0 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

USA, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Wes Craven
Photography: Jacques Haitkin
Music: Charles Bernstein
Editors: Patrick McMahon, Rick Shaine
Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri

I'm very fond of A Nightmare on Elm Street because it's approximately where I decided to give the horror / creepshow genre one more chance. They just kept scaring me too bad. And Nightmare is truly a full-on scare fest, with cunning shock cuts, gore, and a premise that insidiously gets under your skin. But it's also an '80s movie, complete with cheesy synthesizer soundtrack, and a critical moment (in the wake of The Evil Dead) when horror became self-conscious and started to riff and goof and deconstruct, playing for laughs when it chose. The sing-songy nursery rhyme chanted by anonymous children here (a somewhat tired trope of the genre by then) is turned subtly toward explication and a kind of self-mocking: "One, two, Freddy's coming for you / Three, four, better lock your door / Five, six, grab your crucifix / Seven, eight, stay up late / Nine, ten, never sleep again."

Freddy, of course, is Fred Krueger, the monster figure child molester at the center of this. The backstory is silly and preposterous, evidently only to be related in filthy cellars. Even within this movie, let alone the entire franchise that followed, our boogeyman with the Wolverine blades in the red and green sweater is more super villain than proper monster (and morphing slowly but surely into stand-up comic), which makes him ultimately a bit dull or worse. But here's how it works. Fred Krueger attacks his victims from inside their dreams—hence "stay up late" and "never sleep again" in the nursery rhyme. And for most of its length Nightmare is really pretty good on the insanities of dream world logic. The best dream scenes here, such as one in the high school, feel convincingly weird (and threatening) as only dreams can.



The picture is really good on violence too. I count the first death—of Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), shortly after she has enjoyed sex with her boyfriend—as one of the great scenes in horror. Director and writer Wes Craven does it just right, hitting us with it in the first 15 minutes, which have otherwise been mostly spent on introducing the suburban / small-town high school players and creating a genially cozy (if vaguely menacing) atmosphere. Then, quickly, Tina is suddenly disturbed in her sleep, ripped into with invisible blades, lifted from the bed where she's been sleeping (obviously on wires, but it works). She is screaming. There is blood. She is thrown about and then dragged up a wall and across the ceiling. What does gravity matter when colossal evil forces have set to you? How do you fight something invisible that can drag you across the ceiling? It is sudden, wrenching, unexpected, over the top, and impossible to look away from. The picture now has your full attention.

Indeed, it works in many small ways too. Krueger's blades and the way they scrape on metal and other surfaces are continually invoked, making full use of the skin-crawling reaction to the sound and the idea, the proverbial fingernails on a chalkboard. And Craven keeps finding ways to make his characters ridiculously vulnerable, as one scene in a bathtub that is shot looking at our heroine Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, trying hard) from her feet, with her legs lazily falling open. You see that, you suspect what you will see next, and still you can't prepare for it.

I also get a kick out of the faces that show up here: the great John Saxon as Nancy's father and a gruff if somewhat inept cop. Ronee Blakley right out of a defective tanning booth as Nancy's alcoholic mother. And "introducing Johnny Depp," who pretty much even then as a 19-year-old already had his smoov ways down.

Unfortunately, things being what they are in the movie marketing world, something has to be done to resolve the premise, and so the picture gradually shifts into a thriller mode in the last third, as the dream rules become merely utilitarian in terms of hunting down the bad guy—chase scene material. With the booby traps she sets for Krueger at the end, Nancy and her plight become a Home Alone scene even before there was a Home Alone.

It's redeemed somewhat by a last scene that's wonderfully insane and incomprehensible—but then came the sequels, so that's that. I haven't seen any of those sequels, by the way, though I now own a set with the first four and plan to make a project soon of seeing how bad it got. Craven's reputation largely rests here and with The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left, the latter of which is despicable but interesting (a calculated rip-off of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) and with its place in the history of the form. I still recall being scared just by the radio ad campaign, where viewers were encouraged to remind themselves, zombie fashion, "It's only a movie ... it's only a movie."

When A Nightmare on Elm Street is good, it's very good. The dream sense is strong and it often feels like a nightmare, with the lines between dream and reality adroitly blurred, as when people wake from their nightmares with wounds. It has a good many nice gothic notes, with the dream world pushing and distorting reality from the other sides of walls. It's also a pretty good summation of the state of slasher codification to that point (the rudimentary and automatic equations of sex with death, blades as the instruments favored, and of course a central super villain). Do you like scary movies? You could do a lot worse.

