Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #162: A Nightmare On Elm Street

Movies have always had a dream-like quality with the fluid editing, lighting, and impossible situations. Therefore it is only natural for some movies to create a nightmare atmosphere, and in 1984 Wes Craven took that concept to the next level with A Nightmare on Elm Street featuring one of the scariest villains in cinema history, the disfigured Freddy Krueger. It’s already a horrible scenario to have a maniac is chasing you down a dark alley, but what can you do when the alley is your own mind?

With his fedora, stripped sweater, metal claws, and sick sense of humour, Krueger has become ingrained in pop culture ever since he began killing teenagers in their nightmares back in the 1980s. The fact that there have been over half a dozens sequels and a remake has helped keep the character alive, and it has also had the unfortunate effect of lessening his impact. If there is one thing that will make a supernatural monster less scary it is the tenth instalment in his franchise. Still, over the years the mere concept of a dream monster seemed scary enough for me to stay away from those films, although I did watch the gory Freddy vs. Jason when it played on TV. Finally two years ago I rented the original nightmare a few weeks before Halloween to see the origin of the ultimate dream monster. Verdict: stick to the original for a true nightmare.

The concept of the movie feels like a cross between The X-Files and The Twilight Zone. A group of teenagers who live in the same beautiful suburban American neighbourhood all start to have nightmares about a man with a burned face who calls himself Freddy (Robert Englund). Glen Lantz (a young Johnny Depp) says to ignore the monster since a dream can’t hurt you. Unfortunately this particular monster can, and one by one the teenagers start to suffer horrible deaths in their dreams, proving that you can in fact wake up dead, or at least wake up dying.

When a girl is found with stab wounds in her bed, the cops of course go after the boyfriend. When the boyfriend is found strangled in his cell they naturally assume he committed suicide, but Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, the film’s proverbial “final girl”) knows there is something far more sinister at work and begins to think the parents know it too.

She gets her proof when her mother (Ronee Blakley) takes her to a sleep clinic to deal with her incessant nightmares. In one of the film’s best sequences the doctors put wires on Nancy’s head to monitor her sleep and get some rather unusual results. Not only does she wake up screaming with severe gashes on her arm, but also she is now holding a hat that seems to have materialized out of thin air. Talk about the world’s creepiest magic trick.

Nancy’s mom recognizes the hat, having been part of a mob that killed its owner when it was discovered that Freddy was a child killer who was acquitted on a technicality. The parents would not have that, so they burned him alive. They thought they could sweep their crime under the rug and live happily ever after, but Freddy is back from the grave for vengeance. Instead of telling their kids the truth, the adults lie to them or bury their heads in the sand hoping the problem will go away. Instead it grows stronger with each kill, while the children grow weaker from the lack of sleep. Suddenly suburbia doesn’t look so peaceful anymore.

As the nightmarish Krueger, Englund is terrifying and for better or for worse is now forever associated with the iconic character. The film’s effects are all practical and all the scarier for it. I have not seen the unnecessary remake, but I imagine it is full of cartoony CG effects that remind that you are just watching a movie. I like Jackie Earle Haley, but there was no point in him trying to recreate an icon when the original is perfect.

If I have one problem with the original Nightmare it is with its ambiguous ending that left the door wide open for a sequel. After what those characters go through they deserve closure, whether it is death or knowing they can have peaceful dreams again. Even Freddy needs to give at rest, because by the 6^th or 8^th sequel it’s just no scary anymore. Like with actually nightmares, the story needs to end eventually.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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