As I continue down the Rabbit Hole that is my October Horror Movie Challenge, I'm pretty much making up the rules as I go and picking whatever movie feels right when I have time to watch one instead of having a static list. The main goal is to cover as many classic horror films as I can with some newer ones mixed in. So when I finally had a 90 minute chunk to dedicate to watching something, I decided that for my next 3 films, I would watch the first 3 movies in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. I've seen these 3 films before, but I hardly remember anything about them since it's been a good 20 years since I've seen any of them, so I'm ready to refresh my memory.
The thing that I always liked about these movies was that there was a solid story and good writing and this one is definitely the strongest story. You get a "boy who cried wolf" sort of scenario where the main characters understand what is happening, but there is enough reasonable explanation for the events that no one believes their far-fetched tale.
The first movie opens with a montage of Freddy's iconic knife glove being fashioned in a workshop while the credits roll and soon thereafter you are watching Tina, one of the four teen main characters, in a nightmare and you're introduced to our badly burned killer who is chasing her. The idea that the events in the dream manifest in reality once the victim awakens is established early on when you see Tina's nightgown has four slash marks on it. The teens then start getting knocked off by Freddy and the two survivors fight to stay awake any way they can to avoid their imminent death. Eventually Nancy realizes that if she is holding on to something in the dream that it will be there when she awakes and she starts to devise a way to take Freddy down.
It finally reaches a climax when Nancy's boyfriend Glen (played by then newcomer Johnny Depp) meets his death in a manner that has no reasonable explanation to the parents (he's pulled down into his bed and ton of fake blood erupts in a geyser from the bed). At this point Nancy's mother has come clean with her explaining that Freddy Kreuger was a child predator that escaped the justice system and the teens' parents threw him in a furnace and killed him, thus establishing his motive for coming after these four particular teens.
So Nancy devises a plan to set traps for Freddy in the real world, go to sleep, set a countdown timer on her watch when alarms will go off, grab Freddy, and then be awakened with him in her house where she can kill him. Funny, I quickly realized that a lot of the traps she set were borrowed later in Home Alone, there's no new ideas in Hollywood. But she prevails and all is well. Or is it? It has a nice ambiguous ending that lets you decide what is real and what is a dream, which I really appreciated.
I'm really glad I re-visited this one, it's really well done, and a horror classic for sure.
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