Cutting Deep into Horror | A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — Wes Craven’s Slasher Masterpiece with Freddy Krueger - Weekly Spooky: Scary Halloween Stories | Terrifying Tales to Creep Your Night

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to my house.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Oh god, No, what's wrong with your face?

Speaker 1 (00:08):
What do you mean?

Speaker 2 (00:09):
You're all like? I guess I shouldn't have pointed it
out those.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
No, no, please please share your.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Opinion, your complexion.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
You know you want to go there?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's uh, how do you? How do you do that?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I have knives on my fingers? That's right?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Is that connected to the face thing?

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Okay? I tried to let that do and you just
brought it right back. Let me ask you one question, bitch,
Are you scared?

Speaker 4 (00:52):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (00:52):
For the sake of yes, I am very scared.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Say it.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
I'm scared.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Hi, I'm screwed. I'm Freddy.

Speaker 5 (01:06):
This podcast is about why horror scares us, what deep
dark secrets scary cinema shines a light on. The discussions
are frank and involve conversations about abuse, trauma, and mental health.
There are also spoilers, so keep that in mind too. Now,

(01:27):
sharpen your machetes and straight razors, because this is Cutting
Deep into Horror.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Hello, and welcome back to Cutting Deep into Horror. I am,
of course, your host Enrique Kuto here with my Cutting
Deep into Horror co host Rachel.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Hey there, everybody, how are you, Rachel, I'm doing all right.

Speaker 4 (01:59):
Good, good good? How's your throat feel? Your voice feel okay?

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (02:04):
My voice nice?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah. I wasn't gonna say anything, but my voice doesn't
feel like I've been talking into a microphone every day
for twelve hours a day.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
Oh it's not twelve hours a day. You can't you
literally can't do that. It just won't work. You'll have
no voice.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
What's the maximum amount of time you can you can
talk like.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
Without like a noticeable like massive decline and vocal quality.
Probably four hours, and that's spread out over like ten
or twelve hours because you have to take.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Breaks, right and rest it and everything.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
Yeah, so I try to take the breaks and everything,
and that four hours doesn't translate into four hours of
recorded material, right it probably. I think the most I've
ever gotten out of a day, a single day of
like narrated podcast or audiobook or whatever is about, is
just shy of two hours. And that was like really

(03:00):
like the best I've ever done. Like I felt great
that day. I had nothing else to do. It was
when I was up in the Michigan cabin and I
built that little sound booth. Yeah, I mean I was
completely the only rule I had was that before I
could wander around taking pictures in the upper peninsul of Michigan,
I had to get two hours of audiobook done. So
I did. But that was also all I did that

(03:20):
whole day, other than goof off in Michigan.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
So it's a lot easier that way.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
It is, it is. It's a lot easier than here,
where I have a million other things I could and
should be doing as well, And I have to really
try not to get pulled away because you know, adderall
only does so much. It only works as much as
you work it.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, you got to put in, put in the effort.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
That's what.

Speaker 4 (03:43):
That's what. What's this, Winston Churchill said when he was
taking amphetamines all day long. So but no, we're back
with cutting deep into horror where now need I would
say ankle deep in spooky season at least? Oh yeah, So,
and we wanted to talk about one of my all
time favorite horror movies and a movie that still creeps

(04:03):
me out to this day, a movie that Rachel almost
stayed awake through last night, A Nightmare on Elm Street
from nineteen eighty four, directed by Wes Craven, Easily one
of my favorite horror movies, my favorite horror movie individually,
my favorite horror movie franchise, Everything about Ninemer on ELM Street.

(04:23):
I am just all about and have been for basically
as long as I can remember. I was watching those
movies so un you know, unbearably young, because I had
an older sister who was into them because when she
was in high school. My sister was born in like
nineteen seventy eight or seventy nine, so when she was
in high school, Freddie was absolutely all the rage. Yeah,

(04:46):
like that, everybody was into it. When I was in
high school, Freddie was like some kids knew, Like there
were kids who knew who'd be like, oh, yeah, horror
movies are cool. But he wasn't a pop culture icon anymore. Yeah,
you know, he wasn't on every he wasn't everywhere anymore.
He was you had to find him m hm. So
but I, to me, he was always everywhere because I

(05:07):
had the vhstifs because my sister also got too cool
for that stuff when she was like, I don't know,
sixteen or seventeen. So I got all her tapes of Freddy,
which were parts one through five, the original VHS's and
I would watch part one. I had to like gear
myself up to watch it, like amp yourself phone, yeah,

(05:28):
because it was scary, and I watching it by myself
in my bedroom on my VCR at like freaking eight
and eight years old. So usually I would watch parts
three and four. Yeah, those were my favorites to watch.
They weren't too scary, but they were really fun. I
wouldn't have horrible nightmares from them often. And when I

(05:48):
was even younger, before I even got those tapes, I
used to have all night movie watching with my sister,
watching those movies, which, in hindsight, wow, what a loser.
She was hanging out with her like, you know, her
like eight year younger brother watching movies on Saturday night
when she was you know, twelve thirteen years old.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Wow she did not have many friends.

