October Challenge – A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
2 min read
It only takes a single, melancholy tinged re-watch of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street to realise that we lost a very great filmmaker in August of this year. Wes Craven was a genius, a trailblazer amidst a sea of imitators. A filmmaker unlike any other, he was a visual stylist who exuded imagery as beautiful as it was horrific: imagery that brands itself upon the eye, and haunts the memory. After all, who can forget the startling sight of Freddy Krueger bursting through brick a wall as though it were made of fabric, one of many stunningly unique shots that floods A Nightmare, his magnum opus?
Wes Craven’s films are dominated by ideological conflict, and A Nightmare is no exception to this. The film sees the world of the real crash headlong into the world of dreams, but more than that, it sees Buddhist philosophies clash with Freudian theorising. Craven weaves these references throughout the piece naturally, allowing Johnny Depp’s delightfully goofy – and inexorably doomed – Glenn Lantz to airily mention the practices of dream analysis in a way that feels natural to the character. Lantz’s sweetly vague theories sit in harsh contrast to the scene at the sleep clinic that later crops up in the film, and the interplay between Glenn’s youthful optimism and the more solid, yet less emotive, analysis provided by the professionals is deeply interesting.
But, although A Nightmare offers itself up for critical discussion, it also at times deliberately bypasses the brain altogether, socking the audience in the gut with a series of primal horrors. It’s easy to forget, particularly considering the demon jester he became, that Freddy Krueger began life as a shadily drawn villain. The horror of Krueger is that he is so vague; he is a creature bred on the instinct to cause pain, and the sexual nature of his violence – his tongue as it appears through the phone, his hands appearing through Nancy’s spread legs – is vicious and genuinely haunting.
Given the flurry of sequels that followed it, it’s easy to forget that A Nightmare On Elm Street is a genuinely groundbreaking film. It bursts with ideas and imagery, and more than holds up after so many years. In short: it is a fine film made by a fine filmmaker indeed.
