A Nightmare on Elm Street poster title
Movies

Late to the Party: A Nightmare on Elm Street

This is the story of a proactive young woman who can’t get any goddamn help from anyone. I’m a big fan of Nancy and hate everyone else in this film.

Nancy quickly figures out the rules of Freddy’s game and tries repeatedly to lure him into the real world so she can have a confederate dispatch him, but she’s let down first by her boyfriend Glen — TWICE — and then her father. Her mother starts out unhelpful and only gets worse. There’s quite a bit of “you have to believe me!” stuff, which is never my favorite part of a movie, but in this case there’s not much Nancy could do to prove her case that she’s not doing. 

Dream logic helps the movie a lot: Freddy’s abilities like popping up in new places, turning stairs to sticky goo and making his arms impossibly long make him less predictable and harder to fight, and because the characters are dreaming when they deal with him, you can’t necessarily blame them for stupid decisions (wandering aimlessly around his boiler-room lair) the way you often can in horror films.

One thing that surprised me was how many different ways Freddy kills people, or tries to. For a guy with an iconic knife glove, he mostly seems to use it for intimidation. We have drowning, hanging, pulling through a bed and turning into a fountain of blood, and pulling through a bed into a glowy otherworldly portal. He does use his knives to cut off some of his own fingers and slash his own abdomen, I guess because he knows it will freak his victim out to see that he bleeds green goo.

I did not allow myself to fall for the apparently happy ending, but I feel bad that Nancy seemingly learns how to defeat him and still doesn’t succeed. My theory is that the perpetuation of the legend via the creepy rhyme is what keeps Freddy going. Talk to those little girls playing jumprope about a more appropriate song to sing and maybe he can be eliminated for good.

Stray observations:

  • Scariest moments for me were the hand in the bubble bath, because NO, and the wall above Nancy stretching to show Freddy pressing through it to loom over her, because I have a thing about stuff happening behind my bed where I can’t see.
  • Why is there a sheep in Tina’s nightmare at the beginning?
  • It’s a tiny thing but I like that not everyone is wearing black at Rod’s funeral. Movie funerals always look so unnaturally perfect. In reality you always have some people just wearing church-type clothes, like here.