Razors in the Dreamscape: Revisiting A Nightmare on Elm Street

Razors in the Dreamscape:
Revisiting A Nightmare on Elm
Street and the Slasher Film
James Kendrick
The dominant horror subgenre ofthe late 1970s and most of
the 1980s has been called the "splatter film" by John McCarty (1984),
the "stalker film" by Vera Dika (1981), and the "slasher film" by Carol
Clover (1992). During its heyday, it was one of the most despised
of genres, derided by critics as "dead teenager," "slash-and-chop,"
"teenie-kill," or "slice-'em-up" movies. And even though its most
vocal opponents hoped that it would be, at best, a short-lived cycle
that would bum out as quickly as it had appeared, the slasher film has
proved to be one ofthe most influential and resilient subcategories of
the modem horror film. Beyond just its self-aware resurrection in the
late 1990s via Wes Craven's Scream trilogy (1996-2000), the slasher
film has left its mark in various ways on the most popular of horror
franchises from the 1990s and beyond, including the Final Destination
(2000-2009) and Saw (2004-) series, as well as the various remakes
and direct spin-offs such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003),
Halloween (2007), My Bloody Valentine (2009), and Friday the
13th (2009). In addition, the very idea of rapidly produced cycles in
which sequel follows sequel, which Andrew Tudor (2002) notes is a
"genuinely distinctive feature" of the modem horror era, was largely
pioneered by slasher franchises in the 1980s. Thus, while the era ofthe
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"classical" slasher film has passed, its legacy continues to shape the
direction of the horror genre.
Because of the slasher film's fundamentally repetitive nature and
the sheer number of films traditionally categorized as such, one of
the most useful modes of analyzing the genre has been to employ a
structural perspective and examine how its basic constituent parts
work together to generate meaning. Although there has been some
variation in terms of how the structural components of this subgenre
have been understood, it is safe to say that, following Carol Clover's
(1992) analysis, they all contain, with little variation, the following:
a psychotic killer, a terrible place, a variety of weapons of death, a
group of young victims, and a "Final Girl" who survives either to
be rescued or dispatch the killer herself. While there were dozens
of such films produced during this subgenre's heyday in the 1980s,
it was dominated in the popular imaginary by three slasher villains
who emerged through a series of sequels: Michael Myers (from the
Halloween series), Jason Voorhees (from the Friday the 13th series),
and Freddy Krueger (fi-om the A Nightmare on Elm Street series).
Although the Halloween and Friday the 13th series share a
great deal in the way they fit neatly into the slasher subgenre both
structurally and ideologically, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
and its sequels resist easy categorization even though the popular
press conventionally lumped them in with all other slasher films. For
example, although Vincent Canby in The New York Times noted in
his review that A Nightmare on Elm Street "puts more emphasis on
bizarre special effects," he still associated the film directly with the
slasher subgenre by noting sarcastically that Freddy Krueger's success
as a villain "should come as no surprise to anyone who keeps up
with horror films, especially those in which the mortality rate among
sexually active teen-agers is always alarmingly high" (1984, CIO).
And, even though The Washington Post's Paul Attanasio referred to
it as "Wes Craven's latest slasher movie" in the opening paragraph
of his review, he rightly described the film as "more than a gross-out
picture," one that is "halfway between an exploitation flick and classic
surrealism" (1985, D2).
The fact that mainstream film critics were not quite sure what to
make oí A Nightmare on Elm Street is testament to its unique place in
'80s horror: It has the basic components of a slasher movie, but there
is something decidedly more creative and clever going on that seems
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contradictory to its relative crudity and "low culture" status as a gory
horror film aimed at unruly teenage audiences. Thus, this essay will
examine how A Nightmare on Elm Street both affirms and undermines
several of the structural components of the slasher subgenre and
what the resultant ideological consequences are in terms of gender,
identification, the gaze, and monstrosity.
Ideology, Genre, and Auteur on Elm Street
In "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," Robin Wood (1995) argues that
the eponymous theories—previously understood to be "disparate
approaches to Hollywood movies" (60)—can be combined to produce
a "synthetic criticism" that allows for a more complete approach to
understanding how films work. At the heart of Wood's argument is
the conviction that the development of genres is rooted in ideological
contradictions and that this conflict is most clearly understood when
seen through an individual auteur. Viewing films in this manner allows
us to see better how genres are not discrete, but rather how they interact
with each other in dealing with the same ideological tensions (62).
