EyeSore Cinema’s Weekend Movie Picks

Nightmare on Elm Street Review by Justin Lourenco

“Red and green colour combination is the most difficult for the human eye to process”

When I was five, Fred Kruger was my hero. While older kids on my block wanted to be Leonardo, Donatello, or one of Ivan Reitman’s famous phantom exterminators, I wanted nothing more than to don the burnt visage of a mass murdering pedophile. I’d lure unsuspecting eight-year-old victims with the promise of a new episode of “The Real Ghostbusters” on my grandmother’s projection television. Laying in wait in that darkened basement, I would don the red green-stripped sweater, claw, and burn mask. Looking back on it now, I reminisce, thinking, this must be how Wes Craven felt watching his film with an audience for the first time. Because unlike all of the silly sequels that followed, Nightmare on Elm Street is one scary-as-shit surrealist ride through cinema. The film redefined what a slasher film could be in the middle of the sub-genres golden age, and built New Line an empire.

“The claw in carnivorous mammals is primarily used to ensnare prey before they feed.”

Nightmare on Elm Street is a slasher forged in the passion of independent European auteurist cinema. Birthed from the still hungry cinephile mind of a mid-career-crisis Craven; the film is littered with homage’s to favourite art-house European auteurs. While the film never quite succeeds in reaching the depth of character and subtlety of his Swedish professor Ingmar Bergman, it is at once apparent that this film was written with both passion and purpose. Nightmare on Elm Street unfolds as a subversive allegory about the real nightmares that creep into our lives if we don’t pay attention, and take care of our societies children. And it does so remaining true to genre; the film is a no holds barred slasher with a particularly notorious set piece evoking rape, as a teenager is slashed open, penetrated, and dragged up a bedroom wall. It’s blood soaked social commentary scrawled in the bedrooms of suburban families the world over, and that’s precisely what makes this film so frightening.

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

- Viktor E. Frankl

As of today, the lights in the halls of the house that Freddy built are all but extinguished. My grandmother’s basement is collapsed and filled in with concrete; foundation for the next generation of condominiums. Even though I know my childhood, and New Line Cinema are buried and gone, there is still a part of me locked in that darkened basement laying in wait for the next slasher film that will redefine a generation the way Nightmare on Elm Street has.