Speaker 4 (06:08):
Huh No, no she did not. But uh but m
so I was watching them for a very long time.
I really mean that. I'm not trying to be cute
when it's like, oh, but what does those four probably
was four or five like I probably was, and they
scared the hell out of me. They made me afraid
a lot of going to sleep. They also taught me

(06:30):
how to abuse caffeine. I used to. In Night Brown
Elm Street three, it opens with Kristen the main character,
and she's trying not to sleep, so she takes a
spoonful of Folger's Instant coffee and puts it in her
mouth and then washes it down with a Coca cola.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Oooh.

Speaker 4 (06:49):
I did that when I was when I was like eight, eight,
nine years old. I did that so I could stay
up later watching movies.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
That explained so much about you.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
Well, I mean, but like yet, I completely averse to caffeine.
Now I really don't take take to it very much.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
You got it all out of your system.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
Then I stopped doing caffeine hardcore, like I mean, like
I mean hardcore stopped when I was just before I
was nineteen years old, really because I was into drinking
coffee and energy drinks like I think, like everybody else
was in our generation, like right at sixteen seventeen years old,
and I used to I used to go one better
because I used to go right when I was eighteen.

(07:27):
I would go on these crazy long trips and sometimes
I'd have to drive through the night, so I would
I would make a tea like lipped in tea. But
I would take like a big full stockpot and I
would put like forty tea bags in it, and I
would steep it overnight and it would turn jet black,
like light couldn't go through it. Yeah, And like I'm

(07:53):
pretty sure one swig of it was like a whole
cup of coffee worth of caffeine. It was, and it
and it legit nitimately tasted like medicine. Like it didn't
taste good. It tasted kind of like niquil almost, like
that almost licorice. It was so bitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I used to drink that. We called it Henny super
Tea when I was because I used to always have

(08:15):
it with me when I would travel, this big jug
of it, and I remember I would share it with
people and they'd be like, oh God, like, oh, could
you should put some sugar and lemon in this or something?
And I was like no, and they'd be like why not,
and I'd be like because I did that? And then
I drank too much of it. No, really, like I
drank so much I woke up. I was at a

(08:36):
convention and I was pounding it all day and it
was this big container of it. And because I had
like I'd sugared it down and put some lemon in it,
and I woke up in the morning with like my
entire head dried out because it was just so much
caffeine and I was pounding it and pounding it. So yeah,
it was not my smartest move ever.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I'll effective, well, I'll.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
Complete the saga of my adventure with caffeine and then
maybe even talk about night Bra and Elm Street right
after this. So to wrap up my point about caffeine,

(09:25):
So I was drinking this super tea stuff all the
time because I outwardly hated how red Bull tasted and
I was and coffee tasted bad, so I was like, well,
this is even better than coffee. This is this is
brutality in a cup and you are just awake. In fact,
I remember I had a friend of mine took a

(09:47):
swig of it and was just like, oh my god,
and then they were like whoa, Like I could feel
how much caffeine is in this, and I was like, yeah,
if it gets any thicker than that, you have to
cut it into chunks and smoke it. So I was
I was a caffeine fiend for a hot minute there.
And then I got my first job, like right before

(10:08):
I turned nineteen, and it was in an office, and
everybody in that office was like most offices, you know,
was just very like not before my coffee, where's my coffee?
I need the coffee, where's my coffee mug, where's you know,
there's such a focus on coffee, especially in this This
would have been two thousand and six, and I feel
like that culture was especially big in offices. You know.

(10:32):
Now there's cuig culture where it's like, not everybody's dying
for a hit of caffeine necessarily, or if they are,
they're getting it from like their monster energy drink at
lunch or whatever. But back then or and so in
the morning, they're wanting their cureig stuff, you know, They're
wanting their fancy tea or their you know, carmel bachiado
blah blah blah. You know, that's what they want. But

(10:54):
when I saw how everybody was like a grouchy zombie
and excused it because they needed their coffee, I swore
it off. I'm not kidding. I remember it going through
like brutal headaches and every I just was like I
don't want to I don't want any more caffeine. And
then I didn't have any caffeine for probably four years.

(11:16):
Aside from emergencies like driving all night. I would have
this all yeah, driving all night and have like one,
you know, frappuccino thing or something. And now I'm in.
I've been a very very sensitive caffeine for a very
long time, so I don't enjoy caffeine very much at all. Yeah,
it's a very exciting story. But to tell you all

(11:36):
that is that my relationship to caffeine is directly related
to Knightmroren Elm Street and teenager's relationship to caffeine is
very important in all the Knight Barren Elm Street movies,
and they're all trying to stay awake so that Freddy
doesn't kill them. For those who somehow might not know,
that's what a nightmare on Elm Street is about. I
don't know how you could have missed that, but maybe

(12:00):
somehow you did. But we're talking about nightmurare Elm Street,
which you can see right now. I'm trying to find
where it's streaming, I think because it was on HBO
Max for a minute there, but I don't know if
it's still there or not. But but uh, let's see,
so it is on Amazon Prime. What why is Google suck?

