Beware The Spaceman

Tag: wes craven

  • It’s real to her, that’s all that matters

    a spaceship above the world with title

    This one feels like an Off World post because it’s an interpretation, and my interpretations can be wrong. Off a Halloween retro reaction, I rewatched A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    The film is layered. I always knew that. But watching it on my tenner Blu-ray player, a film I must have seen countless times, one of the scenes changed the context of the whole film for me.

    It’s the scene before that last confrontation. Nancy calls her Dad Donald over to the house. Freddy melts into the bed and Nancy begs her police chief dad to get him.

    I always thought that this scene confirmed Freddy’s existence. We see a close-up of Donald’s face. But what my brain never registered before is that he never confirms seeing the boogeyman.

    His only reaction is to hug his daughter.

    Chronologically, the sequels confirm he did indeed see Freddy. But take those out of the equation for a moment. What he sees is a house fire and his troubled daughter.

    The hug, in my estimation, confirms that his character accepts that the situation is real to his daughter, and that actually is all that matters.

    It reframes the whole film.

    I have seen the calls to cancel films like Nightmare, and I get it. They’re not the nicest of films. They’re not designed to be for everyone.

    But I think there’s another reading worth considering.

    We all face our Elm Street at some point or another and when we do that situation can be very urgent and very real. Sometimes our house fire is invisible to others.

    “Daddy” couldn’t fix this. It took the character’s inner strength to do that.

    I think the overall message there is actually very relevant and very positive in today’s world.

  • Ranking Elm Street: Nightmare on Elm Street

    After that viewing of Part 3 and needing to be walked home despite being at secondary school, those words from my friends rang true:

    “If you thought that was scary, you should see Freddy 1.”

    We did indeed watch “Freddy 1”, more well known of course as A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    This film hits different. It opens with a horror segment — a teen running through a nightmare landscape. You automatically settle in, assuming we’re following our protagonist Tina… only for her to be killed in the first few minutes.

    The message is clear: no one is safe.

    What the film does next is build tension absolutely perfectly. We meet Nancy and her friends. The adults — always a step behind in horror — have Tina’s boyfriend down as her killer. As the characters talk about their nightmares featuring the same “creep”, we know that night has to come. It’s this cycle that ramps up the tension massively. You know, because it’s universal, that they will have to fall asleep.

    Unlike the other films, Freddy is on screen here for a grand total of seven minutes. This monster makes the version in the sequels look like a parody. His story is told through the other characters, and that is so much scarier. Proof, I think, that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do.

    But those story beats we do get… wow. One line on first watch from Nancy’s drunk mother: “He’s dead, Nan. He can’t get you. Mommy killed him.”

    In this ghost story, the spectre, demon, or whatever Freddy is has the children paying for their parents’ sins. This is why none of the adults on Elm Street believe the kids.

    Then there’s the ending. Bob Shaye, the producer, wanted to keep Freddy “alive”, seeing the potential in Elm Street as a franchise (he was right). Wes described a different ending — one that is actually a much better fit for the film (he was also right).

    After pulling Freddy’s hat from her dream, Nancy realises she can bring Freddy back into the real world where he can be hurt. Today we’re used to seeing characters like Nancy in horror — but back in ’84, girls in these films usually did a lot of running and screaming. This was wonderfully against the norm.

    Towards the end she faces Freddy and tells him: “I want my mother and friends again. I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing. You’re sh*t.”

    With that, Freddy is gone.

    In Wes’s proposed ending, this wasn’t undone. Nancy goes to school the next day, her friends still alive.

    The ending we got… well, you’ve likely seen it. The car has Freddy colours, and he drags Nancy’s mum through the door. The seeds of MTV Freddy are planted right there.

    But imagine for a moment that Nancy’s powerful victory was left to stand. That Wes Craven’s ending was the one we got. A Nightmare on Elm Street would be a one‑and‑done masterpiece.

    As it is, though, it’s still a masterclass in tension and a perfect Halloween watch.

    Had Wes got his way, would I have watched Part 3 at my friend’s house? Would my friends even know who Freddy Krueger was? Would I be writing this blog to you all on Hallows’ Eve?

  • Elm Street Ranked:Dream Warriors

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number2:Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors

    I’m going to go back to that night — the one I mentioned in the introduction. Because the first Elm Street I ever saw, taped off Sky onto a VHS, was Part 3: The Dream Warriors. It’s remained a favourite, and it came close — really close — to being as good as the original.

    The opening scene sees Kristen falling asleep while making the matchstick house she keeps seeing in her dreams. Freddy’s house. I remember an eerie guitar riff here, but I’m glad to see my Blu‑ray restores the true “Into the Fire” track by Dokken — the rock music she uses to stay awake.

    Her falling asleep leads to a very frightening (to my thirteen‑year‑old brain) run through Freddy’s house of horrors. It’s easy to see now that the little girl she tries to save is a puppet, but back then it was terrifying. When Kristen wakes, everything seems fine. She heads to the bathroom — and jump scare. He’s in the mirror. Never trust a mirror in a horror movie. The taps morph into razors and slash Kristen’s wrists just as her mother walks in to ask what she’s doing.

    At the time, I hadn’t seen anything like it. I didn’t have the words. Freddy is staging these murders to look like suicides. The adults can’t see the threat. They see cries for attention, and later tragedies of the teens’ own making. It’s clear Freddy is a metaphor for depressive mental illness.

