The "Nightmare on Elm Street" films were seen as reprehensible stuff back in the '80s and '90s, the kind of trash that mainstream film lovers and many critics loved to rail against. Sure, we all knew who Freddy Krueger was, just like we knew who his brethren slasher fiends Jason Voorhies and Michael Meyers were. However, I never actually saw any of their movies until I sought them out myself in college. I was always squeamish around the slasher genre, so just watching the first films from each of the major franchises was more than enough for me. To date, I still have no idea when Jason's hockey mask and chainsaw getup showed up in the "Friday the 13th" series.
Over the years however, attitudes have mellowed a bit, mine included. The horror genre moved on to other things, and the long-running slasher series that started in the '70s and '80s are mostly kaput now. "Halloween" is still active, but the most recent attempts at rebooting "Nightmare on Elm Street," and "Friday the 13th" didn't go too well. The old effects and scares look more and more dated with each passing year, and the films are regarded as more cheesy than scary by modern viewers. And so, it's the perfect time for a former '80s scaredy-cat to risk another look. The original 1984 "Elm Street" was my favorite of the '80s slasher films, and there are several "Elm Street" sequels that keep popping up in pop culture conversations. I decided to finally take a look at them.
So, over the past week, I watched "Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge," "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," and the documentary "Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street," about Mark Patton, the gay star of "Freddy's Revenge" and his complicated relationship with the film. "Dream Warriors" and "New Nightmare" have long been held up as "Elm Street" features that are actually pretty good, with clever writing and good quality fantasy horror effects. "Freddy's Revenge" is more interesting for the way that it's become a cult film over the years, full to the brim with homoerotic subtext - or was it subtext? - and subsequently embraced by the LGBT community.
I'm glad I watched "Freddy's Revenge" and "Scream, Queen!" together, because the documentary added some great context to what was otherwise a fairly standard, by-the-numbers '80s horror film. Mark Patton is far more interesting and compelling in real life, and the story of how he tried to pursue an acting career while closeted, and the fallout of the film's failure, is fascinating. Watching him struggle to embrace the "Elm Street" fandom and make peace with the screenwriter he felt wronged him, delivers far more effective drama than anything from the actual "Elm Street" film he starred in. "Freddy's Revenge" is campy and unintentionally hilarious, but honestly not bad for its era.
"Dream Warriors" is nearly as beloved as the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" among the series' fans. The effects work is still impressive, and it was fun to see Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne in early roles. However, I don't think it's nearly as strong as the original, and the concepts and ideas tend to be better than their actual execution. The acting, unfortunately, is pretty poor throughout. This was also the major problem with "New Nightmare," billed as a meta-film about Heather Lagenkamp playing herself, being menaced by Freddy Krueger as a new "Elm Street" film is being planned. The first hour of Lagenkamp and a wooden child actor getting increasingly mired in family melodrama left me bored stiff. Wes Craven pulled off the same concept so much better with "In the Mouth of Madness" a few years later.
However, watching all these films cemented for me that I find Freddy Krueger himself, and the whole shtick of using nightmares to kill people, absolutely fabulous stuff. Robert Englund's great as Krueger throughout, giving him real flair and panache. The different kill sequences, the use of body horror, and the different levels of reality are all realized in really creative, interesting ways in these films. They allow the filmmakers to conjure up these wild, weird cinematic images that occasionally slip into the realms of the surreal and the experimental. "Dream Warriors" in particular has been very influential, and I can see echoes of it in so many other subsequent fantasy films, right up to "New Mutants" in the present day.
I'm debating watching the rest of the series, even though I know it goes downhill in a hurry, and even though I can see how the series' use of dream logic and gory aesthetics could be really, really bad in the wrong hands. There's something oddly comforting about Freddy's straightforward simplicity as a villain, and the formulaic nature of these films. It helps that the violence looks so cartoonish now, and the effects are so over-the-top, I can't take them seriously at all. They're occasionally scary in short jolts, but not disturbing.
I guess this means, in a funny way, I feel like I'm finally old enough for Freddy Krueger movies.
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