(12:21):
Like Google has gotten so much worse.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, it doesn't even try anymore.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
It's not even trying. Well, you could definitely rent it
on Amazon. You could rent it on Fandango. It says
Sling TV with subscription, but that it doesn't say to what.
So it's like, well, that's really helpful to what what?
Am I okay? So AMC okay? So AMC Plus has
Nightmare on Elm Street. Now that makes a little bit
more sense. I love how I had to click like

(12:47):
five things and it doesn't show that AMC has it,
just that it has it through Filo. I really wish
there was actually an effective place to find out when
things are streaming, because there are a bunch of places trying, yeah,
and none of them have ever really been able to
nail it. So anyway, but regardless of all that, if
you haven't seen nightmron Elm Street, that's bizarre. But it's

(13:09):
about a killer named Freddy Krueger who is stalking children
in their dreams and killing them. And if you die
in your dreams, well you die for real. So that's
that's Nightmarren Elm Street in a nutshell, and I was
talking about how the first times I've seen it, like I,
Freddy Kruger and Nightmare Elm Street is so ubiquitous it

(13:31):
would be impossible for me in my life. It would
be impossible for me to tell you which one I
saw first and when exactly, because in my mind, Freddy
Krueger has always been a thing.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:42):
No, I mean not far off. You know. He does
when you're sleeping, you know. But and he is clause
so very much like Santa Claus. Very well done, very
well done.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I'm gonna pretend like I meant to do that.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
Oh I know, of course you did. Of course she did.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
But yeah, So that was my first time watching. It
was forever ago. I don't exactly know, and I don't
know if I watched the first one first, but the
first one was always the scariest one, And it was
always the one that if I had friends over from school,
I would make them watch. I'd make them watch Nightmare
one to scare the hell out of them.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
The scariest one. You gotta go with the scariest one.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
Yeah, And and I remember one time I had a
friend who was over and I showed him Nightmann ELM Street.
And when we started watching part two, I put on
my Freddy Krueger glove like I'd hid in my closet,
and I like turned to him and like did like
a silly Freddy voice like you know, hey, da da da,
and he screamed and ran out of my bedroom like
trying to get out of the house. He was so startled.

(14:46):
And then his and then he called down. But then
his parents called my mom and were like, did your
son show my son a scary movie? And my mom
was literally just like grow up, like just don't don't
let him come over. Then I'm sorry. The world's not
the world's not the way you wanted to be, all right,
that was my mom's response. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
That sounds yeah, that sounds like you're well yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:07):
So, so do you remember your first time seeing thatt
MANELM Street.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
I do, because it was with you. Really yeah, so
it was actually like one of the first, one of
the first horror movies that you showed me. Because even
though I worked at Hollywood Video, which was when I
kind of like really got to get into cinema, Yeah,

(15:32):
I wasn't I wasn't really into horror that much. So
aside from things like The Host, I was into. I
was into uh Korean horror, I guess, because I guess
there was like The Host and the Tale of Two Sisters,
but I didn't really see a lot of horror movies.
So it's you were the person introducing me to horror,

(15:56):
and you asked which which villain I was like the
most interested in, and I was like, easily Freddy Krueger
because that seems like the scariest is somebody that can
get you in your dreams. So you showed me. You
showed me the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
Oh okay, wow, I mean I think I remember that
I was the first to show you, but it still
just seems crazy that you, especially working at a video store,
hadn't seen it yet.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:22):
So wow. Well, I'm glad I could be of service.
But after this quick break, I want to know what
your first impressions were. But that'll be We'll be right
after this. So I show you Nightmare on Elm Street.

(16:48):
Was it a I apologize, I don't remember. I don't
know if I remember the details. Was it like, did
I have the projector yet.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Or no, no, you did not have.

Speaker 4 (16:57):
You just watched it on TV? Yeah, okay, I mean
just on TV. I'm sure I had like a big game.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Can It was a big screen TV. It was like large,
not as big as the one you have now, No.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
No, what is I don't I wish I could. I can't.
I can't. I can't have a bigger TV because a
stand won't hold it without being mounted to the walls.
If it's much bigger, so and I can't mount it
to the wall, I'd lose all my storage for my
Blu rays.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
So yeah, therein lies the conundrum.

Speaker 4 (17:23):
Yeah, and it would also be four feet further back,
so then you're almost like losing the purpose of a big,
bigger TV. But then I have one hundred and twenty
inch projection screen, which a knight rynolal Street looked amazing
on that new four K by the way, yeah, it
looked green. I was very pleased with that. And of
course we watched the uncut version, which is which is
for the first time ever, was released on the four
K disc. It literally, guys, don't feel bad if all

(17:45):
you have is the Blu ray or something. It's it's
like forty seconds.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah, it was not that much different.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
No, it's just more of the most bloody moments of
the movie. So like when Tina hits the bed, it's
and it's covered in blood. Originally there was a splat,
like a noticeable splash of blood, and in the original
version you just heard it and you saw Rod get
a little blood on him, and then this version you
see or hit it and you see it splat on him.
There's more blood during Johnny Depp scene. It's just stuff

(18:14):
like that's nothing crazy because nightmren Elm Street was not
a notoriously censored film. Yeah in America, I mean or
censor's even the wrong word, but cut because it's not
really censorship, it's the NPAA. But also screw them. But no,
the only film that was really of Nightmare on Elm
Streets that was like beat to hell by the NPAA
was Part five, really Part five there there supposedly the

(18:39):
box set that comes out, it'll by the time you're
hearing this, it'll already be out the four K box
set and I'll already have it, thank goodness. But supposedly
there's gonna be a remastered uncut Part five finally, which
is something that we've been hoping for forever. There was
an uncut part five on VHS, but for some reason
it never made it to DVD or blu Ray huh. Well,
I mean the reason is probably that they would have

(19:00):
to recreate a film version because it was probably created
from a tape. But anyway, so we sit down, we
put it on the TV. What were your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
I thought it was amazing because it was I mean,
it was one of the first classic horror films that
i'd seen.

