Sunday, April 25, 2010

A Nightmare On Elm Street: Early Memories

"A Nightmare On Elm Street" is my favorite movie. Ever. It's not even close. It's not only the main reason I'm a big horror geek, it's pretty much the reason I'm a movie geek. I can't say it's the reason I'm a geek overall because I was probably meant to be that from the getgo.

But, for me, just as some people are with "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," I'm all about the "Nightmare" movies. "Freddy's Revenge" was the first R-movie I ever saw in the theater, after I talked my dad into buying tickets for me and a friend.

As most people know, the remake of "Nightmare" opens this coming Friday, April 30. In preparation, I'll probably be talking about the movies pretty much all this week.

Now, it would be easy to just pull the famous screen captures from the original and talk about how awesome it is. But who wants to read more of that? It's an amazing movie, one that set a new standard for horror and one that, to this day, holds up as a pretty good scare, despite some moments here and there that come off a little cheesy, mostly due to the limits of their budget or some mid 80's musical styles that seem dated.

I first saw "Nightmare" at my good friend Mike Rabaa's house. He was having a party with friends and his older sister was having one the same night. It must've been 1985 so we're looking at 7th grade, I think. The thing is: the first time I saw "Nightmare" I missed the beginning. Mike had one of those new-fangled computers and some of us were playing games on that rather than watch the scary movies his mother had rented for everyone to watch.

So the first shot of "Nightmare" is this, Freddy building the first of his razor gloves:

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Then we get the original logo:

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Then we roll to Tina's first nightmare which features her wandering through the boiler room and being scared by not only Freddy Krueger but also ...

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Apparently Tina was afraid of sheep. Or goats. Whichever one it is.

Then Freddy jumps out from behind Tina and she wakes up screaming. Thus, the tone is set.

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But, as I said, the first time I watched the movie I missed all that. I didn't come into the room until a later scene, which is actually pretty famous. The first shot I saw was the famous "Hey, Nancy, no running in the hallway..." moment.

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This lead to one of my favorite images in "Nightmare," that being Freddy taunting Nancy by going into Rod Lane's prison cell and showing her what he's doing to her. At this point, Freddy was different in that he was taunting his prey. Unlike Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees, Freddy played with his food while they were content to just stalk their victims and then slice them up once they cornered them.

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What's funny about "Nightmare" is the amount of knowing glances the characters throw around when Nancy talks about the man in her dreams.

First, Glen knows:

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(There's an odd bit of untapped story with Glen in that while he gives this knowing glance when Nancy describes Freddy, there are other occasions where he points out that he hasn't had a nightmare at all. So why isn't Freddy stalking Glen with the same vigor that he's stalking the other three? Anyway ... )

At Rod's funeral, Rod's father and Nancy's father know:

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(For added drama this shot is when the priest doing the funeral goes over the 'he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword' stuff.)

Later, Nancy's father knows AGAIN:

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And her mother Marge ALSO knows:

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Speaking of Marge, there's also a version of her speech to Nancy telling Freddy's story where she says that the four kids tormented in "Nightmare" all had brothers and sisters that Freddy killed while he was alive. To me, it's a little too on point to add that to the story and I think it adds to the darkness of the piece to leave that out and just have the parents pushed over the brink back in those days and now the kids are paying the price of it.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll go through more of the deleted scenes and images from the first movie.

Or I'll talk about the second movie, which isn't very good!

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