According to Wood, "works are of especial interest when the defined
particularities of an auteur interact with specific ideological tensions
and when the film is fed from more than one generic source" (63),
which is a particularly apt description of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Paul Attanasio's aforementioned point about A Nightmare on
Elm Street's relationship to exploitation and surrealism is particularly
interesting in that, in expressing his confusion over what, precisely,
the film is, he unwittingly identifies its most trenchant qualities,
specifically the manner in which it draws from and conflates other
genres and cinematic forms in order to critique and otherwise rework
the fundamental ideological tenets ofthe slasher genre, of which the
film is usually assumed to be a part. According to Carol Clover in
Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
one ofthe first sustained analyses ofthe subgenre, slasher films are
traditionally "unmediated by otherworldly fantasy" (1992, 22), that
is, they are firmly rooted in the everyday, which is part of what
makes them ideologically distinct from classical horror films (Tudor
2002). Similarly important to this subgenre is crudity and seriality:
"the slasher film, not despite but exactly because of its crudity and
compulsive repetitiveness, gives us a clearer picture of current sexual
attitudes . . . than do legitimate products of better studios" (Clover,
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22-23). Vera Dika, in her essay "The Stalker Film 1978-81," asserts
something similar: "These films need their less-than-professional look,
their devalued quality, and their lack of sophistication to reduce the
realism of the screened events and to encourage a gaming response to
the film" (1987, 96). While Clover and Dika disagree on the practical
result of these films' crudity, they both agree that it is a central aspect
of their constitution as a horror subgenre.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, although hardly a high-budget studio
product (similar to Halloween, it was an independently financed film
that took several years to get oft^ the ground), immediately stands out
from other slasher films in that it is more structurally and thematically
complex. This is due in large part to its introduction of elements of
the fantastic into the narrative, which breaks Clover's assertion that
slasher films are "unmediated by otherworldly fantasy." In introducing
elements of the fantastic into a narrative about a psychotic killer
stalking young victims, A Nightmare on Elm Street becomes the first
example of a cross-breed between the slasher and the possession film,
which is fairly unique in the annals of 1980s horror (similar films
include 1988's Child's Play, in which a serial killer uses voodoo to
transfer his soul into a doll, and the later Friday the i3//zfilms in which
Jason becomes a reanimated zombie).
Just as Wood describes It's a Wonderful Life (1946) as being a
small-town domestic comedy that is literally invaded by a "disturbing
influx offilm noir" (63 ), so A Nightmare on Elm Street is a conventional
slasher film that is invaded by the surreal and the fantastical, which
turns many of the genre's ideological tenets on its head. Surrealism and
horror have long been associated, partially because the bizarre terrors
of early horror films were appealing to surrealists who saw them as
breaking taboos, challenging sexual norms, and otherwise engaging in
the tactics of shock they prized so highly. Yet, even though, as Bruce
Kawin (1984) argues, horror films are literal nightmares—"whose
undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the desire to fulfill and
be punished for certain conventionally unacceptable impulses" (4)—
many such films, especially those produced in the United States, are
ultimately built on a foundation of rationality that in some way explains
the monstrosity, either through science gone wrong (the Frankenstein
myth), psychosis (taken to near parody in the explanatory ending of
Psycho [I960]), or the supernatural as mediated through religion {The
Exorcist [1973] and its many imitators). Thus, even though horror
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incorporates elements of the surreal through monstrosity and abject
terror, few such films undercut the very idea of rational explanation
and hence the possibility of stopping the evil. In many ways, A
Nightmare on Elm Street does precisely that by allowing the surreal
to infiltrate the slasher plotting, introducing elements of the fantastical
that can only be explained via dream logic that is inherently shifting,
flexible, and imminently fleeting. This surreal element, in turn, makes
it a perfect example of Wood's emphasis on films as blended genres
emerging out of ideological contradictions, which in the horror film
is manifested most blatantly in the simultaneous desire to be terrified
and reassured at the same time.