Speaker 4 (19:22):
I mean classic as in the eighties, classic is in
the eighties.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, I mean yeah, I guess I could have rephrased that. Well,
now I'm trying to think, like, what would you consider
horror that I had seen before, because like that was
mostly relegated to monster movies like Godzilla, Them.

Speaker 4 (19:45):
Oh them is a classic horror movie?

Speaker 3 (19:47):
Well?

Speaker 4 (19:48):
And is I'm just picking on you. It is a classic.
I don't know how else you could define it. It's
just also sometimes when people think classic, they think Dracula,
the Wolfman, Frankenstein. But that's like literal classic, that's it's
like the beginning of sound movies.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah. Yeah, so as far as eighties classic, that was,
you know, one of the very first ones I saw.
So it was a very scary experience, but it was
also like a delightful experience to finally partake in that
piece of pop culture that I'd missed out on, you know.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
H I think so yeah. I mean when I was
a kid, one thing that would get me like a
little bit of friends was that I had all these
horror movies. Because some kids, that was like a big
deal to get to see a Freddie Krueger movie or
see a Jason Vorhees movie. That was a big deal.
And I had them, you know, I didn't have to

(20:44):
I didn't even have to rent them or anything. I
just had them between the VHS tapes I got from
my sister and the ones my Betty taped off a satellite.
She would tape every movie off of satellite. My copy
of Freddie's Dead, which is Ambonnel Street Part six up
until the DVD which that that first DVD box at
for Nightmarnel Street was incredible. It had an interact, It

(21:04):
had a disc full of extras that were an interactive game.
Then you unlocked the extras through solving puzzles.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Ooh, that's fun.

Speaker 4 (21:11):
It was really incredible, and it like pushed the absolute
limit of DVD technology. It was really really cool. As
somebody who's programmed a ton of DVDs, I look back
at it and I'm fascinated by it. Oh yeah, But
but for until I got that set, my copy of
Freddie's Dead was a VHS tape with a label with
my aunt Betty's handwriting and pencil on the label and

(21:34):
just said Freddy's Dead. So Betty loved her horror movies.
I'm Betty was those who wouldn't know my great aunt,
so she's more like a grandmother than an aunt. And
she loved her horror movies, and she loved her bad
horror movies. But she would never like talk about that.
It's just you would you would find like in the
Horror of the Blood Monsters, I found a copy. I

(21:58):
found a copy of Horror of the Blood Monsters in
Betty's little cabinet with like VHS tapes, And years later
I actually found that VHS. That addition, because I have it,
I bought a copy on eBay. But the funny thing
is I didn't remember. I remembered the cover a little bit,
but what I really really remembered was on the back

(22:18):
a guy with horrible looking vampire fangs and fake blood
that looked like it was like plastic on your chin,
Like it didn't look like it was actually liquid. It
looked like it was solid but meant to look like blood.
It looked that bad, and I no joke. When I
started thinking about it, I was like, that sounds like
an al Adamson movie would because they were horrible. So

(22:40):
I started looking at al Adamson VHS tapes. I remembered
a few other things. It had a monster on the front.
I remember that the tape was mostly white. So I
started hunting and hunting, and sure enough I found a
couple that weren't it. Then I found one and when
I looked at the pictures of the back, there was
the horrible looking vampire with the fangs and the blood
that didn't look like blood on his chin. And that

(23:00):
was Horror of the blood monsters. And it was an
al Adamson movie. And not only that, extra points al Adamson,
who was a king of schlock in the sixties and seventies.
The vampire on the back was al Adamson. So there
you go. But that was a funny moment, just going wow.
So Aunt Betty had a Horror of the Blood Monsters
vhs that you had to send away for.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
I mean, she's really wanted it.

Speaker 4 (23:25):
Yeah, but you know, she wouldn't like sit down and
show you horror movies, you know, but she'd give you
a tape.

Speaker 5 (23:32):
You know.

Speaker 4 (23:32):
She had satellite dish when that wasn't very common, so
she'd pulled down all kinds of channels, so she was
always taping stuff. She had a wall of vhs next
to her lazy boy aw and she would just hand
them to You'd be like, you like them horror movies, right, Rick,
just give me one. So anyway, But so it blew
your mind a bit, Yeah, it did. Was what was
the thing that scared you the most or grabbed you

(23:54):
the most, just off the top of your head.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
A lot of the the nightmare and dream imagery that
they relied on really creeped me out, and revisiting it
last night, I was reminded how effective and simple some
of those scares are. So the uh, the scene where
Freddy's kind of like pushing his way through a wall,

(24:21):
I thought that was really scary.

