Day 24: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Day 24 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: blood and gore, child harm, child death, child abuse, sexual content, unreality, alcoholism, suicide, mention of sexual assault

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

I would die immediately because I am soooo eepy zzzzzz...



A Nightmare on Elm Street (which I'll be calling Elm Street for brevity's sake) follows Nancy Thompson as she tries to solve and survive the mystery of the dead serial killer haunting the dreams of her and her friends.

I think this might be the perfect slasher. The perfect mix of campy fun and tense horror. A perfect cast top to bottom. A killer score. A villain that's both funny and threatening. Probably the best final girl (I said it!). Memorable kills. Men in crop tops and jackets with no shirts underneath. This film has it all!

It's not a particularly new opinion for me to hold, but I genuinely fucking adored this entire thing. It's 90 minutes but it barely felt like 9, even with my goldfish one-upping attention span. 

About a year ago, I was having nightmares nearly every single night I went to sleep. Real violent ones too. World ending events, loved ones going on killing sprees, being kidnapped, murdered, raped, beaten, running for my life. Any horrible you can think of ran through my sleepy mind. I attempted to forgo sleep entirely to make them stop, but of course that made them worse when my body was finally crushed under the weight of inevitable sleep.

One day they just... stopped. I hardly have them anymore and when I do they're usually much less violent and cruel. But still, if I think about them too long a few of the worst images will burn their way into the front of my mind. The kind of things you can't ever really forget forever. And it was all created by my own brain.

I think Elm Street plays on that kind of experience perfectly. Running on stairs that your feet sink into as you try to climb them. Familiar hallways that you've been down a thousand times being covered in blood. Watching your loved ones being dragged away in clear plastic body bags. Killers that defy all logic to sink their claws into you.

You might think, after hearing my experience with nightmares, that even the very concept of this film would shake me deeply. But it's quite the opposite. This film made me feel seen, heard, and understood. In a way that even some of my favorites aren't able to. And that, combined with giving me a final girl that's braver and more resourceful in putting her own fears to bed than I ever have been, was so important to me.

Elm Street is so real in it's unreality, and that, to me, makes it deeply special.