It is also important to note that A Nightmare on Elm Street was
written and directed by Wes Craven, who was already well known
as an important voice in the 1970s wave of low-budget, independent
horror films, most notably as writer and director of The Last House
on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), both of which
use horror tropes to undercut assumptions about class values and the
role of violence in society. As Christopher Sharrett describes them,
these two films "share in common the notion of a collective barbarism
overtaking the middle-class values of American society frequently
lauded by genre art" (1985, 139). Although dismissed at the time
of their initial theatrical release as exploitative junk, these films and
many others (including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], It's
Alive [1974], Dawn of the Dead [1978], and Day of the Woman 11
Spit on Your Grave [1978]) came to be seen as sharp-edged critiques
of what Robin Wood (1986) identifies as the primary characteristics of
their era: "fi-ustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, greed, possessiveness,
jealousy, neuroticism: no more than what psychoanalytic theory
shows to be the logical product of patriarchal capitalism" (71). Thus,
by the time he was poised to make A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven
had already established a critical reputation as a filmmaker whose
"contribution to the horror genre already seems landmark" (Sharrett,
139), particularly in the way he invested the genre with recurrent
ideological tensions involving family, society, and violence.
Of particular importance here is Craven's low-budget directorial
debut The Last House on the Left, in which he appropriated the basic
narrative of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan,
1960) to tell the story of two teenage girls, Mari Collingwood (Sandra
Cassel) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), who venture from their
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secluded suburban world in upstate New York to the city to go to
a rock concert. Looking to buy marijuana, they are ensnared by an
escaped murder convict named Krug (David Hess) and his "family,"
which is clearly modeled on the Manson family. After holding the girls
hostage for the night, Krug and his family drive them to the country
where they amuse themselves by humiliating, torturing, raping, and
eventually killing both of them.
At this point, it seems that the film's moral is clear: In standard
cautionary-tale fashion, it tells us that pretty young girls who stray to
the wrong side ofthe tracks will pay the price. However, that is just
the set-up for the film's true intent, which takes place at the home of
Mari's parents (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr), where Kmg and
his family coincidentally stay that night. When the parents discover
what has been done to their daughter, they enact their revenge, thus
showing that they—respectable members ofthe upper class—are just
as capable ofthe most vicious and depraved sorts of violence. Craven's
ultimate point is that the Collingwoods' violent retribution solves
nothing; their daughter is still dead and, if anything, they have made
the situation worse by denying their own humanity in slaughtering
Krug and his family. Craven underscores this by ending the film on
a shot of Mr. and Mrs. Collingwood, blood-spattered and exhausted,
but clearly defeated, not victorious. The film thus argues that violence
is an unending cycle that solves nothing, which is quite distinct from
most horror films, especially slasher films, which answer the problem
of monstrous violence with more violence. In A Nightmare on Elm
Street, Craven continues this theme in an even more explicit fashion,
and it is for this reason that the subsequent Nightmare sequels, which
largely discard Craven's complex treatment of violence in favor of
more mainstream horror pleasures, hold less interest in this analysis.
Having established that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a unique
horror film ofthe 1980s that is both a difficult-to-classify genre hybrid
and a product of an auteur with a specific perspective on the role of
violence, the remainder of the essay will explore the various ways
in which the film challenges or subverts ideological elements ofthe
slasher genre as seen through gender, identification, the gaze, and
monstrosity.
Effects of the Fantastic on Gender and Identification
As noted earlier, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a unique horror
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film that mixes elements of the supernatural, especially the idea of
bodily possession, into a traditional slasher plot. The drama of the
possession film frequently "turns on the process of conversion: the
shedding of disbelief, the acceptance of the mystical or the irrational"
(Clover 1992, 67), which is evident throughout A Nightmare on
Elm Street as its young protagonists, particularly Nancy Thompson
(Heather Langenkamp) and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp),
struggle to come to terms with the fact that Freddy Krueger (Robert
Englund), a frightening figure that haunts their nightmares, is in fact a
supernatural being with the ability not just to terrorize them but to kill
them. Once they come to this realization, they spend much of the film
trying to get the adults around them to accept it as well, most notably
Nancy's father, the local police chief (John Saxon). It is telling that the
adults never accept Freddy's supernatural existence; thus, like most
adults in slasher films, they are rendered impotent in terms of helping
the young victims avoid death.