Speaker 4 (24:22):
I mean, where it's like the wall stretching, he's kind
of imprinting through it exactly. Yeah, that's that's an incredible
image and very very scary.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, that one, That one really got me. And the
stairs becoming like sticky and like sticking, you know, sinking
into the stairs.

Speaker 4 (24:40):
Yeah, your feet going through it and it being full
of like bisquic, Yeah, be sticky gunk.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Almost like you're stuck in a glue trap.

Speaker 4 (24:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah, that one, that one really got me. And of
course the uh Freddy with the DeLong twisted arms.

Speaker 4 (24:55):
Oh yeah, where Yeah it was so that you can't
run past him. His arms are extending from ten feet
each way.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:01):
Yeah, really bizarre images. I from what I understand, Wes Craven,
the writer and director of Ameralm Street had was a
very prolific dreamer. Mm hmm, and that was one of
the big elements that inspired the film. And we'll talk
a lot about that because Wes Craven is a fascinating
guy and nightmares in general. Right after this, so before

(25:35):
we dig in a further or cut deeper, So are
you a prolific dreamer? Do you have a lot of nightmares?
Do you have or have you had a lot of
nightmares or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
I have had a lot of nightmares. I had terrible
nightmares as like a young child into my teen years.
So uh, and this is I'm gonna sound like such
a big white bitch, but that's that's why I became
a lucid dreamer, so I could at least like get
out of dreams. I don't dream as much now, but

(26:13):
every once in a while, all still that part of
you is dead. Yeah. Yeah, the the whimsy died years ago.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
Now, when you say you became a lucid dreamer, do
you mean that you actively became one or just that
it was kind of you just kind of turned out
to be one.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
I actively became one. I like did research on how
to uh, how to lucid dream and started practicing, you know,
practicing different different techniques.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
Sometimes I would lucid dream as a kid, and my
big one was I'm not kidding. When a dream got
really scary, I used to imagine that I turned off
a VCR.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Oh that's that's good, and I would wake up.

Speaker 4 (27:00):
Yeah. Yeah, so that's I didn't have a ton of
really scary dreams, although I will tell you I had
one very scary Freddy Krueger dream. And it was Freddy
and he was like standing on this like this platform,
you know, like ah haha, you know, all his glory,
and it was like the net at Chuck E Cheese.

(27:22):
You know that you climb the net, Yeah, big white name.
It was like that, but it was over top of
molten lava and it was just like the lava was
just like rushing by. And that was the scariest Freddy
Krueger nightmare I had.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
That is really scary.

Speaker 4 (27:36):
It was a hell of an image. Yeah, But otherwise,
I mean I'd have nightmares. I'd have nightmares I was
running from things or whatever. But I was never a
very big dreamer in general. And the only times as
an adult I've had like super duper vivid dreams have
been when I've been on medications. Like when I first
started taking zolof years ago, I had friggin' dreams out

(28:00):
the wazoo. Not necessarily nightmares, just dreams like constantly. I
was used to going to sleep and not remembering my dreams,
and all of a sudden, I was just like I
would I would nod off for five minutes and I
would remember my dreams like it was super weird. And
then when I stopped taking well that eased up. Anyway,
and then I stopped taking it, so obviously I didn't
have those dreams anymore. Now I'm on synthroid for my thyroid,

(28:25):
and a side effect of that, well, an effect of
having a hypothyroid is you don't remember your dreams. So
that's a very high simplification. But so the medication has
made me dream a lot lately. Mostly fine. Had a
couple of nightmares. Last week. I had a nightmare that
like messed me up for the whole day.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, that was that was a bad one.

Speaker 4 (28:46):
But generally I'm fine. I'm fine. So you don't find
yourself having the big nightmares these days, no, not really.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Every once in a while, you know, life will get
to you and I'll have, you know, I'll have a
really intense stream or a stress stream.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
Stress dreams are what I have. They're not necessarily scary,
but they're frustrating the.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Exactly where it's not like, oh no, I'm being chased
by something. It's more like, oh no, I just realized
that I've got to buy new tires for my car,
and so I have to sit there waiting in the
tire shop like the whole dream.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
Wow, tough gig.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, it's not not too fun, poor baby. But yeah,
as a child, I would have really really bad nightmares.
And I think that's why the the stairs sequence grabs
me so much, is because one of the recurring themes

(29:44):
I would have is like trying to run away from
something or trying to get to safety, and like the
the ground starting to get sticky or starting to swallow
me up, So that that just reminded me of the
nightmares I would have as a kid, So it's super
effective for me.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
That makes sense, That's That's kind of what I was
getting at, was, Yeah, if you had a lot of
nightmares and it reminded you of them. So an interesting
thing about Wes Craven is he I mean, he became
kind of synonymous with horror movies and he's a was
unfortunately lost him a few years back, man in twenty fifteen.

