#anoes

[spacepolice]

Somehow New Nightmare on Elm Street Movie is happening

[psyduckraidsagain]

i have so many thoughts

i just want to preface by saying i’m aware robert englund is 79 and has gone on record saying he’s physically unable to play freddy krueger anymore. he’s been doing this for nearly half a century and the man deserves his rest. but i’m one of Those fans that can’t see anyone but robert playing freddy.

what’s so frustrating about it is that it’s like willy wonka: one actor put so much effort and craft and improvisation into making one character perfect and uniquely themselves that you just can’t recapture what made that character so special with someone else. there’s a sweet spot where the actor needs to have the wiggle room to make their characterization uniquely entertaining while also having a deep grasp and appreciation of what made the previous performance memorable.

a character baked in improv being reduced to a rigid set of rules isn’t going to be some magic formula that perfectly replicates that same performance: it’ll just give you a bad impersonator on hollywood boulevard. but if you say “fuck it” and throw it all out the window you get the 2010 remake

that being said i think the best choice for the new freddy would be someone who’s able to balance being scary and being a little goober at the same time. it would be really cool to see an actor usually typecast in comedic roles put on a genuinely unsettling performance. i’ve seen willem dafoe get name dropped a lot and i’m on board with that

as for the writing i’m definitely less worried knowing that wes craven’s estate will be producing the movie so it (most likely) won’t be a repeat of the platinum dunes one. not expecting high art or really any solid subtextual meaning since this is being made by the company run by a trump nepo baby fart sniffer. if it’s just a beat for beat remake of the original again i’ll be really sad

in conclusion: make freddy both scary and fun again. these are not mutually exclusive

[gloomeis]

[finalgirlminamurray]

technically, jason voorhees is a nightmare on elm street final girl

[collapserabbit]

Freddy likes puppies.🐶❤️

[finalgirlminamurray]

scattered elm street thoughts, mostly on the 4-6 era, now that i've essentially finished the whole series:

i did like 4 more than i thought i would but it is awfully hard to figure out how the way by which freddy is brought back is supposed to work in this one. would not be surprised if they were writing it to be stupid on purpose because nobody actually wanted to do this. the best i can figure is that the dog pissing on the gravesite tainted the holy water, only it would also have to be a different dog than kincaid's because he was actually in the room the whole time

that said: "it was all a dream" is normally regarded as a bullshit cop-out twist/reveal for good reason, but given what series this is, i think assuming a given scene is actually in the Dream Realm will often make a lot of things make a lot more sense

the ways by which freddy keeps getting definitively killed then revived in the next film gets pretty funny after a while. it's like that post about the hammer dracula movies and how van helsing keeps remembering too late that he forgot to do all the necessary parts of the Ritual to keep dracula down for good this time (i haven't seen any of those yet)

4 and 5 are like, peak special effects showcase extravaganzas in this series. there's a whole separate production team credited for each practical effects setpiece in the credits for these. this is a big part of why even when these films are bad they're almost never boring to watch. 6 does not have anything close to these and it's a big part of why that film feels like such a downgrade. (it ending with a credits montage of moments from the rest of the series doesn't help)

despite being considered one of the big classic slasher franchises, it's remarkable how little they really feel like slashers. sure there's a lot of the slasher formula about them (especially 4, which has just. so many characters to be killed off) but in terms of plot structure and all, they're a lot more esoteric than that. maybe it's the way the deaths all have to be a little more inventive than just murdering people with a sharp weapon, maybe it's the stronger sense of a continuing story throughout the films, maybe it's the inherent supernatural element leading to weird worldbuilding details, maybe it's the fact that in almost all of these you'll have two or three characters surviving out of the main group instead of just one.

even when they're underdeveloped i always find myself genuinely liking all the main teen characters in these, i don't know...they're rarely written to be unlikable or mean to each other like some slasher casts will, they're always just nice kids who care about their friends and it hurts to see them go. it might help that they're generally given specific traumas and anxieties in their backgrounds that their death scenes will be designed to exploit which makes you feel worse for them

mental health and psychiatry is a surprisingly strong running theme throughout all of these. even if it's a typical "they think we're Crazy but it's real so we're perfectly sane" horror movie scenario, they've got a lot of rather non-judgmental portrayals of characters going through in-patient treatment and taking medications for their mental health. and the fact that the films center around being trapped in your own mind and having a hard time distinguishing dreams/hallucinations from reality probably makes them very resonant for people who struggle with that in real life.

another strong running theme: the rot at the heart of the american suburban nuclear family and the lingering undercurrent of childhood trauma, and they won't explicitly acknowledge the sexual abuse subtext but it's always there. some might find this frustrating, but i think it could add to the themes of adults not wanting to directly talk about what's happening to their kids?

this plus the persistent surreal dream symbolism makes these films VERY twin peaks-esque before peaks was ever a thing. of course it was by the time 6 came out, but they only directly reference it as shorthand for "this town is Weird and full of Weird Crazy people" which is essentially what the pop culture perception of twin peaks was at the time. i'd say it was because we were well into the depths of s2 at that point, but actually only s1 would have aired at the time of the film's production, and no one even knew who killed laura palmer yet.

6 is particularly weird in tone even for this series. opening with this dystopian expository text of "all the children in springwood are dead" sets the stage, and then there's the way our protagonist for the first act is a kid whose real name and backstory and reason for losing his memory we never find out before he's unceremoniously killed (if i didn't know better i'd have thought for sure he was supposed to be alice's son, the titular dream child, but...i guess that's still a possibility with what we do know.) then when we go to springwood all the remaining adults are Weird and Crazy and everyone with a job involving kids is delusionally hanging around their former workplace talking to children who aren't there. i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of the scenes in springwood are actually dream world scenes. sometimes the people in them try to tell you something

watching these in tandem with the friday the 13ths you can really see how influential anoes was on them but not so much the other way around. especially once new line got the f13 rights. jason goes to hell is basically trying to be a nightmare film the entire time. freddy vs. jason is way more of an elm street than a friday. even then it's pretty clear anoes was considered the more respectable slasher series. there's practically no sex or nudity in it at all, except for certain fantasy dream sequences (mostly from joey in 3 and 4, the covert perv that he is) and that one sensual abstracted close-up love scene that opens 5

this is getting long so i'll just say wes craven's new nightmare is the perfect finale to this series and i still love it

[finalgirlminamurray]

kind of obsessed with how the elm street films lean more and more into explicitly Gothic horror as the series goes on. it was always kind of that way but it's the later ones that really get into it. old abandoned buildings become an increasingly common setting for climactic scenes. there's spooky old cathedrals and stained-glass churches. The House as central to the horror (the way they keep going back to the elm street house from the first film without even knowing why). something about the generational conflict inherent in the themes, retribution for a long-buried injustice of the past. and of course the heavy use of dream symbolism (i actually think so far the later films like 4 and 5 make the best use of dream logic for some excellent surreal imagery and plot progessions).

of course a lot of this is buried in a film that centers on the lead heroine being pregnant and the evil trying to possess her fetus and of course it's going to be weird about that. not as bad as it could be given treatment of this subject in the genre but it's still weird about it