However, unlike most possession films, A Nightmare on Elm
Street does not adhere to the basic gender term s of a female in the grip of
the supernatural as the cover story for a man in crisis that results in his
eventual feminization through acceptance of the supernatural. Rather,
it resists easy gendering by combining elements of the possession and
slasher films to posit a community of young people who are together
in the grip of a supernatural slasher. At first it appears that the young
women are more easily converted into believing in Freddy's existence,
especially because Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nick Corri), the most
macho of the male characters, remains disbelieving until his girlfriend
Tina (Amanda Wyss) is killed by Freddy while he is in bed with her
(Tina, not incidentally, is the first character we see being haunted in
her dreams by Freddy during the opening credits). However, Glen
confounds these gender terms in the way he comes to accept Freddy's
existence on his own. Nancy does not have to convince him; at some
point off-screen, he convinces himself. While this might be seen as a
"feminization" of his character, it should be noted that Glen is never
couched in particularly masculine terms at any point in the film (that
is reserved explicitly for Rod). Therefore, A Nightmare on Elm Street
is not so clearly coded "female" on its surface because both men and
women are "open" to Freddy's possession of their dreams, although
the film still ends with a Final Girl (which will be discussed later).
The supernatural element in A Nightmare on Elm Street
allows Freddy Krueger to exist within the collective subconscious of
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his victims, which means that he is not so much an exterior monster
who returns to a particular location for vengeance (like Michael Myers
returning to Haddonfield in Halloween) or even a monster who exists
in a marginalized community into which the young victims stumble
(like the Sawyer family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). Rather,
Freddy is a monster of interiority, which has important ramifications
throughout the film for the notion of identification. Freddy's status as
a monster of interiority alters the structure of identification because
Freddy is literally omnipresent within his victims' dreamscapes. He
is both everywhere and nowhere, something that is difficult if not
impossible to convey with conventional subjective camera shots. He
can be simultaneously on both ends ofthe frame, which is depicted in
one of Tina's dreams when she is shown running from Freddy on the
left side ofthe screen, only to run smack into him on the right side.
The impossibility of using conventional camera setups to convey
Freddy's omnipresence is of great significance for A Nightmare on Elm
Street as a slasher film because, according to Dika, the most famous
camera shot in these films is the point-of-view shot from the killer's
perspective (which is used extensively in the opening sequences of both
Halloween and Eriday the 13th). The genre's use of the killer pointof-view shot has been the source of much criticism, especially from
feminist critics, who assert that it is meant to align the audience with
the killer, thus giving the viewers pleasure in vicariously participating
in sadistic murder, particularly of young women. Clover (1992)
has thoroughly critiqued this argument by questioning the equation
between a point-of-view shot and direct identification and also by
suggesting that "the hand-held or similarly unanchored first-person
camera works as much to destabilize as to stabilize identification"
(45). Nevertheless, she still holds that the killer point-of-view shot,
or the "I-Camera" as she calls it, is a "striking" formulaic element of
the genre.
Significantly, there are only two shots in the entirety of A
Nightmare on Elm Street that are from Freddy's point-of-view, both of
which are quite brief and used only in chase sequences, never during a
murder. In fact, the two Freddy point-of-view shots stand out because
they do not fit with the rest ofthe film's overall visual strategy, which
relies more on objective, detached camerawork that emphasizes
the openness of the dreamscape rather than a focused, singular
perspective. The fikn even appears to be actively working against any
explicit identification with Freddy through the camerawork; instead.
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Craven relies more heavily on suggesting Freddy's presence without
ever fully confirming it. Thus, we get many quick cuts of Freddy's
glowering eyes looking out between pipes, or his razor nails scraping
along the side of a building, or a brief flash of motion in one comer
of the frame that might or might not be the product of the audience's
imagination.
