tyranist: So last night we went to a local screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Why would you pay to see a movie you've seen multiple times?
Rish Outfield:
I don't know, really. I guess to see the movie the way it was meant to be seen. I mean, I first saw Elm Street twenty years ago, in 1986. I saw it on video. And that's how I've always seen it. But seeing it in the theatre forces you to pay attention, notice little details, immerse yourself in the experience. Parts of it seemed like a different movie.
Why did you want to see it?
tyranist: For the experience. Movies are always different up on the big screen. Like you, I first saw it on video (and then saw Nightmare 2 later the same night), and I really just wanted to see it in a theatre seat with an audience.
The unfortunate thing is that this wasn't a great screening. The image quality was DVD at best. You could actually see the lines of resolution. And the sound ended up being mono. They couldn't even be bothered to use two speakers for us. Add to that the under promotion and we had a small audience. It just wasn't quite what I was hoping for.Rish: It was like the old theatre we grew up seeing movies at; they had a speaker behind the screen and that's it. And what few people were there--how many would you say, twenty?
tyranist: Maybe. 30, at the most.
Rish: --a couple of them were really obnoxious. The guy sitting on our row (and there were few enough that you didn't have to sit next to anyone) wouldn't stop repeating the lines as the characters said them.
tyranist: That was annoying, but impressive too. We don't often run into people who know more about horror movies than we do.
Rish: Praise if you want, he kept a running commentary on which parts were gross and what was cool and what was about to happen. It made me want to Freddy-slash him.
tyranist: Of course, we only chose to sit near him after all the screeching around us reached a level we couldn't endure. Those kids kept talking through the movie, but they weren't talking about the movie so much as they were just talking. And laughing. And just generally being obnoxious.
Rish: It's really one of the main reasons people don't go to movies anymore. Another being price. What did you think about paying ten dollars a ticket?
tyranist: Steep. I thought it was worth it going in, but the quality lacked. If they came back with a screening for the original WICKER MAN next month though, I'd probably pay it again.
Rish: It's a nice theatre, but I figure it was a digital screening, so they really only had to pay for the poster out front and, what, the sacrifice of not showing Invincible two showings.
tyranist: The added reel at the end didn't really make up the price either. What did you think of the Freddy's Kills feature at the end?
Rish Outfield:
I'm going to take this opportunity to bash the sequels one more time. My GOD, they are crap. It's been around fifteen years since I saw most of them, and I was absolutely FLABBERGASTED (a word I've probably never used before) by how awful they are.
I quite enjoyed Nightmare last night, thinking that it was probably a better movie than I remembered. It got me excited to see the sequels. Then they showed the Freddy's Kills reel, and the clips just got progressively worse, stupider and more contrived, until I just wanted to get up and leave.
Say what you will about the silly Jason sequels, none of them seem to be as embarrassingly horrid as the Elm Street sequels. The only one that seems to have anything redeemable about it is the one people bash the most: Freddy's Revenge. Though I would ALMOST like to see Dream Warriors again, if only to see Langenkamp play Nancy a second time. Even the clips from New Nightmare, which the great Wes Craven wrote and directed, made me turn my face away in revulsion. Or was it shame?
tyranist: When that reel started, I thought that guy on our row would collapse from sheer joy. He could hardly stay in his seat.
Rish: Apparently, you liked the guy on our row more than I did.
tyranist: He was entertaining. And you were sitting closer to him than I was.
Rish:
Back on the subject of the "Freddy's Greatest Kills," the Freddy Vs. Jason stuff looked surprisingly good, though. Definitely a jump in quality from the earlier ones. I'd still like to see NIGHTMARE 2 again sometime soon.
We mostly talked about what I thought. How about you?
tyranist:
I really enjoyed seeing it on the big screen and I had a lot of fun watching it. If we could see them all in the theatre, I'd probably go for it. Like you, though, seeing the death scenes from the rest of the series really reminded me just how bad the series got. As Freddy became the hero of the movies more and more, the plots and deaths and everything got stupider.
More than anything else though, seeing it again last night really made me miss the '80s.
Rish:
Right. The '80s were special.
I hadn't noticed how distracting some of that synthesizer music was, though. The silly electronic score, so terrifying to me twenty years ago, is dated (and at times, amusing) to me now. But maybe I'm not being fair. The times when it works, it really, really works, and I'll be darned if I didn't think to myself, "I'd like to listen to that score sometime, I wonder who wrote it."
tyranist:
It did stand out on that really loud speaker, didn't it?
I was also reminded why I like Heather Langenkamp so much.
Rish: She was nice. A very likeable, very young-looking, character.
tyranist: More girl next door than the types they cast today.
Rish Outfield: You know, I was really surprised by my reaction to the character of Nancy. She's just so sweet and decent, strong and innovative, yet real that it threw me for a loop. Plus, there's Langenkamp's impossibly-blue eyes. I never had a crush on her or anything as a kid, but now I think I'm starting to develop one.
I was also surprised at how different she looked in the 1987 clip from ELM STREET 3.tyranist: She grew up a lot.
Rish: Everybody has.
