|
by kit power 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. Don’t. Fall. Asleep. So, we’re back for an extended session with teenage me for this next set of essays. Early teens, at that. Back in the village (population 450, lest we forget) and Bev, Freddie, and me. Freddie, as previously noted, was something of an unusual child. He had a tendency towards mindless destruction, both self and objects (though rarely other people), and a certain obsessiveness about things. Music, obviously, and predictably, later cannabis (which, given his stoner parents, you’d have to say was a habit he came by honestly), but also certain TV shows and movies. For TV, his particular obsession was The Young Ones, and later Beavis and Butthead (for the former, he overidentified with Vivian, for the latter, Beavis). For movies, it was, of course, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. He had the first five movies on VHS, and he watched them over and over and over again. For a brief period over a summer, due to a complicated falling out between he and Bev due to another girl who lived in the village for a few months, I’d spend most evenings and weekends at his house, and we’d sit and play Mario 3 on the NES… and watch the Elm Streets over and over again. My memory is that I rented The FInal Nightmare myself from the video van man, but I know for sure Freddie had those first 5, and boy did we watch the hell out of them - I can still recall the smell of the room, a mixture of joss sticks and milk just starting to spoil. I have seen them since. About 15 years ago, back when the exchange rate was so favourable a holiday to Manhattan could be justified on shopping grounds (theoretically, anyway, I wasn’t earning that kind of money at the time) I ordered the complete box set (with region 1 encoding) from New Line, when it was released on DVD. I worked through the set, once… and then it sat on a shelf, until I started writing this column, at which point I dug it out, knowing I’d want to cover this series at some point. See, the reason these films are so significant to me is because they represent the point where horror became unambiguously pleasurable to me, as opposed to something that had a weird push/pull revulsion/fascination. Desensitization is, for my tastes, a much overused word, and in any case I don’t think it accurately describes what I’m talking about - there’s still effects shots in this series that squick me out (one in particular from the third movie I can picture in my mind right now, and I can feel my teeth grinding at the memory). No, it’s just that, at some point, these movies became… well, familiar. Comfortable. A comfy pair of slippers, sure, but also an escape into a world that was… well, okay, also scary, but maybe a little less so than the one I lived in, if only because there I understood the rules, and it always ended the same. It’s a paradox of horror fandom, I sometimes think - we come here to be scared, disturbed, discombobulated… and yet, there are these monster (haha) franchises that utterly dominated the 80’s and 90’s, with endless sequels as various maniac and supernatural fiends carved their ways through the teens of america - and I think the primary attraction of these franchises is the thrill of the familiar. It’s maybe part of why vampires, werewolves, and zombies hold such strength in the public imagination; sure, they’re scary, but they’re also… safe, somehow, or at least known, with rules that make them strong but also give them fatal weaknesses. Anyhow. For many kids of my generation, it was Pinhead, or Michael Myers, or Jason. For me, it was Freddy Krueger, so he’ll have to stand in for all. And I’m going to shake up the format for the next 6 months, as I cover these films (New Nightmare I didn’t see until I was well into my 20’s, and therefore falls outside the scope of the project, though I may cover it separately). I’m going to start with what I remember, then go and watch the movie, and come back and write a second part where I talk about what (if anything) I’ve learned. I’m really looking forward to it. Then So, the first Elm Street. I remember Freddy is much less of a wisearce than he later becomes. The essence of him in this one seems to be to disturb and horrify his victims before he kills them. An image that I have very strongly from this film is of him slicing off his own fingers, staring at Nancy as he does so, revelling in her disgusted, horrified reaction. It’s very reminiscent of the kid at school who’d eat his own bogeys to gross out the girls, and I remember being as disturbed by the look of his face as the blood pumping from the severed digits. What else? Some brilliant effects. Freddy coming out of the bedroom wall over Nancy’s sleeping form, the gonzo death of Tina, a tongue coming out of a phone, Tina’s doofus boyfriend being hung in his cell… oh, yeah, Nancy disappearing into the bathtub, holy shit, that was something, seeing a chink of light above her as she was pulled down into an apparently bottomless ocean of dark water. Still… it wasn’t my favourite, that’s for sure (that was Dream Warriors). Ranking movies in a franchise was a business I took incredibly seriously at that age, for reasons passing understanding, and I remember thinking this was good but not quite great. (Oh go on then, just for fun and as I remember - the Elm Street movies by rank, according to teenage me:
I’m sure at least part of that would be the body count metric - do I really remember rightly that only four people actually die in this one? That would certainly have been a demerit from teenage me. Beyond that, and the aforementioned sense that Freddy was still underdeveloped, I suspect that there was also the fact that the effects work got better as the series went on. Like, aside from the finger slicing, and Tina’s death, I can’t remember any outright gross out moments, and some of the effects, like the death of Nancy’s mum, were just plain goofy. Again, it’s not that it was bad, at all, just that it would later be done better. The memories are fond - Johnny Depp’s fountain of blood death, burning footsteps leading up Nancy’s steps - but there’s not the passion or visceral connection that I have to some of the later entries. I have a fairly strong feeling that teenage me is full of shit on this one, however. Let’s see, shall we? Now Well, now. That was surprising - I think teenage me may actually have had a point. I mean, let’s start with the positives - it’s conceptually brilliant. He comes to you in your dreams, and anything that happens to you in the nightmare is mirrored in real life. That’s just an all-time fantastic horror movie idea. And Freddy is a menacing, freakish figure - even in this first movie, the makeup is incredible, and the dirty sweater, hat, and knife glove iconic. Our very first shot of he is in silhouette, and he’s instantly striking and menacing. Additionally, the movie is superbly paced - I mean, it really zips along, starting with a dream sequence that sets up Freddy and the stakes admirably, and wastes very little time introducing the characters before starting to kill them off. The dream sequences themselves are undeniably the stars of the show, too, with a good grasp of the way dream logic works in a nightmare, allowing events to twist around against the person dreaming. The hall monitor who turns into Freddy was a really strong example of this, as was the staircase where the carpet suddenly becomes pits of glue... as was Tina in a body bag, centipedes falling from her lips and worms/snakes crawling in mud at her feet. And the final action sequence, with Freddy pulled through to the real world, running into boobie traps and eventually being set on fire. However, it’s not without its flaws. I found the teenagers to be uniformly bad performances, for starters - even young Johnny Depp isn’t especially strong, and Tina’s roughneck boyfriend is really poor throughout. Similarly Nancy I found to be disappointingly melodramatic - she’s a character I had very fond memories of, but far too many of her line readings felt overplayed, if not outright clunky. The parents are better, especially Nancy’s father, who has a good line in shifty attentiveness and guily glances, but even there, Nancy’s mother is saddled with some pretty horrible lines, and while the actor does a decent job with them, it’s still a tough sell (doubly so with the alcoholism that feels almost crowbarred in to the plot). Most worryingly, there’s parts that just plain don’t make any sense, I don’t think. Like, why do Nancy’s parents put a ton of extra security around the house? They believe that Rod killed Tina and then killed himself in jail, after all, so why bar all the windows and doors? For that matter, why isn’t Nancy sectioned after her meltdown at the dream clinic? That’s entirely leaving aside the impossibility of rigging an entire set of home defense booby traps in 10 minutes, because I’m assuming given how the movie ends that all of that is actually occuring in an extended dream of Nancy’s, though that’s not explicit in the movie. I’m conscious there’s a dangerous potential fallacy here, in terms of preferring a sequel to the original. I’m reminded of the joke (was it from Bad News or somewhere else?) where a guitarist claims to be better than Jimmy Page, because Page wrote Stairway To Heaven at 27, but he can already play it and he’s only 24. So it feels surreal, if not outright blasphemous, to be suggesting that the first movie (the one by Wes Craven, for crying out loud) is actually not the best of the sequence… but here I find myself, based on this recent rewatch, and my memories (which may well be flawed) of what’s to come. This movie will always have a place in my heart, and Freddy a place in my horror pantheon. But while A Nightmare On Elm Street is a brilliant idea, and one with some superb horror set pieces and often brilliant effects work, it’s also a more flawed movie than I’d hoped/remembered. Still, next up is Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. So I’m sure everything will be fine. KP 20/5/18  EXCLUSIVE COVER REVEAL: HELL SHIP BY BENEDICT J. JONES
|
Archives
April 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|