It's spooky season, dear readers!
Yep, it's almost Halloween. And you know what that means. It's time to sit back, dim the lights, crank up the volume, and be properly spooked by a good horror flick. Last year around this time, I naturally shared my ranking of the Halloween movies. As that has already been done in this blog, I will now share my ranking of a different slasher franchise - Nightmare on Elm Street.
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Ugh. This abomination is possibly the worst remake I've ever seen - and I've sat through the Nicolas Cage version of The Wicker Man (2006). The plot is remarkably similar to the original Nightmare on Elm Street, yet the film somehow manages to dodge all the elements that makes it great. Wes Craven's zany and imaginative dream landscapes are replaced with bleak and generic 2010's horror milieus, the fresh and talented cast is replaced by a dull and uninspired cast, and the genuine spookiness is replaced by lazy jump scares and modern horror clichés.
The original Nightmare on Elm Street canon can be divided into two eras, both with their upsides: films #1 - #2 feature a Freddy Krueger who is actually scary, whereas films #3 - #6 feature a sillier Freddy, savvy with various over-the-top zingers. The lack of zingers in the first two films doesn't matter, because the films are legitimately scary horror cinema - meanwhile, the lack of genuine creepiness in the later films doesn't matter, because the charismatic take on Freddy makes the films fun and entertaining. However, the 2010 remake takes the worst of both worlds, combining the lack of fun from the first films with the lack of atmosphere from the later ones, thus creating the only Elm Street flick that isn't one bit scary or fun.
8. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
While being an overall lousy piece of cinema by pretty much any metric, just as you'd expect from the fifth instalment in a slasher franchise, The Dream Child is still streets ahead of the remake. After all, this film at least features Robert Englund's original Freddy Krueger, who is awesome as ever. The plot and human characters may be woefully unoriginal, and every last bit of actual horror had been eradicated from the franchise. But for completists of the franchise, the fifth instalment features just enough mildly entertaining nightmare set-pieces and Krueger zingers to be watchable. A fairly pointless addition to the franchise, but still more or less Citizen Kane when compared to the remake.
7. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
With its spicy 4.9 rating on IMDB (somehow it's the only Elm Street flick to score less than a 5.0 - I don't for the life of me understand how anyone has given a 5 or more to the nauseating 2010 remake), The Final Nightmare is often considered the worst chapter of the franchise. I certainly get that - it's not a great film by any means. But I rank it above The Dream Child, if only barely, because it's more entertaining - and when two films are equally poor on a cinematic level, that counts for a lot.
Out of all the films in the franchise, Freddy's Dead takes itself the least seriously, which makes for many ridiculous shenanigans that are at least mildly fun to watch. The sequence where Freddy somehow inserts himself inside a video game (I'm fuzzy on the details) has to earn points for creativity, even if the execution of everything involved except for Englund's performance is laughably sloppy.
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
What a strange, strange film this sophomore instalment is. Released in the wake of the first film's success but before the third film revived the franchise to newfound popularity, Freddy's Revenge was quickly forgotten - until it became a cult classic for the LGBTQ+ community. No, really.
Yep, the plot of this overlook outlier of the franchise has gained a legacy as a metaphor - protagonist Jesse Walsh's (Mark Patton) struggles as he's haunted by Freddy Krueger are seen as symbols for a gay teenager struggling to realize his sexuality. Couple this with the film's plentiful moments of imagery with homoerotic undertones, and so you have a low-budget slasher sequel that has found a cult following with the rainbow community.
Freddy's Revenge is only at sixth place on my list, because it's not a very good film by most metrics - the acting is poor, the plot is riddled with holes and clichés, and the dialogue is quite horrible. That being said, I just have to appreciate the breath of fresh air that comes with the film's queer allegories (apparently the filmmakers deny to this day that it was intentional, but having seen the film, I'm not buying it). Also, while it's not exactly The Exorcist (1973), the film does have its spooky moments, as Freddy was still the creepy and dark stalker from the first film and not the goofball we saw from the third film onwards.
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
There's plenty to dislike in the fourth Elm Street instalment - many of the franchise's recurring plot elements had become tiresome, and the human characters aren't one bit original or interesting. That being said, there are two things that make The Dream Master very worthwhile viewing for fans of the franchise. The first one, unsurprisingly, is Freddy Krueger - he may not be at his best by the fourth film, but he isn't at his worst either. Robert Englund is still full of energy following the character's new direction in the previous instalment, while not being as cartoonish as he would escalate to be in the next few movies. Krueger may not be especially scary at this point, but he's certainly a charismatic villain with some classic zingers.
