A Nightmare On Elm Street. (12A.)
Directed by Wes Craven.
Starring Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley and Amanda Wyss. 1984.
The eighties, the age when rapacious capitalism really took hold, was the time when goods seemed to develop really short life spans. One minute you were told these new CD things were indestructible, the next it was scratched to pieces and skipping more frantically than Rocky in a training montage. The point being: things from the eighties don’t last.
For Halloween night only, the classic eighties horror film A Nightmare on Elm street is being re-released. When it came out the first appearance of Freddy Krueger, the slasher who kills people during their nightmares, was a revelation. It seemed to take the conventions of the teen slasher movie and give them a provocative, clever twist.
It doesn’t seem like that anymore. Now it seems just exactly like any other slasher movie. No doubt all the sequels and remakes have gone a long way to blunting its edge but watching it again I was at a lost to explain what had made it so special 29 years ago. The acting is mostly terrible (though Johnny Depp in his first film role is pretty solid), the shocks are mundane and the mechanical special effects are crude.
I sat down to watch this with someone younger who hadn’t seen it, promising them a classic horror film and at the end had to bury my head in shame to avoid their piercing look of incomprehension and betrayal. Trying to explain how this was once scary is as impossible a task as trying to justify why you once thought Ben Elton was funny.
Directed by Wes Craven.
Starring Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley and Amanda Wyss. 1984.
The eighties, the age when rapacious capitalism really took hold, was the time when goods seemed to develop really short life spans. One minute you were told these new CD things were indestructible, the next it was scratched to pieces and skipping more frantically than Rocky in a training montage. The point being: things from the eighties don’t last.
For Halloween night only, the classic eighties horror film A Nightmare on Elm street is being re-released. When it came out the first appearance of Freddy Krueger, the slasher who kills people during their nightmares, was a revelation. It seemed to take the conventions of the teen slasher movie and give them a provocative, clever twist.
It doesn’t seem like that anymore. Now it seems just exactly like any other slasher movie. No doubt all the sequels and remakes have gone a long way to blunting its edge but watching it again I was at a lost to explain what had made it so special 29 years ago. The acting is mostly terrible (though Johnny Depp in his first film role is pretty solid), the shocks are mundane and the mechanical special effects are crude.
I sat down to watch this with someone younger who hadn’t seen it, promising them a classic horror film and at the end had to bury my head in shame to avoid their piercing look of incomprehension and betrayal. Trying to explain how this was once scary is as impossible a task as trying to justify why you once thought Ben Elton was funny.
