Cult TV, Freddy Krueger, and Pop Culture Stockholm Syndrome

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. 

Every town has an Elm Street.

All right, so I promised a spirited defense of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. The problem now is that I've just watched the trailers for the next Harry Potter film and I am so excited, y'all. It looks to rock like a rocking thing. And now I may be way too excited about Harry Potter to put together any coherent thoughts on the subject at hand.

Sorry, Freddy. Aw, don't give me that look. No, you are better than Harry Potter, really.

Okay, here's the thing: I'm not saying Freddy's Dead is a good movie, by any means. No, it is not even a mediocre movie. It is a bad movie, an exceptionally bad movie. But I've never thought it was the worst of the series by half, and have always felt like some outrageously silly and ill-conceived moments have gotten it a bad rap.

So I know that it is often silly and stupid, and that the 3D ending was a stupendously bad idea, and that the video game death really is the worst in any of the movies. But I want to highlight some of the redeeming qualities of the film, without denying any of those fully valid criticisms.

First of all, I love this bunch of kids. They're the first post-Roseanne teenagers in the series, and the kind of kids you actually don't see that often in horror movies. They aren't especially attractive (granted, I always had a thing for Breckin Meyer, but I'm fairly sure I was in the minority on that one), they don't have cookie-cutter suburban lives, and there are no cheerleaders or nerds. They're like the Breakfast Club if all of them had been Judd Nelson.

She wants to be Darlene Connor so bad she can taste it.

The backstory on Freddy is kind of fun, and suitably weird. Alice Cooper was his father, which would make anybody a little bit odd.

I'm of two minds about expanding on Freddy's story; I realize that it does probably detract from his pure monstrousness. In the first film he's barely a memory and it's his very vagueness that makes him so terrifying. But a familiar monster also grows in stature as his legend does, I think, and as Freddy gains more of a story to tell, he becomes increasingly mythic.

In this one, Freddy's actually scarier without the makeup.

Freddy's house has gotten a bit of a makeover in this one, which works quite well for me. The blue lighting and cobwebs were getting a little campy by the end, there, becoming more carnival haunted house than horrifying outpost of evil. The abandoned look expressed in dirt and grime and decay reminds me of the house in Clive Barker's Hellraiser, which also gave me the willies.

There's a scholarly paper in the way the decay of Freddy's house mimics the real-estate-related terrors of his aging fan base -- which is why I'm not in grad school anymore.

The opening sequence is a good setup and the total mystery about what the hell has happened to the town is well-played, I think. I particularly like the spectral bus stop. Plus, let's face it, Bob Shaye actually is kinda creepy looking, so his cameo here is awfully appropriate.

Yes, Peter Jackson got into a feud with this guy. But then, he's hard to scare. Except with crickets.

Speaking of cameos, you've gotta like Johnny Depp's little cameo. (Side note: you know how there are several actors from the series at the funeral scene in New Nightmare? Apparently Wes wanted to ask Johnny Depp to do it but was afraid to. And then Johnny told him later he'd have been happy to do it. How awesome would that have been? And knowing he did this dreck, did Wes really think he'd turn them down?)

I like the creepy little girl; she's just creepy enough, without being too obvious. Which the children in white weren't to start with, but they kind of got done to death by the fifth movie. Which was, I might add, in my estimation actually substantially worse than this one. This movie veers into a trippier, harsher tone from the previous couple of movies, which had become almost fantasy, an excuse for increasingly absurd transformations and dream sequences. Freddy's Dead has, at the very least, a fairly credible set of characters and an attempt at recapturing the series' bite.

The town going completely mad after all of the children are killed was, I think, a weird and bold move. The creators have admitted that they'd been watching a lot of Twin Peaks, and it shows. In fact, if you put Roseanne and Twin Peak in a blender with a gallon or two of fake blood and a big hunk of cheese, you might get something like this movie.

And the powerful female characters in this movie are one of the things it takes from the influence of popular texts of the time, like Roseanne. I love Lezlie Dean's Tracy, cliche though she seems now. I love that there's no "good" girl, no cheerleader, no "hot" girl -- just Tracy, who'll happily emasculate any man who gets on her bad side. She's like if Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You was in a horror movie instead of a comedy.

As Ani Difranco put it, "I am not a pretty girl. That is not what I do."

And then there's Lisa Zane's Maggie, who I also love. She's down-to-earth without being naive, good without being innocent, and kicks ass without losing her shit completely. She feels like a worthy successor to my girl Nancy, and I don't think I'd say that of any other Elm Street heroine (except Heather, but that's obviously too weird to get into and the stuff of another post). She brings a welcome maturity and substance to a subgenre largely dominated by dimwitted teenagers.

(There would be an image of Maggie here, but I don't have this on DVD and can't find a nice one out on the Internet. Alas.)

As for Maggie being Freddy's child, I've actually always kind of liked the idea, though I thought it was pretty hideously handled in the film. There were some nice moments -- I like the confrontation between them in Maggie's dream, as she relives a childhood memory and tries to resolve the father figure she seems to have loved with the gruesome discovery in the cellar. Of course the whole thing devolves into silliness in the end, which is perhaps the film's most unforgivable shortcoming, but for a moment the prospect of real darkness looms.

It's too late, Freddy. I know you too well now.

The title, I should explain right off. It's a line from A Nightmare on Elm Street: it's heroine Nancy's response when good-natured jock boyfriend Glen inquires, leading into act IV of the flick, as to why she's picked up a book about booby-traps and anti-personnel devices.


I like it. It's such a teenager-y thing to say, casual and to-the-point, cool without being scripty or a wisecrack.

It reminds me of an occasion when I was in college: I was being bullied by the university administration, and by way of encouragement, my father quoted Hunter Thompson to me: "Don't take any guff from those swine." Nancy is saying, basically, that she's not gonna take any more guff from that swine.

Nancy is also giving the mission statement of every woman in horror and, to some degree, every woman out in the real world as well. It's certainly mine: this is my thing now. I'm into survival.