Another thing that made a big impression on me this time around was how true-to-teenage life the film seemed. I'm no longer a teenager, but I remember how it felt to be alone in a confusing, unfair world, where it was me against everybody, and all the adults seemed to be unfairly set in my path to reaching whatever goals seemed so important to me then. The adults, from Tina's Southern Accented mother to Glenn's pig-headed father, do nothing productive, and certainly help facilitate the deaths of their offspring. Nancy's clueless, drunkard mother thinks she knows best, seemingly purposefully closing her ears to Nancy's claims and pleas. Even her father, top-billed John Saxon, sort of shrugs her off, even breaking a promise to her the same night her boyfriend has been murdered. Nobody believes her, nor listens to what she has to say (even when she says things there's no way she could know, were her story untrue), because she's just a stupid kid.tyranist: Her mother is absolutely awful to her, even after we find out that she knows the truth and that she's hidden it from her daughter all these years. And what is it with her parents? Are they divorced, separated, or just poorly written? I don't remember that bothering me before, but it certainly seemed messed up this time. How could such a good child as Nancy come from parents who are so messed up?
Rish: Now that I think of it, Craven never shows any of the boys' nightmares. That had to have been on purpose. It's probable that they wouldn't have been as effective. We've talked about how you tend to empathize, worry about, and want to protect a teenage girl, and a teenage boy . . . not so much.
tyranist: When the series did finally get around to showing the boys' nightmares, it became less and less convincing. The boys were either of the deliberately weak and nerdy sort, or the dream just didn't quite work because it didn't seem like the character would react that way.
Rish: Another thing we talked about, while walking around the empty mall at night (something I'd like to be able to do all the time, but hey, we ain't zombies), was how the damn ending still does not work. I've talked about it before on the site, but the ending as written (and originally filmed) works better, and one of the reshot endings (the "happy" ending) is even better. But like poor Nancy, no one will believe me, even all these years later.
tyranist:
I'd claim that the ending hasn't held up well, but it was never good. I remember the night we first got to see the other endings and suddenly the movie started to make sense.
Anything else you want to mention?
Rish Outfield:
I don't know. I did say to you last night that the film just didn't seem scary to me now. It sure was in 1986, though.
Freddy, while so well-executed in this flick, well-designed, acted, lit (did you notice how infrequently you actually saw him?), was so castrated by the sequels, TV series, comics, and dolls, that there's nothing he did that elicited any response from me anymore. The only part that actually still scares me is when Tina appears, in the bodybag, in Nancy's school (and reappears in the alley later in the film).
The idea of a friend or loved one coming back from the dead, moaning, reaching, sort of pleading with you, is really, REALLY scary to me. Wes Craven did it to even greater effect in Scream 3, which by all other counts is HIGHLY inferior to its two predecessors, but manages to be the scariest of them all by the use of the dead mother image.
tyranist: A Nightmare on Elm Street has lost some of its edge over the years, but for me the two things that still keep it somewhat frightening are the boiler room and the dream aspect. I've always had issues with boiler rooms and underground tunnels and Nightmare only made them worse when I was a kid.
Rish: Well, your parents used to keep you in the boiler room and slip you food (was it dog food?) through a grate in the door. So that's understandable.
tyranist: It was cat food.
Rish: Really? You know, your parents were kind of cruel. I'd always forgiven their actions, knowing how you turned out . . . but cat food??
tyranist: At least it was the moist kind.
Rish Outfield: We've been talking for a half an hour. But I think we could talk a lot more about Nightmare and its sequels. The idea of Elm Street is just so brilliant, so innovative, and so good, that it's no wonder a zillion sequels and knock-offs were made. I also, now that I'm an adult, find the concept of someone you've wronged coming not after you, but after your CHILDREN, to be quite impressive and quite frightening. It's not really explored in this film, but it's a darn good one.
As you can see, I have a lot of feelings surrounding this movie (many of them I didn't even know I had). A big part of my childhood was based around Horror, and the Freddy movies were very high up on my list. I didn't talk about the Freddy glove I made with real knives in it, or my attempts to burn myself like Freddy, or invade the dreams of my neighbors.tyranist: And maybe you shouldn't.
Rish: Yeah, you might be right.
tyranist: While Michael Myers has haunted my dreams far more than Freddy ever will, I still have a soft spot for the original Nightmare and I'm glad we went.
Rish: After so many years of communicating only like this (over the internet), it was cool to see the movie with you. I wish we could do more of that.
tyranist: October is just around the corner and there are bound to be more horror flicks in the theatre.
Rish: True. But seeing something from "back in the day" is different from the glossy, greasy, cowardly, bottom-line-driven mung that often comes out today. The Covenant, anyone?
tyranist: We'll see that at the cheap theatres and you know it.
Rish: I wish you weren't right.
tyranist: Me too.
So let's go grab some lunch and work out what the next step for this article is.Rish: Sure. Where is it?
tyranist: I'm back to thinking Wienerschnitzel.
Rish: You know, so was I.
tyranist: Meet you there in 20?
Rish: Sure.
Post-Script: In the days since we had this conversation, New Line has released a two-disc high-tech special edition DVD of Nightmare. It is truly magnificent, with many, many features, interviews, unused takes and alternate angles, commentaries, remembrances with a very fat Ronnie Blakley and a very hot Amanda Wyss, and more. I heartily recommend it, even if you've bought the film before (hey, this was my third buy).
Rish "Never Sleep Again" Outfield
September 2006