A Nightmare on Elm Street

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🎙️ EPISODE 582: 10.24.22 Alright, here we go! Because I am a psycho, I have decided to watch the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise for Halloween 2022 (* the first seven movies 1984-1994; I will be omitting 2003's crossover Freddy vs. Jason and the 2010 reboot everyone seemed to hate). And let me tell you something about Wes Craven's original film? It's awesome and totally insane. On some level, I knew these movies were crazy and bloody and scary; they're like among the most notoriously CRAZY and BLOODY and SCARY films ever made — duh! But I truly was surprised by the level of gore and plain weird shit here. It's so odd and beautifully creative. For this week on the show/website, I will be doing "first reaction" podcasts and a brief written critique for each movie in chronological order. At the end, I will rank all seven films.

A quick backstory to get us started: I was a scaredy cat child. I did not watch horror films. Just seeing the box covers in the movie rental stores would frighten me and cause me to have nightmares. I watched like fifteen minutes of the made-for-TV 1990 miniseries version of Stephen King's It and didn't sleep for a week. I avoided them like the plague and when I would be subjected to them (for fear of ridicule, etc.) I had a technique to blur my eyes so it wouldn't look like I was to scared to watch. It seems funny in retrospect, but I was a gigantic pussy when it came to horror flicks as a kid. And this carried over into adolescence and early adulthood as a simple matter of practice. As I get older, people didn't need to know my history with the genre, I simply had to say it wasn't for me.

Fast-forward into my 30s and I decided to give it a try as my general interest in cinema expanded greatly. I became a big fan right away of great and/or "so bad they were great" practical FX, like in early Cronenberg, Italian "giallo" pictures and the so-called elevated horror that A24 and that ilk puts out (e.g., Hereditary). After three decades of hiding my eyes away, I had not only become intrigued by this genre I'd dismissed, but a huge proponent of it. I honestly think there's nothing quite like a wonderfully put-together horror film; it's among the best movie-going experiences you can have.

However, given my history I've missed out on SO much of it! There's nothing I can do to change that, but I'm gonna try. And that's why I decided to devote the majority of Spooky Month (15 movies) to the genre as well as this extra-special lead-up to Halloween focusing on the ANOES saga. I'm hoping to make this a yearly tradition (I already have 2023 earmarked for the Friday the 13th franchise). So, please, dear listener/reader, come with me on this journey?

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 581 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 583 ⫸

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A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American supernatural slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven and produced by Robert Shaye. It is the first installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, and Johnny Depp in his film debut. It was released on November 9, 1984.