[COLUMN] The Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise Was Quintessential 1980s Horror | by Darren Mooney

Note: A Nightmare on Elm Street is 40 years old next week. All the films are streaming on Max. It seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the beloved horror property.

Considering its lasting pop culture legacy, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is remarkably contained.

Setting aside the crossover Freddy vs. Jason in 2003 and the ill-advised reboot in 2010, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise largely consists of six films released between November 1984 and September 1991, two seasons of Freddy’s Nightmares running between October 1988 and March 1990, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare serving as a coda in October 1994. That’s an extremely narrow window for such an iconic series.

Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is one of the true icons of horror cinema, standing alongside Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Michael Myers from Halloween, the xenomorph from Alien and Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series. The films were so successful for New Line Cinema that the studio is still known as “the House that Freddy Built”, even after producing the Lord of the Rings movies. However, Freddy was largely done within the space of a single decade.

Allowing for the inevitable nostalgic cash-ins, it feels like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is done. Robert Englund has acknowledged that he is “too old and thick” to reprise the role, and the fact that Freddy and Englund are more closely intertwined as character and performer than most other horror icons would suggest that the franchise should probably take the hint. Englund had an all-timer run as a slasher icon, and maybe Hollywood should retire the iconic red-and-black sweater.

The only horror franchise that feels remotely comparable is the Saw series, which is a set of horror films built around an iconic pairing of actor and character with Tobin Bell as Jigsaw, similarly helped to establish a minor studio in Lionsgate and was also largely confined to a particular decade. If the Saw movies can be seen to speak to a particular moment in American consciousness, tapping into Bush era anxieties, then the Nightmare on Elm Street series spoke perfectly to the 1980s.

Like John Carpenter’s Halloween, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is a set in white suburbia, where parents had retreated from urban centers to isolated and ensconced communities to raise their children far from the violence of the cities. These parents fixated on fears of external threats. Late in the film, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) comes home to find bars on the house. Her mother, Marge (Ronee Blakley) simply explains, “Security.” Nancy replies, “Security? Security from what?”

This was the 1980s, the era of “stranger danger” and “the American crime anxiety industry.” It is very telling that the threats in A Nightmare on Elm Street often come from within and underneath. Nancy is pulled beneath the surface of her bath. Marge hides the secret of her knowledge of Freddy in the cellar. Nancy’s boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp), is literally swallowed by his own bed. The film’s final jump scare finds Freddy pulling Marge into her own house through the front door.

A Nightmare on Elm Street resonated with fears simmering through contemporary horror cinema. It opens in Freddy’s basement lair, literalizing the dive into the collective subconscious. All this underground imagery, and the literally buried secret of Freddy’s murder at the hands of the parents on Elm Street, recalls the gaping chasms beneath the central structures in films like The Shining or Poltergeist. The gap in the collective memory hides a foundational sin, and that sin is an abyss.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a quintessentially Reagan era horror. It was released the weekend after Reagan secured reelection. “Smack-dab in the middle of a right-wing counterrevolution that transformed American cultural and political life, Craven suggested that the stuff we had repressed was not quite dead and still prowling the cellar, and that it might literally rise up and rip us apart at any moment, right there in our comfortable house on Elm Street,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote.

This emphasis on the collective unconscious was in step with the era. Therapy was beginning to go mainstream. Newspapers devoted coverage to the emerging popularity of psychoanalysis and self-help groups, while Freud found himself relevant again. The decade would also see mainstream debates over the validity of recovered and repressed memories, whether in broad arguments over the testimony of children or in specific high profile cases like the McMartin Preschool Scandal.

In that sense, Freddy was a monster tailored to that specific moment, even more than Michael Myers or Leatherface or Jason Vorhees. Freddy is the specific fear of something repressed and buried in the subconscious, which would break through the surface with tremendous and horrifying force. It’s no surprise that Freddy frequently seems to literally cross boundaries, whether smashing through mirrors or breaking the surface of a family bath. Freddy isn’t real. Freddy is an idea.

“What is seen is not always what is real,” monologues one of Nancy’s teachers (Lin Shaye). “According to Shakespeare, there was something operating in nature – perhaps inside human nature itself – that was rotten. ‘A canker,’ as he put it. Of course, Hamlet's response to this, and to his mother’s lies, was to continually probe and dig. Just like the gravediggers, always trying to get beneath the surface. The same is true in a different way in Julius Caesar.”

A Nightmare on Elm Street is about the world these teenagers have inherited from their parents, and the lies that hold this illusion together. The franchise is firmly rooted in the 1980s, but is about the relationship of that decade to the 1950s and 1960s. This is obvious in the production design. Though set in the then-present, elements like Glen’s convertible hark back to the 1950s, evoking the weird nostalgia of similar films of the era like Christine, Blue Velvet or Back to the Future.

