Okay, first, a story. I come in just shy of five feet tall, and have always been a lot shorter than average. When I was five, around the time that Nightmare on Elm Street came out, I was the size of a toddler. So little tiny me is toddling around a novelty shop at the mall with my parents, my eye level right around knee height for most adults, when I bump into a pair of legs. I look up to see who I've bumped into, and it's a life-size Freddy Krueger doll.
I lose my shit.
I still remember that tantrum, the hysterical sobbing as my parents took me out in the mall concourse to try to calm me down. I remember going home that night and lying in bed, terrified that Freddy Krueger was going to climb through my window and kill me. And for the rest of my childhood, I had nightmares about Freddy. He was my own personal boogeyman.
Fast-forward to high school. The Sci-fi Channel has a lovely running feature, the Sci-fi Series Collection, that airs short-lived and unlamented sci-fi television shows in their entirety. It was an obvious ploy to fill airtime with cheap content, but it was a treasure for me. (That's where I saw the Planet of the Apes TV show, another one that changed me for the weirder, but that's another post.) They aired all six episodes of a show from a couple of years before, Nightmare Cafe. Created by Wes Craven and starring Robert Englund, the show was a lot sweeter than you might expect, more fantasy than horror.
Having avoided everything related to A Nightmare on Elm Street ever since that scarring childhood trauma, I had no idea who Craven and Englund were. I just knew I ADORED Nightmare Cafe, particularly the snarky and mercurial angel of death, Blackie. When I discovered that my beloved Blackie was also Freddy Krueger, my brain kind of melted.
But by then I was a jaded teenager, not to mention a devotee of classic horror from the 20s and 30s, so I decided it was time to face the boogeyman. At a sleepover at a friend's house, she suggested the most recent of the Nightmare movies, New Nightmare. Saucer-eyed but too cool to admit my abject horror, I agreed. And of course it was the best horror movie I'd ever seen.
Granted, I'd seen next to no horror movies that dated past about 1970 at that point, so it didn't take a lot to awe me. Still, the storytelling was so good that, despite being a movie basically about a movie that I'd never seen, I adored it. Langenkamp and Saxon's performances in New Nightmare were so good, I felt like I'd seen the original, somehow. Little Miko Hughes was so weird and yet so believable -- mid-90s L.A. was so weird and yet so believable, for that matter. Occasionally a character in a movie is a Hollywood star, but very rarely do you see movies about people who just work in movies, known but not by any means famous.
And then going back and watching Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time after seeing New Nightmare was surreal. But that's not what this is about.
This is about Freddy, and Robert Englund, who of course appears both as Freddy and out of makeup as himself. It did… strange things to me. Taking my profound childhood fear (and fascination, of course, because that's fear for you) of Freddy with my teenaged puppy-dog crush on Blackie and effectively embodying both in a single figure, who then slices his way out of Heather Langenkamp's bed… it was a sexually formative moment.
My high school was an historic brick edifice surrounded by old-growth trees and flower beds. Outside the school, there was this particular turn in a particular path I walked regularly which was completely unlit and black as pitch at night. It scared the crap out of me. But when I came up on that turn, I thought of Freddy hiding behind a tree or in a shadow. And that comforted me, even though I still thought Freddy was apt to disembowel me, because no other monsters would dare, not with Freddy there. Only Freddy could kill me, and I loved him, so it was okay. (It's probably fair to say that this had some strange affects on my love life later on, but everybody deals with weird shit, right?)
I was lucky that New Nightmare happened to the be first Nightmare film I saw, really. If I'd seen, say, The Dream Master (…yeurgh) first, things might have gone very differently for me. I might be writing a blog about romantic comedies right now.
Instead, I encountered a figure who might do horrible things to me, and who I loved anyway. A grotesque and horrifying monster who was somehow my grotesque and horrifying monster. I went on to watch enough horror movies to write an occasional (...very occasional) blog about horror movies largely because of this man -- this monster.
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