You know, I spent the last few weeks, among other things, filling in some gaps for older musicals I missed. Those things tend to be simplistic, with black-and-white morality and plots that are far from complex. They aren’t generally my thing, and while I did like at least aspects of most of them, it does occur to me I need something that is, more or less, the opposite of that right now. What is the opposite of a musical?
Maybe horror movies. More death in those. Let’s start with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Teenage Tina (Amanda Wyss) has a nightmare involving a shadowy figure wearing some sort of bladed gloves, but when she wakes up, she finds slash marks through her nightgown. Similar bad dreams seem to be hitting a lot of teens at her school, most notably her friend Nancy (Heather Langencamp). When Tina dies violently in her sleep, the top suspect is her boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri) who was sleeping next to her at the time. But Nancy doesn’t think so, and she goes looking into things while having similar nightmares herself. Her only support is her own boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp in his film debut). But if the killer, the mysterious Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), can kill you as you sleep, how can you avoid him when, you know, everybody needs to sleep once in a while?
Now, for movies like this, I come into it more or less knowing what happened thanks in large part to cultural osmosis. But this is about the same as it was when I saw slasher flicks like Friday the 13th, Halloween, John Carpenter’s version of The Thing, and even Psycho. That’s fine. I generally prefer atmosphere in horror movies over jump scares. Even if I do know what and where all the major scares are, that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the movie for what it is.
Besides, this is the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie, back when everyone still treated Freddy Krueger like the creepy child killer he was and not the more comedic figure who was very popular in pop culture and was known as much for his quips and his kills. And Englund is an incredibly effective killer. As for the other members of the cast, Langencamp does the plucky heroine well, and Depp is a fine in his first role.
It also helps that director Wes Craven really knows how to put a creepy scene together. Yeah, synthesizer music is a bit dated and doesn’t work for me, but the dream effects still work, and Krueger comes across as an unstoppable force of nature with a nasty urge to scare his targets as much as kill them. There’s a reason shots like Langencamp in the bathtub and Depp getting pulled into his bed are iconic moments of 80s horror. Was this the opposite of an older musical? Well, maybe not, but it was fun all the same.
Grade: B+
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