Why Uncle Wes is Important To Me: Wes Craven and the Boogeyman

Hardcore horror fans know the origin story of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger very well: Wes Craven has recounted the initial idea in many interviews over the years.

As the story goes, a very young Wes was peering out the window of his house watching the night when he caught the attention of a man in a bowler hat who was shuffling past. The man met Wes’ gaze and leered at him, scarily. Wes closed the curtain immediately and stood in fear next to the window for a few minutes.

He pulled the curtain back again, and to his sheer terror, the man was still staring at him. Wes watched as the man then turned as if he were walking toward Wes’ house, scaring him even more. He ran and told his older brother, who grabbed a baseball bat and waited by the door.

Apparently, the man got quite a kick out of giving the young boy an unforgettable jolt. Wes Craven got something more out of it, though; the seed for arguably the most popular of the modern movie monsters, Freddy Krueger.

Quite a few things differentiate Fred Krueger (gleefully and manically portrayed by Robert Englund) from his other popular counterparts; he doesn’t wear a mask (he doesn’t mind not facially hiding his intentions, chillingly), he clearly enjoys being the hobgoblin, and maybe most importantly, he is articulately lascivious. This is also a clear evolution from the classic Universal Monsters, who, aside from Dracula, didn’t relish their tragic roles as creatures of the night.

While Dracula is maybe his closest affiliate in early horror cinema, Freddy has something that even Drac didn’t have: Krueger could be the monster in your closet, the hand reaching for your foot when you absentmindedly dangle it off the bed, the voice whispering into your ear when you swear you’re alone…in other words, The Boogeyman.

The original intent of the boogeyman (or bogeyman, bogieman) is perhaps even more sinister than Craven intended his nightmare man concoction for the screen to be.

Simply put, the boogeyman was an imaginary creature that was used to literally scare children into behaving and listening to their parents. The boogeyman varied in “appearance” and legend, which changed from house to house depending on the imagination of the questionable parental units abiding. Some kids were told things like, “If you don’t share your toys, the boogeyman will get you,” or the even more unsettling, “Go to sleep, or the boogeyman will get you."

 

“But only in their dreams can men be truly free; ‘twas always thus, and always thus will be.” So speaks the poet John Keating, AKA Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society.

Keating must never have seen A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Wes Craven’s boogeyman was born of that same spirit, and if the intention of his film wasn’t necessarily CONQUERING the boogeyman, it certainly became so for many children of the 1980’s who were able to stand up to Krueger simply by making it through the entire film.

In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy is defeated by the heroine Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) when she finally figures out that Freddy cannot exist where there is no “spirit of fear” (2 Timothy 1:7, KJV). Krueger feeds off the fear of the teenagers of Springwood, and when Nancy turns her back on him, she strips him of his power.

Here is a VERY important development to the future of the horror film. One heavily used horror trope finds females appearing as basically victimized “girls in turmoil”, screaming and waiting to be rescued. Even Laurie Strode of John Carpenter’s masterpiece Halloween, who fights back instinctively against the boogeyman Michael Myers, didn’t become proactive in quite the way Craven’s Nancy Thompson does in Elm Street. Nancy comes up with a plan and tries to, in effect, bait the boogeyman.

In his insightful book Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion, and Psychology, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley writes that "Nancy ultimately finds in her dreams the deep resources of personal strength to overcome an evil that the adult social world had failed to defeat."

Nancy finds the strength to accomplish this not just DESPITE the fact that her parents have separated and her mother has become an almost wholly introspective alcoholic, but partially BECAUSE of it. She knows that, even right there on good old Elm Street USA, there are dark depths, and as John Kenneth Muir points out in his excellent book, Horror Films of the 1980’s, “Nancy can recognize the link between worlds for what it is, and look below the surface of reality because she is already trained to do so, through family history.”

So, this is a horror heroine who doesn’t run away screaming, or become inevitable prey to the boogeyman of the night. She fights back, and in turn, conquers even the scariest of boogeymen. Elm Street’s tacked on ending of Freddy’s arm pulling Nancy’s mom through the door as the kids drive to school was added despite Craven’s protests, and is somewhat nullified by Nancy’s reappearance in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, co-written by Craven.

Craven himself has suggested that horror movies can have a positive effect on people, that making it through your first scary horror films can represent a squashing of childhood fears and thereby make kids feel empowered. In the case of Nancy, not only do kids get a hero who isn’t afraid to confront her fears, she does so despite the failings of the adults around her.

A Nightmare on Elm Street also represents another personal nostalgia for me, and perhaps yet another reason for my own gravitation to the franchise; I first watched it with my mother and a group of friends. We screamed and laughed and my mother had to have someone walk upstairs and wait outside the bathroom for her, but we made it through that terrifying film and thereby defeated that beastly boogeyman Krueger.

