"I'm not sure about this one," I told him.
"Give it a chance," he insisted. "You'll love it. If you don't, we'll turn it off."
And still I resisted. "If I say turn it down, turn it down," I warned him. "If I say shut it off, shut it off. If I say I need a break, pause it immediately. If I tell you to fast-forward, do it. And if I watch the whole thing and can't sleep tonight, you're staying up with me. But I like Wes Craven. So I'll give it a try." So Ian gave me the remote so I could lower volume/pause/stop/fast-forward as needed, turned on all the lights in the TV room, and settled my puppies on my lap for an extra layer of protection. And then we started the movie.
I'd like to say I forgot why I was afraid to watch it in the first place. I can't. But that, in this case, is a good thing, because it means that Craven did his job, and did it very, very well. My precautions did turn out to be unnecessary; aside from a bathroom break or two (turns out drinking half a gallon of tea before settling down to watch a movie is a bad idea...who knew, right?) we didn't need to pause or stop the film. And no way in hell was I going to fast-forward once I saw how beautiful the movie's aesthetics were. I didn't want to turn away, or turn it off, because not only was it beautiful, it was exciting. It was like a Hitchcock film: I never knew what was going to happen next, but I definitely wanted to find out.
I like Wes Craven a lot. I loved Red Eye and was pleasantly surprised by Scream, and Nightmare on Elm Street is in the same vein as both: a little humor, a lot of great aesthetic effects, a hell of a lot of suspense, and all the trope-subversion in the world. Craven loved to play around with audience expectations, and my God was he ever good at it. That's what makes Nightmare so wonderful and so terrifying. Craven uses his jump scares where they count. And he makes sure to place them where you least expect them to be. Oh, and as if that's not enough, he uses just enough body horror, and just enough psychological freak-outs, to make sure you never forget what you've just seen.
For the millionth time I'll say, I'm picky about horror. I like my horror like I like my period pieces: classy, and with as little gore as possible. (Which is why I will never understand what my dad sees in shows like Hell On Wheels because what even is that thing.) But Wes Craven knew what a lot of modern horror directors do not: how to make even the goriest slasher film a work of art. Because whoa, there is a lot of gore in Nightmare on Elm Street. There are literally fountains of blood in that film. Fountains. I'm not kidding. There are maggots, there's writhing intestines, at one point Freddy Kruger's face is torn off revealing a bloody, fleshy skull underneath. ("I told you to warn me if something like that was going to happen!" I protested to Ian when that scene came around. It was...oh, I don't know...about fifteen minutes into the film.) But even throughout all of that, the aesthetic is so beautiful you don't really know what to make of it.
And then there's the music. It's eerie. It starts off soft and builds to a crescendo, which is cool enough, but the brilliant part is that throughout most of the "normal" scenes. i.e. when Nancy and her friends are awake, the music is almost classical--piano, chimes, and simple repeating note patterns. Then when we enter dream-world and Freddy makes his appearance, BOOM--in come the drums and the synthesizers we associate with the 1980s. Again, very well-played, because even though the music varies, the score feels cohesive.
And then there's the characters, and there's Nancy, oh my God can we just talk about Nancy for a minute? People may hail Joss Whedon as the champion of Strong Female Characters, but the man has nothing on Wes Craven. I've yet to see a Craven film where women are firmly placed in the role of "victims" and the men are in the role of "saviors." It's always a toss-up. And this is what I mean about Craven majorly screwing with the tropes. For instance, we expect that Tina is definitely going to die first because she has sex. Well, spoiler alert, she does...but guess what? Her boyfriend is punished too. This is huge because #1, this movie came out in the 1980s, and I don't think I need to remind anyone how conservative America was in the 1980s...and #2, even today in a lot of our media, we fall into the trap of shaming girls and glorifying boys who have sex. Not so in Nightmare on Elm Street. Everybody's fair game: girls, boys, virgins, non-virgins, dorks, jocks...Freddy Kruger doesn't care about your sex life. He just wants to slit your throat.
But the reason Nancy survives is not because she's a virgin--in fact, it's implied that she isn't--but because she figures out how to empower herself against Kruger. The bathtub scene, where his clawed hand comes up between her legs, implies rape, as does a later scene when he attacks her in her bedroom. But she defeats him not just with physical force, but emotional: she gets to look him in the eyes and say "You can't hurt me. F**k off. I own my own mind and my own body, and if you don't like it, tough." And even without the rape/assault survivor analogies, can we just acknowledge that this girl has the biggest, brassiest set of metaphorical balls ever? She Home Alone-ifies her house, makes sure her mom is out of the way (or tries to, anyway), tells the authorities what's up and won't take no for an answer, and then walks right into the path of a serial killer. She knows she has to be the one to take him down and instead of hiding away, she rises to meet the challenge. And when he attacks her friends and her mother, she doesn't run away in fear. She gets mad. It just got personal, Kruger. You messed with her mom, and now she's going to mess with your already-none-too-handsome face.
The scene where Nancy tells Kruger, once and for all, that he has no power over her reminds me of a scene in Divergent. Inside a fear-driven simulation, heroine Tris's boyfriend, Four, tries to force himself on her sexually, even though in real life he promised he'd go slow. Tris stops him, kicks him off with a decisive "NO!" and wakes from the simulation to find everyone applauding her and telling her she's an example. Not only does she fight off a rapist, but she is congratulated for it. Her empowerment is treated as something to be rewarded, rather than a given. Instead of hearing "Well, you go alone with a guy in his room, what do you expect?" the message is "Whoa! You fought that guy off! Way to go!"
Same for Nancy. While no one is there to give her a high-five after she strips Kruger of his power by refusing to believe in him, Craven makes it clear that Nancy's success against him is real. She couldn't do it just by booby-trapping him, she had to confront him, and then she had to stop giving him the power to hurt her. Again, it's huge, considering the era in which this film was made. Craven's message might've been clouded by the unhappy ending (which, for the record, he didn't want there in the first place), but his original intent is clear. You have the power. You might be afraid, but that doesn't mean you can't be brave.
And last night after watching this thing, I slept well with my pups curled up at my feet and the window wide open. Ian told me he was proud of me for getting through the whole movie, but he can't possibly be as proud of me as I was of myself. Because here's the thing that I've slowly started to discover about horror films: done right, they can be as empowering as they are terrifying. And let me tell you, Craven knew how to do it right.
But purely from a filmmaker's perspective, the best thing about horror films, especially ones like Nightmare on Elm Street, isn't their empowerment factor. It's that when they're over, when you come back to reality and remember that it's just a movie and it wasn't real, it hits you that hey, this film, this really cool piece of visual storytelling, came out of someone's imagination. And then comes the very best part of all: going and writing your own film, and seeing what kind of things can come out of your imagination.
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