Back in January, when David Bowie died, I mentioned that, although I don’t usually mourn celebrity deaths given I don’t know them, I felt his passing with a keenness I don’t often feel when I hear the famous have passed away. When I was in junior high, I’d recorded a cassette tape off my parents’ LPs that had The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced on one side and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on the other. It was my introduction to adult music, real rock and roll. I played this tape all the time on my Walkman or whenever I was going to sleep at night, and every song was a favorite at some point. Bowie was formative for me, as he was for a lot of younger people over the decades he was working. A few weeks later when Alan Rickman passed, I also felt it keenly. Die Hard, in which Rickman plays villain Hans Gruber, was the among the first R-rated movies I remember seeing. I saw it when I was much too young while hanging out at my friend Wally’s house down the street. Watching inappropriate movies at Wally’s house on HBO late at night, being able to stay over because my mom was friends with his mom, is among the fond memories I have from childhood. But this entry isn’t about Bowie and Rickman. As deserving as they are, as fondly as they stood out in my childhood, both have been celebrated in the press since they passed.
Last week, during the memorial segment of the Academy Awards, over which Dave Grohl, another formative figure from my youth (though more as a drummer than singer/guitarist) played Blackbird, one of the first faces to flash across the screen was Wes Craven’s, who had an impact just as significant as Bowie or Rickman. When Craven died, it was as much of a shock for me. Like Rickman or Bowie, it came out of the blue. He’d kept his cancer quiet the way they had, but it doesn’t seem the tributes were as widespread. Part of this, of course, is that he wasn’t quite as meteoric in esteem as Bowie nor was he as versatile as Rickman. Craven, despite a few forays into drama, was primarily a horror director, so those of us who mourned him were horror fans. We were mostly children of the 80s who’d been delighted and scarred by their first glimpse of Freddy Krueger on late-night TV. Kids who’d come of age in the 90s when he’d introduced meta-narrative into popular horror first with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, probably the second strongest entry into the Nightmare on Elm Street series (unless you prefer Dream Warriors, which Craven’s fingerprints are also on) and then the Scream movies. Die hards like me even appreciate his penultimate effort: the critically maligned (I would argue rather unjustly) My Soul to Take (which isn’t a masterpiece but still worth watching and may require its own entry here at some point).
To celebrate his life, I watched the full Nightmare on Elm Street series after he passed, and a month later watched the four Scream movies as well, and I was struck by just how well they held up. Recently in the course of writing some autobiographical material, I touched on the effect seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street the first time had on me, as follows:
Elm Street, in particular, was the movie that had sparked my addiction to horror. When I was small, I watched movies like The Blob or King Kong while sitting with my uncle, which had whetted my appetite. When I turned ten, I caught a commercial advertising Elm Street as the late night movie on Fox. The spot lasted thirty seconds or so. But having caught sight of Freddy Krueger’s charred visage, I was enraptured. I had to see it. That night, I waited for my parents to fall asleep. The movie came on at eleven, and after they’d turned off the lights and gone to their room, I snuck downstairs and sat close to the TV with the station on and the sound turned down. My hand was resting on the knob—back then, TVs didn’t have remotes or power buttons but knobs—and I’d hit it every time I heard a floorboard creak upstairs. It was thrilling. To be up without permission. To sneak behind their backs and watch a movie I was sure they didn’t want me watching. And then, he appeared. First as shadow, unnaturally long arms stretched across a back alley. His trademark glove with its four finger-knives scraping against the metal to produce a nerve-chilling screech. And then, there he was, in the flesh. The deep furrows on his face from where he’d been horribly burned, the raspy voice, taunting his victim, and those yellow eyes. He was evil incarnate, vengeance in human form. And I couldn’t have been more frightened if he’d appeared in the room with me right then. Everything within me screamed to look away as he chased that girl down that alley. But I couldn’t. There was something both repellent and attractive in my fear. I wanted to see how it all ended. How could these kids vanquish such a primordial force?
In preparing to write this, I watched it again. Craven had already created one masterpiece before this, The Hills Have Eyes (I find Last House on the Left a little too clunky to call it a masterpiece), but Nightmare took it to a whole new level. He tapped into something primal, Jungian, and became master of a critically-dismissed but culturally-beloved genre. The first Nightmare is filled with iconic moments. The wall above Nancy’s bed stretching out and showing Freddy’s shape or plunge into the cavernous bathtub. Tina being pulled through the air in her dream, dragged along the ceiling as Freddy attacks her. Glen getting pulled through the bed. Even the simple Freddy nursery rhyme is indelibly etched in the memories of so many people of my generation. And then he did it again with Scream. I remember I saw that with my friends at the dollar theater when I was in high school, and I’d never been more frightened in a theater (the experience was really only trumped by James Wan’s Insidious, which I saw in a theater alone and which had me hunched in my seat covering my eyes for the first hour). Still, if Freddy was all he’d ever created, Craven would be remembered fondly. It doesn’t matter that other directors and writers took over the character and watered him down. He remained one of the generations most recognizable icons, up there with Frankenstein or Dracula. As a writer, I can also take heart from the fact that Craven got rejected all over Hollywood. No one wanted to make Nightmare. Sean S. Cunningham, the creator of Friday the 13th, told Craven that because it happens in dreams, no one would be scared. Well, not only did Nightmare prove him wrong in that regard, it’s the bedrock upon which New Line Cinema was built. Without Freddy, as the wonderful documentary Never Sleep Again points out, there would never have been Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings (thought I’ll take Nightmare over Rings any day of the week).
Watching Nightmare again, I found it delightful, as I always do. The special effects are a little dated now, but the scares still hold up. It’s a brutal movie, but it’s also psychological. Freddy is one of the great boogeyman, and though my wife may protest, I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to share it with them. Craven might have faded in cultural relevance in the last decade of his life, but he made the movies he wanted to up until the end. He’s a hero of mine, and seeing his face flash across the screen at the Oscars reminded me that I wanted to write about him. He’ll be missed, but we’ll always have Freddy, and I thank him for that. My childhood wouldn’t have been the same without him.
There are no comments yet