The second element making this into an adequate sequel is how the film utilizes the franchise's concept - for a film series about a villain who haunts people in their dreams, most Nightmare films simply don't do very much with the possibilities of the dreamworld settings. However, The Dream Master gets creative with its set pieces, much thanks to its imaginative director - Finland's own Renny Harlin! The Dream Master has a wonderful aesthetic, as many of the horror sequences take place in colorful and zany dreamscapes.
4. Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)
The dialogue? Horrible. The acting? Uninspired. The horror? Unnecessarily reliant on violence and jump scares. The plot? Largely nonsensical.
So, yeah, I'd say the crossover between the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday The 13th franchises was everything fans wanted it to be.
The film is silly, but it serves its purpose remarkably well. Seeing iconic horror villains Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees teaming up to kill a bunch of teenagers together is very entertaining, and watching them turn against each other (which eventually leads to an epic fight between the two) is even better. Low on cinematic value, high on entertainment value, and thoroughly deserving of its #5 spot on my list of the Top 10 Guilty Pleasure films, this crossover is quite the spectacle.
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Dream Warriors is the turning point that helped the franchise stay relevant. Usually, the third instalment of a horror franchise is the point where everything falls into a cycle of repeating clichés and re-living the glory days of the original instalment. However, the Nightmare franchise dodged this trope by changing the very formula of the franchise in a major way. Wes Craven returned to write the script for the film, and this script did some bold changes - namely, the franchise made a self-aware turn from 'dark and actually creepy' to 'humoristic and entertaining'.
This was quite the risk - silly horror movies aren't very often especially good. But, then again, neither are sequels that try too hard to be serious and scary without feeling fresh or original at all. And so, for this particular franchise, it was a smart decision to embrace the inherent silliness of low-budget slasher sequels and make the films from Dream Warriors onward purposefully comedic. The film doesn't try too hard, and ends up being loads of fun as a result. Robert Englund may have been great as the dark and lurking Freddy of the two first films, but he's also damn decent as the goofy and charismatic Freddy that this delightful sequel ushered in.
2. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
Unpopular opinion: Wes Craven's New Nightmare is the scariest film ever made.
I'm being serious here. No horror film has creeped me out as much as the 1994 pseudo-reboot of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The reason for this lies largely in the film's genius premise, as it gets meta but not in a humorous way like Wes Craven's Scream (1996) - but rather in a frightening way. We've all seen meta humor, but meta horror is its own can of worms and I love every second of it.
New Nightmare takes place in 'the real world' - a reality where the previous Elm Street films exist as works of fiction as they do in our reality. Wes Craven (the original film's director), Heather Langenkamp (the original film's lead actress) and Robert Englund (the original Freddy Krueger) all play the roles of themselves - celebrities famous for the Elm Street franchise. But, in this film, Langenkamp starts to see dreams where Krueger haunts him. She begins to realize that Krueger is no fictional character, but an actual entity who has left the world of cinema and is now after her in real life.
This blending of fiction and reality works immensely well. The reason I found the film so creepy is that it works so hard to feel like it's taking place in real life and not in the realm of fiction - seeing Hollywood celebrities play themselves and talk about the other Nightmare on Elm Street films as existing movies create a very real-world atmosphere. And when the demonic Krueger starts to appear in this reality, making the characters realize that Krueger is 'more than just a fictional character', this really gets to the viewer. This is the only horror film that has caused me to lose sleep on the following night, and I attribute that to the fact the film makes the viewer question one's own reality - it leaves you with a frightening feeling of "what if Krueger is indeed a real entity and will show up in my dreams next?". It sounds silly, but trust me, this film does such an excellent job with its meta premise that it will rattle your brain in this way.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The original Nightmare on Elm Street isn't just a masterpiece in the context of this franchise, or even horror in general, but across all of cinema - as can be witnessed by its 65th place in my Top 100 favorite movies of all time. Wes Craven's directing is spot-on, as the combination of well-timed jump scared and overall creepy tones make the end product into one of the genre's most genuinely spooky offerings. The concept of a supernatural killer haunting people in their dreams is wildly imaginative, and makes for some creative and visually startling set-pieces.
The casting, from Robert Englund cementing his Freddy Krueger as one of cinema's most iconic villains to young hot-shots Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp making their breakthroughs, is fantastic. The plot moves at just the right pace, and Charles Bernstein's score sends chills down one's spine - in fact, my Halloween playlist that I blast every October uses short instrumental snippets from this film's soundtrack as transition pieces between Halloween-appropriate pop tracks such as Monster Mash and Thriller. There may be some surprisingly decent sequels in this franchise (in addition to the laughably poor ones), but none come close to the original, with its ice-cold thrills and Wes Craven madness.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for quite an unusual post - the historic 2016 Presidential Election has its 5-year-anniversary, and to commiserate this tragedy, I'm posting a list that I wrote but never published a year ago - the Top 10 Dystopian Movies.
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