Wes Craven emerged from the counterculture. His first film, The Last House on the Left, was inspired by news footage of the horrors of the Vietnam War, and he acknowledged that “Vietnam, more than anything, was the influence” on his follow-up, The Hills Have Eyes. There are shades of Vietnam to the climax of A Nightmare on Elm Street, as Nancy sets tripwires and improvised explosives around her house to trap Freddy, bringing the conflict home in the same way as Rambo: First Blood.

Indeed, A Nightmare on Elm Street is very directly inspired by atrocities in East Asia. According to Craven, the “central line” the film originated in accounts of survivors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who had fled to Los Angeles. One traumatized child of such immigrants reported having deeply unsettling dreams before dying suddenly in his sleep. These “nightmare deaths” were the subject of much media fixation during the decade.

However, A Nightmare on Elm Street is also rooted in a specific 1960s trauma. John F. Kennedy was shot on Elm Street. “So that is the last moment of American optimism, it was the loss of American innocence, it was our loss of trust, and the beginning of our incredible cynicism; it was the rise of conspiracy theories and of arch conservative lines and even a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan,” observed Englund of the title. “It saw a little bit of Jim Crow coming back and saw ugliness creeping into the American soul. And so the Nightmare on Elm Street is really the Nightmare of America.”

More broadly, A Nightmare on Elm Street feels like a metaphor for the attempts to repress the trauma and chaos of the 1960s, to bury it deep and hope that future generations might be spared. The children on Elm Street are the children of a generation that embraced consciousness-expanding drugs and who tried to levitate the Pentagon. The 1960s were a difficult period for America, with anti war protests, the Civil Rights movement and feminism all challenging the established order.

Much of that generation gave up on the revolution. Countercultural icons like Jerry Rubin sold out, going from yippie to yuppie. San Francisco went from the frontline of a counterculture revolution to the heart of new American capitalism. Ronald Reagan left the Democrats to join the Republicans. This anxiety over this shift bubbled through the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, most heavily in Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is very consciously in conversation with this era, particularly the iconic horror movies of the period. The film opens by focusing on Tina (Amanda Wyss), who seems like she’ll be the film’s protagonist until she is dispatched and Nancy takes over. It’s a choice that recalls the use of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960s classic that tapped into the period’s anxieties. Early sequences emphasize the crucifix above Tina’s bed and frame Freddy as a demon, evoking the parental anxieties of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, another classic horror about a generational divide.

Ronald Reagan reportedly slept very soundly. He was so “cataleptic” that he slept through a hurricane that hit the White House in 1985. However, not all Americans were so lucky. By 1974, Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United States. In 1984, the year that A Nightmare on Elm Street was released, 9 million Americans were spending $350m on it annually. Valium was so ubiquitous that the FDA approved three non-brand versions for market in September 1985.

Usage soared among the older generation. In 1985, there were 12 Valium prescriptions per 1,000 men between the ages of 10 and 19, but 358 prescriptions for every 1,000 men over 60. For women, there were 18 prescriptions per 1,000 in that younger range, but a massive 672 per 1,000 in the 60-plus demographic. America was clearly having trouble sleeping, and was self-medicating. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Marge is repeatedly shown to numb her conscience with a bottle of vodka.

When Marge eventually confesses that Freddy is hunting these teenagers in revenge for their parents’ vigilante murder of him, she insists to Nancy, “I was just trying to protect you. I didn't see how much you needed to know. You face things. That's your nature. That's your gift.” Nancy can survive if she is willing to look at these crimes head-on, to wake up from her stupor. It’s a very literal expression of the concept that would provide the etymology of the modern use of the word “woke.”

However, Marge also warns her daughter, “Sometimes, you have to turn away, too.” This is Marge offering some self-justification, acknowledging her own refusal to confront the crimes in which she is complicit. Nancy employs this advice at the climax of the movie, turning her back on Freddy and denying him power over her. Freddy vanishes, disappearing like television static. Nancy escapes into a dream of suburbia. She sees the world as her mother does, pure and innocent white.

Of course, it’s all an illusion. Nancy didn’t really defeat Freddy by choosing to look away, like her mother did. Instead, she has fallen into the same trap as her parents. When Glen shows up to take Nancy to school, he notes the uncharacteristic “fog” creeping over suburbia. These characters have stopped looking outside themselves, stopped confronting evil in the world and their part in it. In the film’s final moments, Freddy seems to triumph, even if the later sequels push and pull with that.

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is very firmly anchored in its place and time. It captures a particular moment through the prism of horror cinema. It’s one of the great horror series, and it feels unique in part because of that specificity. There is undoubtedly a way to reinvent these films for the modern world, but it would require a creativity and inventiveness rare in these sorts of modern major franchises – even horror.

The Nightmare on Elm Street films are a reminder of that moment where it was “Morning in America”, but the nation was trapped in an ethereal dream-like trance.