Detail: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

0 Scream (1996)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Henry Winkler

It's easy enough to knock Scream for attempting to have its cake and eat it too, make a scary movie and at the same time be all smug and ironical about it. Certainly the entire franchise played out that way—is still playing out, with the late-arriving fourth installment from 2011 (which I haven't seen). Many, many such exercises have followed—The Cabin in the Woods, for example, is only one of the better ones. More broadly, the whole decade of the '90s is often dismissed as an especially poor time for horror, and Scream tends to be assigned the face of that, turning horror into little twee comedy skits with occasional shock cuts and gore, until finally Saw, Hostel, the zombie apocalypse, and a lurching army of reboots reintroduced us to the experience of actually being scared by movies again (if rather unpleasantly so, but being scared is always unpleasant after all).

Still, the first 13 minutes of Scream are so good I really think we might need to back up a little here. Wes Craven may be uneven before he is anything else, but the confidence and pure verve are unmistakable. The details are just right: a teen girl alone at home at night in a big comfortable suburban mansion, Jiffy Pop on the stovetop, and someone with a funny voice who keeps calling on the cordless and asking weird questions. "Do you like scary movies?" he says. Drew Barrymore is a perfect choice to play the victim, and even better (shades of Janet Leigh in Psycho) she's gone from the movie practically before it's begun. The strokes of development are swift—from flirtatious joking with the strange caller to outright terror as he suddenly seems to be close by, and seriously malevolent too—and finally you just have to accept the premise. It forces you to, even as the action grows more outlandish and convenient. This opener has some air of the showoff stunt, but no one is about to get up and walk out after that, even as the movie quickly settles into the snide and, yes, very witty nonsense that follows.


In a kind of horror movie twofer, Neve Campbell, already on her way to becoming a horror movie icon, succeeds Drew Barrymore as the chief potential female victim of interest. Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, whose mother was brutally slain a year to the day before the events of Scream. Of course there are always one-year anniversaries of slain parents in these movies. There is also more overt attention than usual paid to virgin and non-virgin status, but as it turns out that has much more to do with the meta side of the picture. In a late scene a video store clerk outlines "the rules of horror movies" in detail. Altogether too much thought was put into them.

In fact, after the first scene, the picture plays a good deal more like classic '80s teen comedy than horror—I suppose it's no coincidence the slasher subgenre that Scream formally parodies emerged out of the same time period, the early '80s, that also produced Fast Times at Ridgemont High and everything that came in its wake. The principals in Scream are mostly high school students, the scene is often the high school interior and grounds, and the preoccupations tend toward the usual cliques, sociological value judgments, and partying, not necessarily in that order. There is some noticeably lesser degree of interest in sex, which mostly just contributes, in abstracted fashion, to explaining the predicament in which our gang of heroes find themselves.

That's because the other genre type that Scream borrows liberally from is the mystery story, cozy Agatha Christie division, in which people are way more preoccupied with "solving the case"—that is, using logical processes of elimination to figure out the identity of the slayer, who we see roaming and skittering about in a long black robe and the now-familiar iconic white mask. This is on a notably different track from blind terrorizing forces of evil and somewhat silly in the context—again, twee skits. Red herrings and elaborate clues abound, and at points someone sitting in an overstuffed armchair wearing a deerstalker cap, smoking a meerschaum, and making amazing points of deductive reasoning would not be altogether out of place.

The whole thing is a mess and a dated mess now too. There is way too much '90s music on the soundtrack—Nick Cave, Moby, an acoustic version of "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Gus—and too much of that is well, you know, smug and ironical. And yet I'm willing to forgive the excesses and weaknesses of Scream. Movies after Pulp Fiction were marred by a lot of this business for a few years there, that's one excuse. But it's nice to see flashes of Wes Craven the consummate horror filmmaker, and it's nice to see him working with a cast that brings a lot of good energy and is obviously having a ball. I don't even knock the franchise at large—I liked Scream 2 a good deal, and I even liked the Scary Movie franchise too, built directly off Scream. But the only thing that's essential in all this is the first scene of the first movie. All the rest is marginally entertaining hokum played for laughs.

Detail: Scream (1996)