(30:23):
It feels much more recent. But Wes Craven was originally
a college teacher. He was a college professor, or maybe
he was a high school teacher who yeah, he was
a high school teacher who had dreams of making movies.
But it's so much more interesting than that because he

(30:45):
grew up in a very very devout evangelical Baptist family.
So he did not watch television or see movies until
he was in college. Oh wow. And he didn't read
very many books that weren't related to, you know, religion
and his faith. So Craven never watched movies through the

(31:10):
lens of anything other than analytics. Like analytically, I guess
the way to put it. Because he had no nostalgia
for movies. Yeah, he had no nostalgia for like, oh, well,
that movie's kind of silly, but I liked I've liked
it a long time. He didn't have any movies he
liked for a long time. He didn't have any movies
he grew up with. So he always looked at movies

(31:31):
very differently than most people. And when he made his splash,
before he was able to make movies, he was just
volunteering on sets and working on sets. Supposedly, and I
think it's true he directed a porno movie. Back then.
That was not uncommon, especially if you're on the East Coast,
if you could get because making movies back then was

(31:53):
pretty much the same no matter what the movie was.
You needed a crew, you needed lights, you had to
have a film editor, you had to know how to
do all this stuff. Yeah, so you know. But his
first film as a director was The Last House on
the Left, which I don't think you've seen.

Speaker 5 (32:07):
I have not.

Speaker 4 (32:08):
It is a very powerful, upsetting movie. It's loosely based
on Oh gosh, what is it called. I can't believe
I'm not remembering. It's like the there's this Swedish Spring
or something like that. It's an old story about these
bad guys who end up staying in the house of

(32:29):
the of the parents of the woman they just murdered,
not unknowingly, and the parents figure it out first and
attack them and kill them. Oh but that's like a
very basic concept of Last House on the Left. But
it's a very grisly movie. Wes Craven was very adamant
that if he's going to show horrific things, then it
should be horrific. So there's a scene where they like
murder somebody and they like cut their stomach open, and

(32:51):
then there's a two minute sequence of everybody just kind
of sitting there after they did it, just kind of
like living in the reality the bad guys ooh, including
like how are they going to wash their hands and
stuff like, because they're in the Woods, Like it's really
rough and very very smart and scary. So that was great. Then,

(33:13):
of course his big hit that was kind of a hit,
and then his other bigger hit was The Hills Have Eyes,
which is a kind of cannibal survival movie, also pretty
damn good. But he came up with a Nightmare on
Elm Street and really wanted to make it because, in
his words, the way he understood being scared was nightmares.
Because he didn't have books or movies or TV shows

(33:35):
that were scary, or even radio that was scary. So
the original horror movie in his life was nightmares. So
he had a lot he'd spent a lot of time
thinking about his own nightmares and what they meant and
why he was scared of them. I like that, Yeah,
I mean he's a really fascinating guy. There's he never
wrote a biography or a memoir sadly, but there is one.

(33:56):
There was one written by about him. I wish I
could remember the title off the tome my head, but
I read it and it's very interesting. Yeah, he's a
very very interesting guy. And we'll talk more about that
and how Nightmre and Elm Street came to be. Right
after this, so yes, Wes Craven fascinating guy, super fascinating guy,

(34:25):
made a lot of really interesting movies. I know you're
a huge fan of Red Eye, which is one of
his later films that was really good, really shocking. He
had a very troubled career. He was always trying to
get out of the horror ghetto, as they like to
call it, because he tried to get so many movies
off the ground, and ironically enough, he had a horrible

(34:46):
time getting Nightmare and Elm Street off the ground. Everyone
turned it down. Oh really everybody did. Why they said,
in his words, why would anybody be scared of this?
If it's just a dream, That's what they would say.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
If you die in your dreams, than you dian.

Speaker 4 (35:02):
Really, they just didn't think that it would be scary.
So the way that the film ended up getting made
was he talked to a guy named Bob Shay who
owned a at the time, very small, very boutique distribution
company called New Line Cinema. And I'm not being sarcastic.
It was a little company called New Line Cinema and

(35:24):
they had had just a few modest hits with Evil
Dead and Pink Flamingos and a few other films, but
they had never had anything really huge. They had just
started having offices in California. I think, wow, that's how
early they were in eighty so, and this would have
been like eighty two or eighty three. And making nightmron
elm Street on a budget of about one point one
million dollars. It's important to keep in mind that that's

(35:47):
a lot of money compared to say Halloween with its
like one hundred and something thousand dollars budget or two
hundred thousand dollars budget thirteenth around the same two hundred
thousand dollars budget, Ayron Elms Street was a lot.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
More expect yeah, I mean all the effects on everything.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
Yeah, yeah. And it's just a much bigger movie, much
more scope and scale. And Craven had a horrible time
getting the money together, and even Shay couldn't just come
up with the money. He had to mortgage his home
and bring in some outside investors, and he was hustling
all the time to get the movie made. And it's
one of the reasons there are so many sequels is
that Bob Shay, because it was such a massive financial

(36:25):
risk for him, he demanded a lot for his money.
As far as the rights, the film rights, sequel rights, etc.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Go.