    Luckily for the teens, someone does know what they’re going through, as we’re reintroduced to Nancy from the first film.

    This is the first Elm Street to use the psychiatric ward setting. And despite what might sound doom‑and‑gloom so far, the film pivots from horror to dark fantasy. To defeat Freddy, our Dream Warriors use a psychiatric drug and have to find their inner powers (the depression metaphor really keeps coming, doesn’t it). The X‑Men film New Mutants would later credit this movie as a heavy influence.

    I actually loved this change. It’s perhaps the last Nightmare film where you’re rooting for the teens, not the killer. There are a couple of very memorable kills — one where he takes out a Harry Potter lookalike years before that was a thing, using a wheelchair (it’s bizarre). And of course, the iconic moment where he pops out of a TV and, after slamming his victim’s face into it, quips: “Welcome to prime time, b%tch.”

    It’s with this line that you can trace the steady decline. Once the monster starts taunting his prey with one‑liners, a layer of mystique is lost. But in my opinion, this film is darn near perfect anyway.

    We do lose some key characters. Nancy is killed in the story — though, as you already know, this isn’t her last appearance. But overall, the film is surprisingly hopeful.

    If you wanted to see the best this franchise has to offer, you can make an unofficial trilogy of Wes Craven’s films: the first, the third, and New Nightmare. Everything from the soundtrack, those really dark subtexts, and the practical visuals make this a classic.

    But that just leaves one. The one that started it all. Meet me on Elm Street. This Halloween.

  • Ranking Elm Street: New Nightmare

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number 3: Wes Cravens New Nightmare

    It’s 1995. I’m over at my friend’s before school. He has horror movies on, which isn’t unusual. The trailer (yes, VHS tapes did this before the main feature — it wasn’t just a cinema thing) was for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. My friend smiles and says, “Freddy’s back.”

    But “Freddy’s back” was no longer a surprise. This was the VHS release, but looking at the cinema dates, Freddy had been declared dead in 1992 only for a new film to be advertised in 1994. “Freddy’s back” was becoming as predictable as EastEnders being on tonight.

    There had been six films, and when we last saw Krueger, his daughter had banished him to hell for what was promised to be the final time.

    What came out in 1994 was, in this Analyst’s opinion, an absolute stroke of genius. The film didn’t undo Freddy’s death. It brought back Nancy from the first film despite her being “dead” by Part 3. Except it didn’t. Nancy remained dead. Heather Langenkamp returned — and there lies the film’s difference.

    One of my favourite scenes in the entire franchise follows Heather on a talk show. The host brings out Robert Englund in full MTV Freddy mode. He gets a standing ovation from the studio audience as he teases, “You’re all my children now!” It’s a famous quote from Nightmare 2. But wow, what a creative way to make a point.

    This boogeyman — whose picture on a VHS box once sent me home with nightmares — had become something else. An icon still, yes always. But somewhere between saying “Welcome to prime time!” in Dream Warriors and rapping with the Fat Boys in 1988, the curtain had been pulled too far open. The mystique of the dream stalker had long gone with every lore dump in every sequel. In this one scene, Wes told his audience he knew that.

    Wes writes a film here that puts his Dream Demon — the thing we call Krueger — back to his darkest. He stalks Heather, her son, and other Elm Street cast members. The way to defeat him is to play Nancy one last time. She faces off with him in the boiler room. After Freddy’s defeat, we learn this was all a screenplay, and that Freddy is once again trapped inside the story. Leaving us all safe until next time.

    Among our group at the time, I don’t think this one got the love it deserved. Partly because it came towards the end of the Elm Street run — we’d seen a lot of the scares done before. But also because it was, whisper it, a bit creative and arty. When you’re that age, you don’t usually go for that kind of thing.

    This concept though — where the characters know they’re in a horror film and know the rules — well, that could be expanded upon by Wes a couple of years later in a film called Scream. It became quite big. A story for another time, I think.

  • Ranking Elm Street: Freddy Vs Jason

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number 5: Freddy Vs Jason

    We’re moving outside of the Elm Street series here. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994 would see that out. (Here in the UK, the marketing even labelled it Elm Street Part 7.)

    Almost a decade later, in 2003, Englund picks up Freddy’s iconic glove one more time. This time his opponent isn’t Nancy, or Jesse, or the Dream Warriors, or Alice. It’s another iconic 80s slasher: Jason Voorhees.

    The Friday the 13th series predates Elm Street, its first outing landing in 1980. By 1982, Jason is wearing the hockey mask we all associate with him. By 1986 — and quite possibly influenced by Elm Street — Jason is resurrected, and the more supernatural elements of his character are in place. At the end of Jason Goes to Hell, the supposed finale for the series, Freddy’s glove appears. The stage is set for the crossover.

    Full disclosure: I haven’t seen all the Friday the 13th films. Maybe they should be on my list. But I saw enough back in the day to know what they were about, and a lot of the mythology was covered again in the Never Sleep Again documentary.

    What we get here is a battle that takes us to the iconic locations. There’s a psychiatric hospital very reminiscent of Dream Warriors. Camp Crystal Lake is also a key setting. The film is packed with callbacks to both franchises.

    Who wins? Well, that depends on how you read that final scene. But as an Elm Street guy… You thought Jason won? You must be dreaming.