Horrorfest 2015: Cravenfest - A Nightmare on Elm Street

When I started Cravenfest earlier this month I decided I was going to skip A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET even though it's his most famous film for two reasons: I'd already seen it, and not only that, I'd already written about it for Horrorfest. But guess what? That's stupid. It's Cravenfest! So here we go.

 

I read my NIGHTMARE review from a previous Horrorfest the other day and was disappointed to find that I was kind of dismissive of the flick. This year I saw it on the big screen at the Hollywood and although I don't remember being dismissive of it before, apparently I liked it a lot more this time.

 

The movie is so famous the premise doesn't really need to be restated, but here we go: the teens of small-town Springwood are having nightmares in which the same mysterious man appears. One teen (Amanda Wyss) turns up dead under mysterious circumstances and her boyfriend (Nick Corri) is blamed for it. But their friend (Heather Langenkamp) was there, knows about the shared nightmares, and suspects something supernatural might have been to blame.

 

Craven does a great job on a fairly low budget creating a contrast between the real world and the dream world with probably the most fantastic sequences coming early on: there's one scene in which the ceiling above a sleeping Langenkamp seems to morph into a ghoulish figure looming above her and ready to strike, and another in which Wyss is murdered by an invisible force, lifted first onto the wall of the bedroom and then onto the ceiling as her helpless boyfriend watches.

 

This is 1984 so we're nowhere near digital trickery at this point and you have to hand it to Craven and his team: they've gone above and beyond to do something different with what was already becoming a tired genre, the teen slasher film.

 

Of course every teen slasher film needs a memorable villain and this one has probably the most memorable of all, for better or worse: Freddy Krueger, as played by Robert Englund. He doesn't get much screen time on his first outing but that's to the movie's benefit. Unlike most of the other NIGHTMARE flicks, this one benefits from a little bit of mystery involving just exactly who the knife-handed nightmare visitor is, and how he's connected to the kids he is haunting.

 

Watching this film in the context of the rest of Craven's work was interesting because some connections I never noticed before instantly jump out. The most obvious was probably the famous bath tub scene, in which Freddy's knife-gloved hand emerges from the bath water between an unaware Langenkamp's legs. This directly echoed the snake-in-the-bath sequence from his earlier (and less successful) flick, DEADLY BLESSING. Hey, if it isn't seen or appreciate the first time, why not use it again?

 

The movie also co-stars John "Enter the Dragon" Saxon as Langenkamp's police lieutenant father and Ronee Blakley as her alcoholic mother, not the only negligent parents in good ol' Springwood, but among the first in a long-line of notably neglectful adults in Craven's film universe.

 

The first NIGHTMARE is also known for being Johnny Depp's screen debut and he arrives onscreen in full heart-throb mode, able to convincingly play a goofy teenager while also stealing audience hearts.

 

Now, even though this is CRAVENFEST, I'm going to take a break from Craven-directed flicks for a while so I can focus on the rest of the NIGHTMARE series. After all, it is Craven's greatest creation and even if his personal stamp isn't on all the movies, it only feels right to cover them all.