Speaker 4 (36:33):
He demanded a lot, and famously he didn't pay Craven
his royalties, which Craven was owed royalties for all of
the sequels and stuff and suppose reportedly never gotten them.
So when they started talking to him about making nightbron
elm Street Part seven to bring him back to try
and reinvigorate the franchise, he had one meeting with Bob

(36:56):
and Bob said, like, I understand that I haven't like
handled whatever, so I hope this help, and apparently slit
him a check for an amount of money. Nobody knows
how much it was, but it was probably a lot.
And that because you gotta remember, we had Freddy Krueger
movies every year, and then by nineteen ninety we're doing
teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and by the end of the
nineties it's freaking Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, yeah, so Freddy Freddy kind of skyrocketed New Line.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
Bob Shay used to call New Line Cinema the house
that Freddie built because unlike most series, and this is
very serious, like very for real, most films, the sequels
The benefit to them is not that they will make
more money. It's that they'll hopefully make the same amount
of money with half or even less than half as

(37:44):
much advertising, because the first film has established the market
the market for it, right, So it's very normal for
sequels to make less money than their predecessors and still
be hits. People sometimes think that that's not the case
because in really incredible exceptions like Knight, Brown, elm Street,
John Wick, whatever, each movie's bigger. But that's super not normal. Yeah, yeah,

(38:10):
so you can't hope that. You can't expect that to
be what your movie does. If you make sequels, you
can't expect it to be bigger and bigger and bigger. Well, Night,
Brown Elm Street. Not only was each film bigger than
the last, but then the VHS sales were bigger than
the last as well, to the point where they were
breaking records. Part three and Part four I believe both
broke VHS rental sale records entirely back to back.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Damn.

Speaker 4 (38:35):
So it was printing money. It was making so much money,
And of course there was the nineteen eighty nine and
nineteen ninety Freddy's Nightmares TV series. There was so much merchandise.
Freddie was everywhere. And the thing that it's easy for
people to forget because of that is how scary Freddie
actually was in the beginning, because he did become kind
of a cartoon character of a child killing maniac. I

(39:01):
don't know what to tell you there, but that's the
way it is. So they would he had grown into
so much. But that first film was sincerely scary and
unusual in the best kind of ways. It reminds me
a lot of when we were talking about Evil Dead
last time, how Evil Dead spawned a series of films
in a TV series that were a lot more lighthearted.

(39:22):
But that first movie is so scary and so claustrophobic
and really is incredible to look at on its own.
And that's how I feel about Nightmren Elm Street. I
think I know Freddy lore backwards and forwards. I've been
obsessed with Freddy Krueger for forever. But when I watched
Nightmare Elm Street and take it as just the one film,
it's way more. It's very exciting, it's very scary. Yeah,

(39:45):
you know, if I don't if I pretend I don't
know about the sequels, then I can interpret the ending
a million different ways things like that. So that's my
you know, my whole rant. Wes Craven was a genius.
He made a lot of movies. Some of them were
really great, some of them were not so great, but
he was always making something interesting. Nightmare ELM Street, by

(40:06):
the way, its initial box office earn was fifty seven
million dollars against a one million dollar budget, so a
mild success, yeah, I would say so. And the sequel
did even more than that, really, oh gosh, yeah, and
they rushed part two. I like Part two. I don't
think it's it's that bad. It does have like the
gay subtexts, which I actually think just makes the movie

(40:27):
more interesting. But it was made for three million and
made thirty million, so see that was a little bit smaller,
although it was in theaters less long. But then Part
three they spent four point six and it made forty
four million, and at this point VHS sales were exploding.
Then they spent six point five on Nightmare Lmstreet four
and it made forty nine point four million. Wow. So

(40:51):
then the decline began with Part five, which they spent
eight and made twenty two and then Freddy's Dead, which
was made nineteen ninety one, where they spent about eleven
million and made about thirty five.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
So it's a decline for the series. But if that
was just numbers for a movie, just any movie, wouldn't
that still be considered like a success.

Speaker 4 (41:17):
Yeah, it would. It's just at some point you're like,
people are clearly getting tired of this concept. Yeah, so
if we keep like, do we just keep going until
we lose money?

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Is that the goal? You know?

Speaker 4 (41:26):
So then after five years they had Wes Craven come
back to New Nightmare and it was not a very
big hit. It was very well received, but it was
not a big hit. They spent eight million dollars and
made about twenty but of course HS was massive back then.
So but then, of course they're all dwarfed by Freddy
versus Jason, which cost thirty million and made one hundred
and sixteen million, But.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
That had the power of two franchises behind it, so like, yeah,
well what's crazy?

Speaker 4 (41:51):
That point I want to point out is Knight brehn
elm Street remake from twenty ten, which I was not
a huge fan of, although one of my favorite moments
in it is when they say, like we should just
meth to like stay awake, and then he's like, where
do you get meth? And he's like, I don't know.
They don't do it because they literally have no idea
how to buy meth, which is just a really funny exchange.