The result of this strategy is that identification is made even more
complex than in most slasher films, where identification constantly
shifts between the killer and the victims/heroine (Dika, 88-89). In A
Nightmare on Elm Street there is no shifting of identification because to
identify with the killer is, in a way, to identify simultaneously with the
heroine and vice versa. With the lack of subjective camera shots from
Freddy's point of view and his physical fragmentation by quick cuts
and suggestions of his presence, he is rendered fully abject. Like birth
and uterine imagery, Freddy's abject status (in Julia Kristeva's sense
of the word) plays with inside/outside distinctions. As Barbara Creed
(1993) notes, "The concept of inside/outside suggests two surfaces
that fold in on each other; the task of separating inside from outside
seems impossible as each surface contributes to the 'other' side of its
opposite. The implication is that the abject can never be completely
banished" (49). Although in slasher films killers and heroines share
certain gender traits and an ability to utilize violence, they are still
separate entities. The same cannot be said so easily of the killer and
heroine in A Nightmare on Elm Street, which makes it difficult if not
impossible to shift identification between Freddy and Nancy because
he is inside Nancy's subconscious; he is the inside to her outside, the
interiority to her exteriority. When Nancy is dreaming and in Freddy's
realm of the dreamscape, she is inside her own mind, which Freddy
has essentially subjugated and made his own. However, to identify
with one is to identify with the other because Freddy is Nancy's abject,
that part of her that cannot be fully banished (which might suggest
why he returns in sequel after sequel, even to the point that, in Wes
Craven's New Nightmare [1994], he breaks the bounded confines of
the cinematic diegesis and invades the realm of those who created
him). Although it is tempting to think that it is easier to identify with
Nancy, such identification is always complicated by Freddy's abject
presence within her subconscious, which is on some level connected
to the subconscious of all the other young victims.
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Gender and the Final Girl
The role ofthe Final Girl is the one element ofthe slasher subgenre
that is kept most fully intact in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Nancy
fulfills all the basic elements of this character archetype: She is the
only teenage character to survive in the film, and she defeats Freddy in
the end (at least temporarily). Unlike her girlfriends, she is not sexually
active, something that is made explicit in the sleepover sequence when
Rod and Tina go to bed together, but Nancy refuses Glen's suggestive
come-on by asserting that they are there for Tina, not themselves
(which also leads to an amusing joke when Glen, forced to listen to
the sounds of Tina and Rod in the next bedroom, mutters, "Morality
sucks"). Nancy is also one ofthe more resourceful Final Girls in that
she sets up elaborate booby traps and prepares ahead of time for her
confrontation with Freddy, rather than waiting to be backed into a
comer before retaliating.
The importance ofthe Final Girl in Clover's (1992) analysis rests
in how she confounds gender by conflating elements of masculinity
and femininity, which is also evident in the killer, who embodies both
masculine and feminine traits. While this shared gender mixing is one
more element that brings the killer and the Final Girl together, gender
ultimately becomes dichotomous at the climax because the Final Girl
realizes her full masculinity by emasculating the killer, who is then
figuratively castrated and thus fully realizes his incipient femininity.
This is given an interesting twist in A Nightmare on Elm Street in that
Nancy emasculates Freddy not by stabbing him (which has phallic
overtones in other slasher movies and contributes to our understanding
ofthe Final Girl becoming fully masculine), but by bringing him out
of her subconscious and turning her back on him and sapping him of
power, which has important ramifications for the functioning of the
gaze as will be addressed later.
However, at this point, what is of greatest importance is that, in
order to defeat him, Nancy must bring Freddy out of her subconscious
and into reality, where he is less powerful. The dreamscape as Freddy's
realm of power is underscored by the fact that that Nancy never asserts
any control within her dreams. Unlike the later Nightmare films in
which various characters learn to control elements of their dreams in
order to do battle with Freddy (most explicitly in Part 3, "The Dream
Warriors," and Part 4, "The Dream Master"), here the dreamscape
is entirely his realm where he can assert masculine domination over
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his feminized victims. One might understand this in Lacanian terms,
with the dreamscape as a prelinguistic moment for the victims in
which they cannot understand the system in which they are mired and
Freddy standing in as his own twisted version of the Law of the Father.
Thus, Freddy's masculine or feminine position is based largely on his
location; to bring him out of the interior realm of the dreamscape is, in
its own way, a kind of emasculation that weakens him.
The Terrible Place and the Uncanny/Familiar
Another of the fundamental traits of the slasher film is the
"Terrible Place," a fypically remote location where the killer lives
and stages his attacks. Although much of ^ Nightmare on Elm Street
revolves around Nancy's house (which also figures significantly in the
sequels, especially Parts 2, 3, and 4), the Terrible Place is actually the
human subconscious, which literally separates the victim from others
because they cannot enter his or her dream. It is exclusionary not only
in this sense, but in the even more absolute sense that only the teenage
victims are the ones having nightmares. In Creed's (1993) terms, the
subconscious positions a Möbius strip inside/outside dichotomy, and
as the film progresses, the once-solid membrane separating dreams
from reality becomes porous, which allows Freddy to expand beyond
his borders in the subconscious to interact with his victims while they
are awake, most notably in the scene where he calls Nancy to inform
her that he is about to kill Glen and then turns the telephone receiver
into a leering version of his own mouth, complete with lascivious
extended tongue.
