MY LIFE IN HORROR: EVERY TOWN HAS AN ELM STREET 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.
 
Every Town Has An Elm Street

 
Before
 
I remember liking this a lot. It wasn’t up there with 3 and 4, but it was a solid favourite. I remember cool deaths - the kid with the hearing aid whose head explodes, the kid who gets stuck in a videogame. I remember a finale in 3D, with the old school 3D glasses, and old school 3D sight gags with swords and whatnot.
 
Guest stars. Rosanne Barr, Alice Cooper. Freddy saying ‘any street can be an Elm Street’. Aren’t all the teenagers from Freddy’s hometown dead now? Doesn’t the plot revolve around him somehow pulling teenagers back to his town?
 
Hell if I know. Hell if I remember.
 
Time to find out.
 
After
 
*sighs*
 
I mean, you could make a case that it’s the most Elm Street of all the Elm Street movies. DIsturbed teens? Check. Spectacular setpiece death scenes? Check. Innovative twist on the franchise that is inadequately explained, leading to final resolution that feels arbitrary and unearned? Acting that veers wildly from competent to awful? An underlying assumption that if the effects work well enough, the story can just skate? Check, check, checkmate.
 
You’ll have detected a note of increasing disappointment as this series has gone on. It’s been frustrating, to revisit such an iconic part of my childhood and find it so lacking in so many fundamental, basic ways. It strikes me that it’s surprising it hasn’t happened more often, given the nature of the My Life In Horror project; sure, there’s been the odd nasty shock, but as a whole, where I have revisited the source material, it’s been a pleasant surprise to note how well pieces have held up, and even where the work has become dated, and/or my wider understanding provided a clearer and less uncritical perspective, there’s often - almost always, in fact - been something of merit to discuss, some useful insight or perspective or grace note.
 
These films are just… meh. Blah. A genius, world class idea for a horror movie franchise that continuously squanders that potential on mediocre acting, subpar stories, and a paper-thin mythos that leads to unearned resolutions (Freddy’s Dead is arguably the worst offender in this regard, introducing never-before-mentioned, placeholder-name-that-never-got-replaced The Dream People, for fuck’s sake, as the wierd demons that gave Freddy the power to kill people in dreams because No Fucking Reasons, lap up your slop horror fan and enjoy the show, look, 3D snake puppets whose animator got his own credit, eat your fucking popcorn and shut the fuck up).
 
I know the Hellraiser franchise basically goes off a cliff in the third movie, and, from what I understand, from there proceeds to drill ever deeper into the ocean floor to seek out a molten core of awfulness at the very centre of the planet… but at least the first two movies show promise, ambition, and an understanding of how to build a mythos. The Elm Street movies, especially from the fourth film onwards, seem content to coast entirely on empty iconography; one, two Freddy’s coming for you, dream logic death, and the dude himself, hat, claws, sweater.
 
It’s no wonder 4 was my favourite as a kid, really; as I noted in that essay, it’s in the fourth movie that they finally, fully embrace Freddy as an icon, making every reveal shot an event. But it's also in that movie where the writers appear to all but give up on the notion of having an earned resolution, trusting that if they merely provide a series of highly inventive and spectacular dream death shots, the audience simply won’t care that the story is so stupid, or the ending so forced.
 
And the worst part is, it worked, at least for 13 or 14 year old me. I didn’t give a shit that the stories were stupid or that the endings made no sense - I was too busy being wowed by people turning into cockroaches and getting squished. I was just one more mark for the VHS sales/rentals, proving the point of the cynics that made the franchise - as long  as it’s inventively bloody, these kids’ll lap it up.
 
On the other hand, if I’ve forgiven myself for loving The Lost Boys… well, no, okay, I haven't, so that doesn’t help.
 
Well, how about this? What I can take forward as a positive is that I was able, back then, to fall in love with an idea. Even if the execution was flawed, like Doctor Who, the central premise of the Elm Street franchise is an all-time great one; and unlike Who, an all-time great horror premise, as opposed to an idea that could serve to tell horror stories. And I think that’s okay. I think it’s okay that I was such a fan of Freddy Kreuger as an icon, a monster so complete that he committed the worst crimes possible, and then went on to do it all over again, in our dreams, just because he could. A maniac that got ever more heavy on the quips and poses as the series progressed, a villain we felt safe cheering and enjoying as he sliced up our teenage avatars, knowing the monster would always be bested… and always be back.
 
And of course he was back. New Nightmares followed, as did Freddy Vs. Jason, both of which I saw at later dates and about which I Have Thoughts… but they fall outside the scope of this series, not being anything I could fairly claim as a source of youthful influence. No, it’s classic Freddy I grew up with, and it was classic Freddy I returned to (with the exception of part 2, probably for the last time).
 
And given how hacky those movies now seem, especially in terms of plotting, it feels appropriate to sign off this revisit with a hack observation of my own; one that I’ve found not to be true for most of these works, but that undoubtedly holds weight for these films; sometimes, you’re better off leaving yourself with the memories.
 
 
KP
25/7/19