A Nightmare On Elm Street.

[Corpsey]

this sounds very relatable. the thing of not having seen something but being scared of it because your brother or your nephew or just older kids were watching it. all of the gabber and rave music from that time were also heavily sampling these horror/sci-fi movies so that the whole thing became even more mythical.

It's that cliché about horror - don't show the monster, it's always scarier to let your imagination run riot.

Obviously those VHS covers DID show the monster, but it was a static image that you could imagine from (also ofc you were a child, you couldn't really be sure that the imaginary isn't real).

As an adult seeing CLIPS of Freddie Krueger I can see that it's all quite hokey and ridiculous, especially because he became throughout the sequels a wisecracking cartoon character. Similarly with Chuckie.

Saying that I do tend to avoid horror films not because they're scary but because they're sadistic and disturbing. I watched the infamous Terrifier 2 scene with the salt in the wounds etc. and even though it's obviously massively OTT and even sort of funny, it's still got a nastiness and sadism to it that I don't like.

Nevertheless, I did watch it, having read about it. As an adult, as when I was a kid, I'm still taking a peek at things that I know are going to disturb me. Not sure what drives that.

 

[version]

It's that cliché about horror - don't show the monster, it's always scarier to let your imagination run riot.

Obviously those VHS covers DID show the monster, but it was a static image that you could imagine from (also ofc you were a child, you couldn't really be sure that the imaginary isn't real).

As an adult seeing CLIPS of Freddie Krueger I can see that it's all quite hokey and ridiculous, especially because he became throughout the sequels a wisecracking cartoon character. Similarly with Chuckie.

Saying that I do tend to avoid horror films not because they're scary but because they're sadistic and disturbing. I watched the infamous Terrifier 2 scene with the salt in the wounds etc. and even though it's obviously massively OTT and even sort of funny, it's still got a nastiness and sadism to it that I don't like.

Nevertheless, I did watch it, having read about it. As an adult, as when I was a kid, I'm still taking a peek at things that I know are going to disturb me. Not sure what drives that.

Freddy on the poster as just a skeletal face and hand is a great image.

 

[0bleak]

The main thing I dislike about watching horror movies, because like @Corpsey said they're usually kind of cheesy as an adult, is cheap-ass jump scares - gets me every time even when I know it's coming.

 

[catalog]

Wes Craven pops up in that voodoo book by John cussans. I've got it somewhere, veill try find the quote. I think he went to Haiti and then wrote it

 

[catalog]

The main thing I dislike about watching horror movies, because like @Corpsey said they're usually kind of cheesy as an adult, is cheap-ass jump scares - gets me every time even when I know it's coming.

I'm similar. I generally dislike horror unless it's a bit hammy. But it's a very pure cinematic form, up there with wrestling and porn, according to herzog

 

[sus]

OK so how does this film start. It starts with all the teenagers having the same dream. The collective unconscious is registering some invisible threat in the suburban idyll. This premonitory haunting, like an intrusive thought nagging at you: something is very wrong.

 

[sus]

Somehow none of the adults have this dream. They live in a totally separate world. They can't see or understand their kids' worlds. They don't put much effort in to trying.

Maybe they have lost their powers, in growing up. They have lost touch with the unseen forces.

 

[sus]

They all have the same dream. But the boys are too busy playing tough to acknowledge it. One girl, a kind of Cassandra, is seriously spooked, she wonders whether she's getting visions of the future, this monsterman with switchblade fingers who is going to rape her and slash her to death. She's so scared she can't sleep alone so her friends sleep over with her.

 

[sus]

And they are hanging out, and the girls tell each other about their dreams, they are starting to realize they've all been having the same sleeping visions. And then they hear something outside.

Someone is definitely out there and they're freaking out, is it the man with switchblade fingers from the dream? And they step out, and... it's just our Cassandra's exboyfriend! He's come to get back together. A collective sigh of relief.

The exboyfriend is dressed in black leather, greased hair. He plays with a switchblade that looks suspiciously like Freddy's fingers. He jokingly kidnaps/play-wrestles our Cassandra upstairs to the bedroom to make out.

Her friends can hear them having sex through the walls. At some point the shrieks of pleasure become shrieks of pain. When they bust down the door, she's bleeding out, slashes all over her torso. And her greaser ex is gone.

