and keep up the tradition of a month long marathon exploring an Eighties slasher series and have decided to watch all seven A Nightmare on Elm Street films (including Freddy vs. Jason and the 2010 remake). These things just have to be done sometimes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the most successful series in horror history, and love it or loathe it, there’s no denying the impact the series has had on horror cinema. Wes Craven’s groundbreaking 1984 film completely reinvigorated the Eighties slasher movie, with its provocative tale of a sadistic killer who preys on his teenage victims in their dreams. Its central antagonist Freddy Krueger is one of the genre’s most recognisable icons, heck, he's practically the poster boy for the Eighties. Craven’s film not only featured feverish suspense, surreal dream sequences and fantasy horror set-pieces which blurred the line between dream and reality, but was also enriched with themes evident through the director's work, including teenage angst, familial strife and generational conflict. Practically broke by the time he made the film, Craven had to sign over the rights to New Line and suffer the indignity of seeing his shadow-dwelling child killer diluted almost beyond recognition, as sequel after SFX-driven sequel reduced Krueger to the Norman Wisdom of the slasher world, with bad puns and a penchant for slap-stick violence.

So, refill your glass, set your tolerance level for bad one-liners and ludicrous fantasy horror to ‘high’, and join me if you will, on a bloody trek back to Elm Street, Springfield; to where all those sleepless nights in shredded bed sheets first began…

A Nightmare on Elm Street 
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge 
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors  
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master 
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
Wes Craven's New Nightmare 
Freddy vs. Jason 
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
 

Popular posts from this blog

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010)

Image
Dir. Andy de Emmony After placing his senile wife in a care home, retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) heads for the coast to revisit their ‘old haunts’, including the now out-of-season hotel they honeymooned in. By day he is stalked along the windswept beaches by a spectral figure dressed in white, and by night he is terrorised by strange sounds and someone, or something, attempting to enter his room… In the 2000s BBC4 attempted to reignite the old Ghost Story at Christmas tradition by adapting MR James’s A View from a Hill (2005) and Number 13 (2006). This series was seemingly short lived though, as their next outing wasn’t until 2010, and an unusual reinterpretation of James’s classic chiller Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad . While de Emmony’s direction captures the atmosphere and tone of James very well, this film differs significantly from other adaptations, including Jonathan Miller’s supremely unsettling 1968 take . Neil Cross’s screenplay only incorpo...
Read more

Halloween: Resurrection

Image
2002 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Four years after mistakenly killing a man she thought to be her brother (really, Dimension Films? Really ?), long-suffering Laurie Strode is eventually hunted down by her not really dead actual brother, crazier-than-bat-shit Michael Myers, and murderlised. Making his way back home to Haddonfield, Myers discovers the crew of an online reality show has taken over his house (!) to broadcast a Halloween special featuring a group of dumb-fuck teenagers dared to spend the night in the house of ill-repute. Naturally he goes on yet another killing spree. And it's all caught on camera and broadcast online for other dumb-fuck teenagers to watch. Yes, all of this actually really happens. It really fucking happens. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later did not warrant a sequel. It was intended not only as a twentieth anniversary celebration of John Carpenter's classic chiller , but as a way to draw the series to a close, with its original heroine finally co...
Read more

Caveat (2020)

Image
Isaac, a brooding drifter suffering from memory loss, agrees to look after Olga, the niece of his acquaintance Moe. A troubled woman prone to bouts of catatonia, Olga lives in an old, ramshackle house on an isolated island in the middle of a dark lake. Isaac agrees to wear a chained harness that prevents him from going into certain rooms. He gradually comes to learn of the unsettling history of the house and the unquiet dead it harbours within its walls... Written and directed by Damian McCarthy,  Caveat  is steeped in the Gothic tradition. With distinct echoes of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, it is ripe with a lingering atmosphere of morbidity and decay. McCarthy's screenplay toys with themes such as psychological rot, dark family secrets, and the aftermath of unspeakable violence and cruelty. The story unfolds within the creepy confines of the lonely, mouldy house, with myriad forbidden rooms, hidden passageways and concealed bloody secrets. The house itself is cut off from c...
Read more