The man of my dreams: A Nightmare On Elm Street Reminiscence

I think everyone remembers when they had their first horror movie experience. Not the first time they experienced a scary moment during a movie but the very first time they experienced a bona fide horror film, something which left vivid, visceral scars across their tender young psyche. I had a close call when I was about seven or eight and I begged my mum to let me stay up to watch “Alien” which was showing on late-night TV. I must have been very, very persistent because in the end, she relented and said that I could stay up and watch it – alone. Everyone else would be going to bed and I would have to stay up and watch it on my own. I think I made it as far as the Nostromo’s first beauty pass across the screen before, spooked, I turned the TV off and slunk off to my bed. Well played, mum.

It would be another four years before I tangled with the genre again. Okay, sure, I’d watch “Jaws” and, to a lesser extent “Jaws 2” a bunch of times and develop a deep and abiding anxiety about swimming in the sea, but I’m talking about deep-down, in-the-bones fear which would fuck me up for a good two weeks afterwards. That film was “A Nightmare On Elm Street” and the architects of my very real nightmares were my older cousins during the summer holidays of 1986. Terror arrived in the form of VHS rental copy of Wes Craven’s seminal supernatural slasher movie and I was petrified.

Even now, there’s something so insidiously brilliant in the idea of a supernatural monster who hunts and kills you in your dreams. You can forget the hitherto impenetrable safety of pulling your blankets up around you – this bogeyman can not only reach you through the safety of your sheets, but he purposefully waits until you are asleep and at your most vulnerable before he strikes.

I guess to modern horror fans, some of the effects work in “A Nightmare On Elm Street” may look a little hokey by today’s slick, CGI-enhanced standards but believe me, to this wide-eyed twelve-year-old that bit, where a backlit Freddy Krueger strolls down the alley with his absurdly long arms scraping the walls on either side, was utterly chilling. There are other sequences, of course, which are still incredible to this day and one in particular which fundamentally changed me. I’m talking, of course, of the death of Glen (Johnny Depp) as he’s dragged into his bed and his room is assailed by a volcanic eruption of blood and gore.

There’s no point in denying that I wasn’t able to sleep the night my cousins showed me the movie, certainly not in my own bed. I ended up spending the night fitfully napping at the foot of my parents’ bed. I’m not even sure I made it back to my own bed the following night either. What I do know is that when I finally mustered the courage to sleep in my own bed again, I did so lying on my front. My reasoning then was that if Freddy tried to pull me through the bed, I wouldn’t fit because I’d be facing the wrong way. Take that, Freddy – who’s the dream master now, you bastard son of a thousand maniacs? That was my reasoning now and I’m going to say that the fact I still have to go to sleep lying on my front is just force of habit.

In Freddy Krueger, writer/ director Wes Craven created one of Horror cinema’s iconic titans and it’s remarkable just how fully formed and formidable the character is in this, his first and arguably best outing. While the sequels would, in turn, add to and detract from his sinister mystique and pop culture would embrace and inevitably soften him, here he is a raw force of supernature, a ruthless, predatory sadist hell-bent on taking revenge on those who burned him to death. There’s a sick sense of humour in his killings – he likes to play with his victims and sets out to inflict psychological pain as much as physical pain with his iconic razor-fingered glove – a glove my cousins gleefully replicated half-way through the movie using butter knives and a dishcloth. In the dimly-lit living room, as the butter knife fingers clinked around the slowly opening, creaking door I can assure you it looked blood-curdlingly, shit-your-pants authentic.

Robert Englund is superb in the role, making Freddy a fully realised character in his own right, not just another unstoppable killer in any old slasher. The cast of fresh-faced teens are great too, with Heather Langenkamp bringing a very different ‘final girl’ energy to the mix, one that the series would try and try again to recapture with varying degrees of success.

With the benefit of more than three decades’ distance from that traumatic afternoon’s viewing, “A Nightmare On Elm Street” is a film I have enormous affection and admiration for. I don’t watch it often, but every time I do I enjoy it anew, even though so many of its scenes are seared forever into my subconscious. It was my first ever proper horror movie and, for many years afterwards it was my only horror movie, a genre I decided wasn’t for me.

Ultimately, it would also be the film and franchise which brought me back to the horror genre when, some five years later, I bit the bullet and bought a ticket for an overnight marathon screening of not one, not two but four “Nightmare On Elm Street” films – plus “The Evil Dead”. As I emerged, blinking, at around 7am the following morning, “A Nightmare On Elm Street” had changed me again, and horror would be a firm fixture of my personal cinematic pantheon from thereon in.