 

[sus]

I guess thus is what I meant, that everything supernatural is a metaphor for the mundane? And how it reminded me of Lynch, all the magical realism to say something very simple, about violence against women. Maybe all horror has this figurative quality, I dunno, I don't watch horror very often.

 

[sus]

Cut scene to the English teacher in class. "What is seen is not always what is real," she lectures. "There is something rotten in nature. Something cankerous." They are talking about Hamlet.

 

[sus]

Another girl, she has a secondstory bedroom, and boys can climb the garden trellis to sneak up into it through the window. And so of course, how does Freddy get in? He threatens through the window, beckons and sneaks in through the window. The house has a security problem. The Father has failed to lock it down. He's too busy at work. Mom is busy drinking clear liquor from hidden handles.

 

[sus]

And so there is a way that danger has been invited in, like a vampire.

And the other way to "ask for it" is to go outside. Not to open the gates to the barbarians but to step outside the gates, into the wilderness.

And over and over again in this film, a voice in the darkness will call to the teenagers, call their name and say, step outside. Leave your Father's home. They are hypnotized. They step out in their slips, barefooted, and stumble into the dark as if in a spell. They want to face this evil haunting them they want to look in its eyes discover its source.

 

[sus]

They want to see the raw force that exists beyond the veneer of civilization. They weakly hold up an impotent crucifix, hoping it will save them. "This is God," Freddy says, and shows them his claws. Pure power. Natural State. The horrible dark abyss of force that polite society pretends doesn't exist. Their parents pretend they can't hear its beckoning voice. Maybe they no longer can.

 

[sus]

There is this real sense that the kids and parents live in totally different dimensions. That the kids see forces lurking in the world the parents cannot.

A fissure opens between worlds. The venting vapors beckon our heroine, call her down to the underworld: the boiler room underneath the school, in the suburban basement. Furnaceglow fire in the darkness.

Mvuent said something smart, he said "the backrooms of the subconscious" and that's exactly it, there is a mapping of the immaterial/psychic to a physical visible reality. That's the magical-as-metaphor-for-the-mundane.

 

[version]

I guess thus is what I meant, that everything supernatural is a metaphor for the mundane? And how it reminded me of Lynch, all the magical realism to say something very simple, about violence against women. Maybe all horror has this figurative quality, I dunno, I don't watch horror very often.

There's a Christian element to it. A lot of those 80s horror films are essentially people being punished for things like premarital sex.

 

[sus]

The forces of the Unseen begin intruding on the Seen. But to the adults they just manifest in mundane material ways. When the greaser is strangled with bedsheets by Freddy, the police (and our heroine's dad is police chief) rule it suicide.

The kids keep having the same nightmares. The ones that are still alive, anyway. Some of the nightmares seem to be implanted by media: we see the high schoolers fall asleep listening to/watching violent programs with women screaming, car wrecks, gun shots.

One thing the adults cant explain is why, after her nightmares, our heroin wakes with slashes and open wounds on her body. Mom takes her to a sleep specialist; Science tried to study it; but Science by its design is not equipped to handle the invisible realm. It can only measure observed phenomena.

 

[sus]

There's a Christian element to it. A lot of those 80s horror films are essentially people being punished for things like premarital sex.

Yeah Ian and I watched Friday The 13th after and it was very transparently this. An hugely inferior film to Nightmare IMO.

 

[sus]

OK so our heroine actually brings back Freddy's hat from her dream. If she's woken up during the dream she gets sucked out of the dream dimension back into our world. And apparently she can take things from the dream dimension back with her. (This unlocks a new plan: she'll grab on to Freddy, bring him back, and kill him IRL. She'll wrench her unconscious foe into daylight, expose him to all the adults that don't believe in him.)

When she brings the hat back it says Freddy Kreuger, and that's how she learns her adversary's name. And that's how she learns that Freddy is a figure from her parents' past. Her mother never told her. This is something she's inherited. A haunting through the generations.

 

[sus]

Well I have plenty of thoughts on the ending. Do you turn your back on your fears to show you're not scared? Or do you face them? Why are all the men in her life such loser letdowns? How, in trying to protect her Daughter, did the Mother doom the Daughter?

But I will leave it there for now that's more than plenty