The Nightmare On Elm Street series

Chris: The received wisdom about this franchise is that there are only three good films — the original, Dream Warriors, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Is that the case?

Owen: I don’t really like

New Nightmare very much.

James: What’s wrong with you?

Owen: I think it’s a bit ponderous and full of itself.

James: Speaking as someone who’s both ponderous and full of himself, I think it’s great.

Owen: It was an attempt to make Freddy scary again, and I think the cat was out of that bag.

Mike: I loved it. It felt like that was Wes Craven’s Scream before he did Scream. It was tackling horror films and the effect horror films have on audiences. It always felt like when Wes Craven made a horror film, he had something to explore, as opposed to ‘let’s just watch Freddy cut up some teens in silly ways’, which is what some of the latter sequels were.

Chris: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

James: I like what they did with it. It’s closer to what Craven originally saw Freddy as. He wanted to go for someone big and imposing, and it’s only because Robert Englund was freaky and dark that he went with him.

Chris: Aka Willie, the lovely alien from V.

James: And now he’s in your dreams, killing children. And the comedy was leached out of him in that one. He hadn’t been menacing for a long time. The second one, which is still quite grim generally, is when you start to see Freddy as a slightly camp, humorous figure. After three, it’s just ridiculous. It’s full-on comedy at that point.

Mike: Everyone talks about the third one being one of the best, which it is, but it’s also the tipping point. It’s the point where it almost stops being a horror franchise and becomes something else entirely.

Chris: It’s the first one to properly realise the potential of having a character who can manipulate the dream world. Freddy can appear as a giant snake, he can appear as a TV, he can appear as anything. It’s just that that became more ridiculous as the franchise went on.

Mike: It’s sad. He was this really menacing, scary

character in the first one. You don’t even get a full look at Freddy’s face. He’s very much in the shadows. By part five he’s fun, but he’s just completely lost all of his power. He’s essentially a kids’ cartoon character, which for a child-murdering serial killer is quite a strange thing. James: It’s easy to lose sight of how dark the first one is. The actual story, and Wes Craven’s concept, was based on Cambodian refugees who’d been dying in their sleep. And the seed of the film was, what if something was killing them in their dreams? I think that’s why the film works. It’s a really primal sort of fear, the idea that you’re at your most vulnerable when you’re asleep, and the blurring between fantasy and reality.

Owen: As much as the dreams are surreal in their imagery, they all have understandable plots. Which isn’t the way dreams really work. David Lynch is very good at dreams that don’t make any sense. There’s nothing in the

Elm Street series that’s as frightening as the bum behind the diner in Mulholland Drive. Chris: Freddy’s Revenge is really interesting. There’s a hidden subtext about Jesse, played by Mark Patton, battling with his sexuality. Well, not so hidden. When I saw it as a kid, I didn’t get that. It’s been embraced since by the gay community, and it’s really interesting to watch it from that perspective.

Mike: It makes that film so much better, I think.

Owen: The line between what’s real and what’s a dream is really, really odd. There’s a sequence where Jessie gets out of bed in the middle of the night, in his pyjamas, ends up in a leather bar where he meets his PE teacher, who takes him to school and makes him run laps. And that’s not a dream.

Chris: Until Freddy’s Dead in 1991, they were basically making one a year. It’s crazy that these things were even semi-coherent, let alone that some of them were as good as they are. The Dream Master, for example, is the true ‘what the fuck?’ Nightmare movie. That’s the one where they bring Freddy back by having a dog piss fire on his bones: “Write that down, that’s happening.”

Owen: There was a writers’ strike, so there was only the bones of a screenplay and director Renny Harlin going, “Let’s do this.”

Chris: “Interior. Renny Harlin’s Mind. Night.”

Mike: Is this the one where they’re on a beach and Freddy puts on sunglasses? Parts four, five and six are a bit of a trilogy of shit, aren’t they?

James: I always thought

The Dream Child was the nadir of the series.

Chris: At least that has things like the M.C. Escher staircase shenanigans. Whereas Freddy’s Dead has literally nothing going for it whatsoever.

James: Apart from 3D Freddyvision.

Owen: I like the idea that Freddy has wiped out the entire child population of Springwood, and all the adults have gone mad. But they don’t do much with it.

Chris: We had to wait a while after that for Freddy to come back, and he did so in

Freddy Vs. Jason where he butted sharp implements with Jason Voorhees. It’s actually quite fun. It’s a better

Friday The 13th movie than it is a Nightmare On Elm Street movie.

Owen: It really delivers on the Freddy versus Jason scenes. The actual plot is… whatever. But the cartoony aspect of them fighting is adorable. It’s like Itchy and Scratchy.

James: At the press screening for this, they didn’t show the last three minutes of the film, so you wouldn’t know whether Freddy or Jason won. I never watched it again, so I’ve literally never found out.

Chris: To quote the Black Knight in The Holy Grail,

“Alright, we’ll call it a draw.” And then we have the remake. It’s not great, but it’s still better than Freddy’s Dead.

Owen: It’s a good-looking film. It just doesn’t have many ideas in its head.

Mike: I hate that Platinum Dunes era of remakes. Their

Friday The 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this all kind of merge into one big, beige blob.

Chris: Alright, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!