This difficulfy in separating nightmare from reality recalls Freud's
understanding of the uncanny {unheimlich) and the familiar {heimlich).
The Terrible Place of dreams is unheimlich, but dreams almost always
start out heimlich, that is, in familiar terms. Thus, there are always a
few moments at the beginning of each nightmare sequence when the
viewer is forced to ask, "Is this dream or realify? Did Nancy go to
sleep, or is she still awake?" These nightmares usually commence in
the place where the victim goes to sleep (in Nancy's bedroom, in the
bathtub, etc.), then slowly become weird, or uncanny, thus signifying
that the border has been crossed. However, the very fact that this
border-crossing remains questionable for any length of time suggests
just how thin the border really is. Just as the permeabilify of inside/
outside confounds the identificatory separation of Freddy and Nancy,
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so is unheimlich!heimlich difficult to separate, which complicates
Dika's assertion that "the characters in a stalker film (and arguably
of other genre products) form a distinctive set of binary oppositions"
(92). Instead, it reaffirms Wood's view of genres as products of
ideological contradiction, here literalized in the horrific bleeding of
nightmare into reality and vice-versa.
The Slasher Monster in the Symbolic Realm
The discussion at this point turns to Freddy ICrueger himself and
what his status as a supernatural villain means for the monstrosity
that is typical of slasher films. In some ways, Freddy fulfills the basic
requirements of the slasher, mostly notably Dika's assertion that he is
"an archaic element, a relic from an earlier time that has now retumed
to disrupt the present stability of the young community" (93). Years
earlier, Fred Krueger, a serial child killer, escaped prosecution due
to a technical error in the paperwork, so the outraged neighborhood
parents whose children had been or were in danger of being victimized
sought their own justice by burning him to death in the boiler room
where he took his victims. Freddy then returns in supernatural form
to haunt the dreams of those parents' now teenage children, a literal
incarnation of the sons paying for the sins of their fathers.
According to Clover, the typical killer in a slasher film is
"propelled by psychosexual fury" (27), and Dika notes that most
slasher films open with a woman's death, which usually suggests a
primal scene that then forms the background for the killer's vengeance
(the paradigmatic example here being young Michael Myers watching
his sister go upstairs to have sex with her boyfriend and then
killing her in Halloween). In A Nightmare on Elm Street, however,
psychosexual fury or oedipal trauma is not at issue. We know nothing
of Freddy's background except that he was a "filthy child murderer,"
which certainly suggests child molestation and could possibly be tied
to oedipal trauma, but never within the diegesis. Rather, Freddy's
wreaking havoc on the teenagers of Elm Street is simply to avenge his
own death. He is a fully narcissistic killer.
Freddy is also different from other slashers in the way he is
represented on-screen, which for Dika is "the single most important
characteristic of these films" (88). In the traditional slasher film, the
killer "is either kept off-screen or masked for the greater part of the
film. He is thus depersonalized in a literal sense" (88). According to
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Clover, these killers are human, but only marginally so, "just as they
are only marginally visible—to their victims and to us, the spectators"
(30). Freddy, on the other hand, is neither masked nor kept off-screen,
although he does exist largely at the margins of the frame and in
shadow (something that changed in the sequels, as he became more and
more central to the point that actor Robert Englund began receiving
name-above-the-title star billing, a rarify in a genre when the villain
is generally played by a Stuntman in a mask). Even more importantly,
however, Freddy is a full presence in A Nightmare on Elm Street
because he speaks and has a distinctive personalify. He is thus part of
the symbolic realm, as opposed to other slashers like Michael Myers
and Jason Voorhees who are mute. Freddy's abilify to speak makes
him all the more sinister in that he is not perceived as a monotonous,
unstoppable force but as afleshed-out villain who cackles at and taunts
his victims before dispatching them. This makes him, in a sense, more
human, but also more evil because his functioning within the symbolic
order suggests that he actively chooses what he does rather than acting
out of a predetermined and unquestioned evil nature.