Sure, he reared his ugly head again when I was a teen watching Freddy’s Revenge, which I rented despite my own misgivings about the fearsome face of Fred staring back at me from the big box VHS cover art, but by now I knew the ultimate truth about Freddy and Elm Street…it was only a movie. Having grasped that concept through daring myself to watch, the horror film became essentially what a roller coaster ride might be to some; just a really fun, adrenaline powered ride through the creative concepts and sometimes astonishing cinematography and special effects of a film’s creators. Legendary author H.P. Lovecraft pointed out that “we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point.”

Cue Robert Englund, manically laughing as he peels back a layer of his own skull to reveal that “You’ve got the body, and I’ve got the brains.”

Children should be taught to deal with their fears, that much is undeniable. It’s an integral part of childhood, the way in which kids are made aware of how to cope with their natural apprehensions. There are the negative ways of using their fears against them (“If you’re bad, the police will come and lock you in jail”), or in effect making children scared by their own lack of fulfilling an adult’s expectations in things as non-threatening as sports or schoolwork.

Some parents even unknowingly try to bully their children into not being scared of curious things, such as humiliating them for being scared of something the adult finds non-threatening. Similarly, comparing children to other children their age or younger in a negative fashion (“Billy is only 8 and he isn’t scared of the swimming pool like you are”) can be just as damaging to a child’s psyche and self-esteem.

None of this is to suggest that every little kid should watch A Nightmare on Elm Street or any other horror film. There are movies that are not made for children of a young age, or kids who just can’t handle that form of entertainment. Toddlers should literally NEVER be exposed to a horror movie. In these cases, horror films can even be detrimental, which is why an adult should be familiar with the material they are going to screen with their kids. Plus, knowing what’s coming next is potentially a good way of letting the child know when they should cover their eyes.

The most important part of it is letting them in on the creative aspect. Showing them, “This is just a movie. That’s makeup done by an artist. That was made by this group of talented effects people.” In effect, pulling back the curtain to show kids the creative side of making a film.

It has been pointed out by numerous horror experts, particularly David J. Skal, that horror movies tend to reflect the times in which they are released, rather than vice versa. This seems to hold true in particular to horror vehicles during wartime. There seems to be some connection between people needing the catharsis of experiencing a thrill ride that has no implication on their own lives, but echoing the tragic reflection of the real life horrors of war. In the “atomic” fifties, the monsters of yesteryear were replaced in cinema by the looming threat of the atom bomb, with film after film showing the effects of atomic energy on the world, turning ants and spiders into gigantic monsters hell-bent on destruction.

Some psychologists have even suggested that there’s a lure in horror films because they reinforce morality; the old-fashioned moral codes and karmic aspects of horror thrive as much in modern horror as in the Grimm fairytales of old.

Rob Zombie, director of a handful of what some might think of as more extreme horror movies, is of the opinion that it’s irresponsible not to show the carnage that a horrible act can attain. He may have a point. The Bible describes in some detail the abuse and subsequent dismemberment of a concubine. She is, after a night of abuse, cut into 12 pieces which are distributed into “all the coasts of Israel” (Judges 19:22-29, KJV). There is no way to sugar coat that horrific event, and the Bible does not attempt to. Was it a reaction to the morality of the times? Judges 19:2, KJV: “But his concubine played the harlot against him…” Undoubtedly so, since many Christians in modern times have struggled with the interpretation of that particular scripture. The morality of the Old Testament plays out most famously in horror stories such as Tales From the Crypt, in which those outwardly seeking to perform evil receive their comeuppance…and it usually ain’t pretty.

Wes Craven directed his boogeyman in one more movie, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. In that extremely interesting, cerebral and self-aware horror film, Freddy is regarded as a demonic portal; a beast existing now in the real world because of attempts to quell horror stories. It was an attack on horror censorship, and also a response to Craven’s critics who surmised that his films did more to hurt the world than to help it.

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert wrote of New Nightmare: “"I haven't been exactly a fan of the Nightmare series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing."

Interestingly, the climax of the movie is a play on the “Hansel and Gretel” fairytale, and Freddy is disposed of by Heather Langenkamp and her very young son, Dylan (Miko Hughes). 

 

In fact, in a reactionary turn of events, it is Dylan who comes to his mother’s aid and helps to send the big, bad boogeyman searing into the netherworld where he belongs.

Godspeed Uncle Wes, and thanks for giving horror a reasonable and wise voice, and for helping to give some of us the tools to, in essence, defeat the boogeyman.