Kids These Days Just Need Some Sleep
The same things as always are scary about A Nightmare On Elm Street - just for different reasons.
Freddy Krueger was a villain for the ages. Slinking through the shadows of his boiler room with his razors scraping along the pipes, he haunted nightmares for generations, becoming widely regarded as one of the scariest villains of all time. He even had an edge on other famous slashers like Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers, because his gimmick was something newer, flashier, and more terrifying - he was in your head.
Though it was marketed towards teens with its high-school aged cast of characters, A Nightmare On Elm Street played towards adults’ fears. Its visuals of these perfect, academically inclined, children of white, upper-middle class families being torn to shreds by a thing no adults could see were perfect portrayals of parents’ nightmares at the time.
When the AIDS epidemic began in June of 1981, blood and sex became poison. This led the horror industry to thrive, simply by nature of being. The first rule of the classic slasher is simple: if you have sex, you die gruesomely, your blood splattered over walls and friends and furniture and camera lenses. Poison from poison. But even in those murders, there was comfort in that the killer could be detected. You could scream as you ran and someone would hear you. Death came quickly and violently. There was no room for long, drawn-out terror here, no watching as your friends and loved ones slowly wasted away, just quick, almost painless, deaths. Until Krueger.
Freddy Krueger was a villain who couldn’t be believed. He tormented his victims before he killed them, stalking their dreams. Then, when he did get around to killing them, he did it in a way that should have been impossible. To everyone but the victim and their friends, he either wasn’t real, or was easily solved. Even Nancy’s mother, having seen her thrash around in the sleep clinic and wake up with wounds tells her that she “Need(s) to sleep, it’s as simple as that.” As with a lot of horror of the time, the message to parents was clear and familiar: This could be your kid. The parents in Nightmare are almost comical in their neglectful behaviors. Marge Thompson bars the windows of her home in a fit of drunken despair, and then tries to explain away the mortal danger her daughter is in with a rambling, incoherent, monologue that somehow makes the situation even more confusing. She puts her daughter in harm’s way through her oversight, as do the rest of the parents in the movie. As mentioned before, this message hit hard, especially because of the beginning AIDS epidemic. What came across to the general public was that if they drank or ignored their kids, those kids would have sex and make other poor choices that would lead to them being hunted by an invisible, unexplainable enemy for the rest of their lives.
In 1984, Nightmare was scary because of the incompetent parents and members of authority whose actions led their children, directly or indirectly, to death or danger. It was scary because those adults couldn’t be convinced of Freddy Krueger’s existence. It was scary because these kids were on their own against an enemy they hadn’t been given the resources to fight.
Sound familiar?
A theme throughout A Nightmare On Elm Street is of temporary solutions to permanent problems. If Nancy just gets some sleep, she’ll be better able to collect her thoughts and fight Krueger. A nice idea, but not possible. If she just ignores him, denounces his power, he’ll go away. Also a nice idea, but similarly impossible. It’s difficult to ignore how true this rings to a teenager living in the modern day. We should just rest and take some time for ourselves, which is a nice idea, but late-stage capitalism is in full swing, and resting won’t make that go away. In fact, it might make it worse because that’s time we didn’t spend working and earning a living.
Our Fred Krueger is capitalism, is climate change, is rising facism. (Which, as someone who watched The Sound of Music and Cabaret, I thought would come with more showtunes.) The bars on our windows meant to protect us are adults giving us economic and social advice meant for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. The people who don’t believe in climate change (see, my biology teacher) are the people who watch their children get torn apart in their sleep and deny that there’s something attacking them from the inside. The doctor at the sleep clinic pointing out how horrible Nancy’s nightmares are without a way to help is the therapist who is finding it increasingly hard to tell mental illness from a reasonable response to current events, and reasonably so.
The current Freddy Krueger isn’t invisible. People are just looking the other way. They assume that the world works like it did when they were young, that the posters about mental health and stress are something other than a single Paw Patrol bandaid over the gashes made by Kruger’s knife hands. The problems kids today are facing are similar to the ones Nancy Thompson and her loved ones were, but on a much larger and harder to reach scale.
Freddy Kruger as a villain is scary enough as a concept. Even if you don’t think about why, a horribly burned guy with knives for fingers stalking you in your dreams is objectively horrifying. But add in all the things he’s represented over the years - AIDS, drugs, mental illness, capitalism, corporate greed, facism, climate change - and you’ve got yourself a real nightmare.