Rejecting the Gaze
At least since the influx of psychoanalytic film theory in the
early 1970s, the gaze has become one of the most highly charged and
hotly debated elements of the cinema, and, as Clover, Linda Williams
(1984), and others have shown, it is of the utmost importance when
discussing horror films (although Clover questions whether we
should be focusing on the fractured and partial "look," rather than
the powerful, all-controlling "gaze"). Despite A Nightmare on Elm
Street's lack of explicit point-of-view shots, which are usually used
to signify who controls the gaze, the gaze is an important element that
comes into play in Nancy's eventual emasculation of Freddy.
According to Clover, the abilify of the Final Girl to dispatch the
killer ''depends on her assumption of the gaze" (60). This turns out
to be quite the opposite in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Here, Nancy's
triumph over Freddy is instead dependent on her actively rejecting the
gaze by turning her back on Freddy, which serves as the embodiment
of Craven's conviction that "the only way to ultimately end violence
is to turn away from it, to take its energy away" (qtd. in Sterritt 1984,
34). In a sense, Nancy's turning her back on Freddy can be seen as
controlling the gaze in that she has the power to either accept or reject
29
it, rather than simply being its object; she essentially denies Freddy
the status of object within her own gaze while also denying her own
status as object within his. It is not that she turns the gaze against
Freddy; rather, she takes away its power entirely, which suggests that
the gaze is only powerful when it is reacted to. Voyeurism becomes
true scopic control only when the object is aware of, and complicit
in, her objectification, much like Michel Foucault's idea of the
Panopticon (1995). In gender terms, Nancy's rejection of the gaze
altogether suggests that the gaze, as Laura Mulvey (1975) asserts in
"Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," is inherently masculine,
that even when a female appropriates it, she is simply appropriating
a masculine position. Thus, Nancy's defeat of Freddy is more ftiUy
feminine in that she rejects the masculine gaze entirely.
Within the context of Craven's earlier horror films, Nancy's
triumph over Freddy plays as a powerful inversion of the critical
ending oí The Last House on the Left, in which the Collingwoods enact
violence against Krug and his family, but in the process forfeit their
own humanity, which Craven emphasizes in the final shot of them
looking bloody and defeated. That ending has a direct connection to
A Nightmare on Elm Street because Freddy Krueger the supernatural
villain is a direct product of parental vengeance, which we never see
explicitly, but is explained to Nancy by her mother. Marge Thompson
(Ronee Blakley), near the end of the film. Thus, like the similarly
named Krug, Krueger was slaughtered by the parents of his victims,
meaning that the beginning of A Nightmare on Elm Street picks up
thematically from the ending of The Last House on the Left, with the
cycle of violence now continuing on a supernatural level, thus directly
contradicting Marge's pathetic assertion that Freddy Krueger cannot
hurt Nancy because "Mommy killed him." Like the Collingwoods'
violence at the end of The Last House on the Left, Marge's violence
has not solved the problem by killing the monster, but instead made
it worse: She has sunk into an alcoholic stupor to blunt the pain of
her transgressions, and Freddy now has more power than ever to
traumatize the children of Elm Street.
Nancy, on the other hand, not only maintains her humanity in
defeating Freddy, but emphasizes it in her rejection of the archetypal
slasher trope that equates triumph with the Final Girl appropriating the
slasher's violence, thus becoming "the female victim-hero" (Clover,
4). She becomes a protagonist "in the full sense" in that she combines
30
"the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero," but her victory
is more powerful for being willfully nonviolent. Nancy's triumph over
Freddy is a kind of transcendent triumph that makes Craven's critical
depiction of the Collingwoods' descent into savagery in The Last
House in the Left all the more disturbing.
However, as in many modem horror films, Nancy's triumph
is only fleeting. Following in the footsteps of the shock conclusion
to Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), A Nightmare on Elm Street
works against any notion of containment in the final moments as
Freddy makes his presence immediately known mere moments after
he was supposedly vanquished. The final scene in the film mocks
the reassertion of civilized normalify by bringing all the deceased
characters back to life, only to trap them in a possessed car that bears
the distinctive red-and-green stripes of Freddy's sweater. Even further.
