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 My Life In Horror Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway. This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review. This is my life in horror. Straight Talk Only In This Room Before This one looms large, for me. Massive, in point of fact. It could well be the first one I saw, as I think back - I know I watched them out of order, and I don’t think I started with 2. Regardless, it remained consistently my favourite throughout my teenage years, and I’m sure it’s the entry I've seen the most. Consequently, I have extremely vivid memories of it - though I guess we’ll find out how many are correct, and how many misappropriated from later entries. I remember a child’s red trike, in a now dusty and abandoned house of Elm Street - Nancy’s old house. I remember a teenage girl staring into a bathroom mirror, as the steam rose and her reflection is replaced by Freddie’s face. I remember - vividly - the faucet handles morphing and becoming hands - one clutching her arm to hold it in place, the other growing claws to slice at her. I also remember how that scene changes as she’s woken up, and instead of Freddy attacking her, she’s holding a razor blade to her arm. It’s a brilliant evolution of Freddie’s powers from the first movie - the notion that now, he’s effectively controlling the kids as they sleep, turning them into sleepwalking puppets (an idea that is later made explicit, in one of my favourite scenes in the franchise). It’s creepy on its own terms, the invasive lack of agency, the compulsion masquerading as self harm, but narratively it really opens things up, with the kids being placed into psychiatric care by well meaning parents convinced their kids are suicidal. It’s so brilliant because it’s a logical expansion of the original themes. If Freddie is seen as a representational force - of that with is monstrous and lives in our subconscious - then giving him the power to induce what looks like suicide makes perfect sense. More, it allows Freddy to occupy the space of a self destructive mental illness - in the context of the movie, a shared delusion, even, which is a phenomenon not unknown to occur in teenage groups, from time to time (there’s a thread I could tug on there about incels, to pick a recent example, but I won’t). And what’s so great about that is that’s exactly how the adult world does treat the kids, with predictably awful results. Because ultimately, in the movie, Freddie isn’t a representation - he’s a real malevolent entity that wants to murder teenagers in their sleep. In this respect, the movie gets to have its cake and eat it, form following theme, allowing the theme to be reflected back by the characters, yet still delivering a brilliant horror movie that manages to find a way to square the ‘nobody believes us’ cannard with the premise. Tying into that, the return of Nancy as a dream therapist is inspired. Enough time has passed (and Heather Langenkamp was old enough to start with, probably) that she seems plausible as a medical professional - and of course her career arc makes perfect sense, given the events of the first movie. My memory is she enters the movie 20 or 30 minutes in, once the kids and their situation is well established, setting up the brilliant scene where she sits in the group therapy session and tells the kids she believes them, before teaching them how to fight back. This is the second development, and one that if memory serves carries over into 4. The notion that dream logic is a two way street - that our subconscious and imagination can give us power as well as fear. It may feel cheesy on a re-watch, but I remember as a kid really digging seeing the kids discovering the power of their dream selves, and having Nancy, the Nightmare survivor, as the narrative key to unlock that potential is smart storytelling. Of course, as we’ve come to expect from an Elm Street movie, there is also bloody death in abundance. Again, memory suggests a high tide mark in that regard, both in terms of bodycount (worryingly, something I vividly remember being a key indicator of quality for me as a kid) and in terms of inventive gruesomeness. Certainly, the ‘fuck the prime time, bitch!’ execution looms large in the imagination, as does the fatal heart stabbing of the wizard master, and the death by overdose - the image of her needle tracks opening and closing like hungry mouths retains a clarity borne of righteous disgust. But for all that, and others no doubt forgotten and soon to be rediscovered, the big one has to be the death by puppetry. As noted above, the movie throughout is playing on the strengths and weaknesses of dreams, and dream self image. In this murder sequence, Freddie grows from one of the kids puppets, and then proceeds to slice open the kids arms and legs, and pull out the major veins, tugging them to manipulate the kid into walking. My memory of this sequence is so visceral that I wince as I recall the bloodied clump of torn flesh