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.