Marge Thompson's admonition that she will quit drinking is rendered
meaningless by Freddy's sucking her through the portal of the front
door into an unseen netherworld. Again, this last scene also conflates
fantasy with reality, as its beginning suggests a normal day, only to
reveal in the end that it is either (a) another nightmare or (b) Freddy's
complete invasion of realify. Most slasher films are not as explicit
about depicting the retum of evil; for instance, Halloween ends with a
shot that only suggests Michael Myers' point of view, and Friday the
13th ends with a confusing nightmare suggesting that Jason Voorhees
never really died. In this regard, the end of ^4 Nightmare on Elm Street
connects more fully with possession films, which end "with a scene
that indicates that the force in question is only temporarily laid to rest
and that evil will shortly rise again" (Clover, 72).
Conclusion
We have seen how A Nightmare on Elm Street's breaking of
the boundaries usually associated with the slasher subgenre allows
it to complicate and confound notions of gender, identification,
monstrosify, and the gaze while simultaneously extending Wes
Craven's thematic preoccupation with violence as a destmctive cycle
and the thin line between civilization and savagery, which makes it a
particularly intriguing example of Robin Wood's contention that genre
films are ideologically contradictory. Despite its usual conflation with
the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises, all of which were
popular around the same time, A Nightmare on Elm Street is difficult
31
to categorize as a slasher film. And, even though it incorporates
elements of the possession film, as well, it is not fully that either. Thus,
it is an interstititial text, one that has characteristics of recognized
subgenres without ever fully adhering to any of them, which is key to
understanding its unique ideological work.
The mixture of the slasher film and the possession film allows
Craven to complicate crucial issues involving gender, monstrosity,
and the power of the gaze. The mixing of genres also creates a unique
space for an extension of the ideological work of his '70s horror films,
which, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, use graphic depictions of
violence to question the very nature of human violence and to suggest
that it is ultimately a dead end that destroys the humanity of those
who wield it. Introducing the supernatural into the slasher plotting
of A Nightmare on Elm Street allows Craven to create his ultimate
condemnation of violence in Nancy's rejection of the gaze.
Although most slasher sequels must deal with the death of the
killer in the first film and how to bring him back to life in a way that is
acceptable to the audience, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the slasher
is dead to begin with; it is, in effect, a sequel to a slasher film that was
never made. Thus, A Nightmare on Elm Street, even more so than the
self-conscious Scream films, has a great deal to say about the slasher
cycle itself while also adhering to many of its rules. The death of the
physical Fred Krueger (whom we never see, except in fragmented form
during the opening credits) and his resultant entry into the collective
subconsciousness of the film's characters makes A Nightmare on Elm
Street, in a sense, a metacinematic exploration of how the slasher cycle
became part of the landscape of the American subconscious throughout
the late 1970s and 1980s. Even though Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees
ean be killed again and again at the end of each of their films, they can
never be fully banished because you can never kill their presence. Like
Freddy, they are superhuman in the sense that, when they are killed,
they enter the collective subconscious of the entire society, where they
remain permanently and rise from the dead from time to time in the
form of both marketing paraphernalia like tee-shirts and posters and,
most importantly, the neverending sequels and spin-offs.
32
Works Cited
Attanasio, Paul. "The Gore of Your Dreams." The Washington Post 23
January 1985: D2.
Canby, Vincent. "Screen: Nightmare." The New York Times 9
November 1984: CIO.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Prince UP, 1992.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film,
Psychoanalysis. NewYork: Routledge, 1993.
Feminism,
Dika, Vera. "The Stalker Film, 1978-81." American Horrors: Essays
on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller.
Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987. 86-101.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison (Alan
Sheridan, trans.). NewYork: Vintage Books, 1995.
Kawin, Bruce. "The Mummy's Pool." Planks of Reason: Essays on the
Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1984.
3-20.
McCarty, John. Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo ofthe Screen.
NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1984.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen ]6.3
(Autumn 1975): 6-18.
Sharrett, Christopher. "Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse: Wes Craven on
theUonorFilm.''Literature/Film Quarterly 13.3 (1985): 139-147.
Sterritt, David. "Horror Films: A Form that Seems Always With Us."
Christian Science Monitor 28 November 1984: 34.
Tudor, Andrew. "From Paranoia to Postmodern? The Horror Movie in
Late Modem Society." Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed.
Steve Neale. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. 105-116.
Williams, Linda. "When the Woman Looks." Re-Vision: Essays
in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Mary Anne Doane, Patricia
Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. Los Angeles, Calif.: American
Fihn Institute, 1984. 83-99.
Wood, Robin. "Ideology, Genre, Auteur." Film Genre Reader II, ed.
Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 59-73.
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