at the top of the kid’s foot as it drops into shot. In my memory, it’s a gore effect shot for the ages. As, screw it - let’s go see if it holds up, shall we? After Okay. So, to pick up where I left off, hell, yes, that scene holds up. There are only a couple of effect shots that really highlight the veins ending at the wrists and feet, but they are as vividly grizzly as I remember, and made me wince as I saw them, Sure, the effect shot that ends the sequence, of giant sky Freddie cutting them to make the kid fal,l is sloppily executed, but that doesn’t do anything to dull the power of the central image, for me. That one was a keeper. As was a sequence I’d forgotten until it happened, where a giant worm/snake with Freddy's head explodes out of the floor of Nancy’s house and starts eating Kirsten - goddamn, what a delightfully horrible effect that is! It’s also the moment where Nancy is drawn into the dream for the first time, and is brought face to face with Freddy, and the look on the snakes face as it spits the word ‘You!’ is just superb - a real franchise punch the air moment. It’s on, people. Likewise, hungry mouth needle tracks (they make a little slurping noise as they open and close which is as visceral ikky as it sounds), ‘Fuck the primetime, bitch!’ and bathroom taps turning homicidal are all present and correct. I’d also forgotten the delightfully weird image of poor mute Joey, literally tied to a bed frame with tongues over a firey pit. The tongues that bind his wrists and ankles move. That’s a thing that happens in this movie. So some great bonkers imagery, and effects work that mostly holds up, as well as a full-on Harryhausen style scrap with Freddy’s skeleton in the last act which feels like a loving homage to a bygone era, so far, so good… ...and here comes the but, and it’s this; it’s just not that great. Good, sure; fun, frequently, in a gross out kind of way. But there’s too much holding it back from actual brilliance. I think the acting is part of the problem. The kids are various shades of okay to good (especially given some of the sucky dialogue they get in places - the writing varies wildly between well observed and ‘literally no-one has ever talked like that’ and riding that kind of horse as an actor takes rare talent), but the two leads are just not too good, either on the page or in performance. Heather Langenkamp still seems to have basically two and a half performance modes - terrified, ernest, and insistent (which looks like ernest, but sullen), and Craig Wasson is similarly hampered - his problems exacerbated by being lumbered with the spooky nun/Freddy’s mom subplot, which is I think genuinely poorly handled on just about every level. It’s not that the core idea that Freddy’s remains need to have a decent burial is a bad one - it’s plausible enough within the fiction, and sets up a tight final act dual narrative, with Nancy and the kids fighting in the dream and her father and Dr. Gordon - it’s just that the scenes with the spooky old nun are slow and go on for a million years, and the whole thing could have been done even in the pre-internet age in a less hokey way. It’s particularly annoying because the pacing otherwise is spot on, with the movie zipping along - you’re never more than 15 minutes away from Freddy delivering gruesome death to an unfortunate teenager, and let’s face it, that’s what we signed up for. Freddy’s morphing is also an interesting facet this time around - he’s a shapeshifter, here, animating and inhabiting objects, the aforementioned giant worm appearance - hell, he even gender flips to play a sexy nurse right out of Penthouse Forum at one point, which I imagine raised a few eyebrows at the time. I’m taking myself back into liking it again, which I did, but… Well, okay, here’s where I land - I did like it. A lot. But I didn’t love it, the way I loved it then. It is still a gleefully imaginative movie, in a lot of ways, and yeah, Englund finally feels like he’s fully inhabiting the role, that Freddy has become more than a prosthetic with attitude. On the other hand, the kids are kinda goofy and cheesy, and not in a good way - by which I mean, unlike in Elm Street 2, it doesn’t feel intentional here, and that’s a damn shame. They almost work as a group, but they don't quite; just one too many cliches, in both writing and performance, to keep me from rolling my eyes once in a while. All the thematic strengths I highlighted in the ‘before’ section are present, but there’s a detectable quality gap between idea and execution - principly, for me, at the level of characterization. I’m glad I revisited it - to quote Freddy, it was like seeing an ‘old friend’. But, unlike 2, I think it’ll probably be a very long time before I decide to put this one on again. Maybe it’s just down to personal experience. Maybe with Elm Street 3, I’ve simply done my time. Next up: Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master KP 28/1/19 FURTHER READING 
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