(42:11):
It cost thirty five million dollars and made one hundred
and seventeen million, and for some reason it never spawned
a sequel because it was actually very successful, wow comparatively,
Yeah so, but yeah, so that's kind of a rundown
of Freddy's history. The house that Freddy built. We'll talk
about the actual movie maybe if You're Lucky, if You're good,
when we get back. So, the opening of Nightmare and

(42:45):
elm Street is so brilliantly simple and iconic, much like
Freddy Krueger himself. It opens with these dirty hands and
a work bench full of garbage and he's making something
mm hm. And as we see him making something out

(43:06):
of metal and sharpening it, it's slowly revealed that it's
a leather glove with knives attached to it, and not
just attached, but attached through hinged metal, so that their claws,
I mean, they'll they have pressure.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
You can, you know, yeah, you can really get purchase
with them.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
And just that concept is fascinating to me. The idea
of the finger knives, It's just it's so simple but
so evil, Like who would think to make a glove
with knives on it to kill people?

Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (43:46):
Like why wouldn't you just.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Use a knife or a Yeah, it would be simpler.

Speaker 4 (43:51):
Yeah, but he built it. And that's because Freddy is
is devious as hell. And I mean we find out
pretty early on, well not that early on, but Freddy's
a child killer.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (44:04):
That's what happened when he was alive. He was a
child murderer and he had killed potentially twenty children if
we follow just the lore of this of this film.
I'm not gonna dig into all the stuff from the
later movies. He killed potentially twenty children. But he was
released on a technicality because the search warrant was not
filled out properly. So literally he was to stand trial.

(44:26):
They had found evidence that he had killed these children,
and then he had to be let go because the
judge was like, I can't he This search warrant makes
all of the evidence in admissible. So the parents all
get together and they burn him alive. Some good old
Frontier Justice in the Suburbs. Yeah, because we as we

(44:47):
go from the making of the Glove, we head into
Tina's nightmare, which is a very great primer for the movie.
It's this, you know, young blonde woman in her nightgown
running around a boiler room which Freddie supposedly took the
kids that he killed to this old, abandoned boiler room,

(45:09):
and he's stalking her. There's all kinds of bizarre dream imagery.
There's a sheep running past her and stuff. There's just
all these odd choices that I can only imagine we're
actually in someone, whether it's Craven or somebody who he
knews nightmares, because it's so out of left field. I
can't imagine it being made up. Yeah, so what do

(45:31):
you think of this whole sequence where he's stalking this
young woman.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
I think it's a beautiful introduction because not only does
it immediately prime us for the nightmare logic that we're
going to be following, it also gives us a great
introduction to Freddy, his backstory and kind of his motive,
which his motive is pretty simple. It's just be evil.

Speaker 4 (46:00):
No, I mean, I mean that's and in this movie
in particular. I mean, he's that's really his entire purpose. Yeah,
he just wants to be evil. He just wants to
be terrorizing people until he kills them. M he's playing
with his food for lack of mit term.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, he I mean, he's very much like a predator
in that way, because a lot of the dream sequences
are very much a game of cat and mouse between
him and his next victim. But it's also a great
introduction to Tina and kind of sets us up for
the fake out later on because we kind of expect

(46:37):
Tina to be the heroine, to be the final girl,
especially because she's the first person we're introduced to. She's
the person that we kind of learn about Freddie with.
So I think it's it's a great way of introducing
the story.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
Well.

Speaker 4 (46:52):
And she's young and pretty. She's the blonde girl. She
has the look, she has a Hollywood look, you know,
the Hollywood look of a high school senior. Yeah, which
is you know, which would would be the Hollywood look
of a high school senior back then. Was like a
drop dead, gorgeous twenty four year old woman. And that's
one thing that's easy to forget because, like I said,

(47:14):
this movie has become so ubiquitous. Everybody thinks of Nancy
Heather langing Camp as the lead because she is and
she's incredible, But if you didn't know anything, it would
feel like Tina's the lead character. Yeah, because Nancy is
just here and there, here and there, and they cast
Heather langing Camp, which was brilliant, a brilliant move. She

(47:35):
looks like an awkward teen girl. Yeah, yeah, she doesn't.
She was about twenty or twenty one at the time,
but she just looked like she hadn't quite gotten out
of her awkward phase yet. She still had that kind
of babyface. I don't know how to describe it, because
she is a beautiful woman, but like she just looks
a little awkward. Yeah, And I think that that's so

(47:55):
perfect for Nancy, because Nancy is kind of an average
girl who at turns out is anything but exactly. So
I yeah, I think that that's That's something that I
always think about. So Tina, of course, running away from Freddy.
Freddie jumps up behind her. We get our first really
big jump scare, and she wakes up in bed screaming.

(48:19):
Her mother comes in and you know, she says, sorry,
I was having a bad dream, and her mom says,
must have been some dream and there are four slits
down her nightgown. Yeah, And her mother, because the parents
are all about not listening to the kids and explaining
away their fears, says, you got to you gotta either
cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dream.

(48:40):
And it's one or the other. And that's my favorite
thing about night Brown elm'street about all the films is
that the instincts of the parents. It's like, Mom, Dad,
I'll die if I go to sleep. And the first
thing is like, all you need is a good night's sleep,
and you don't feel better. It's like, what, what are
you even listening? Yeah, it's like, no, you you're you're

(49:02):
just freaking out over nothing.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Oh hormones.

Speaker 4 (49:06):
Well, I mean that's not a horrible statement.

Speaker 3 (49:09):
You know.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Hormones do do all kinds of crazy things to you.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
It's true.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
But there was a in Nightmare three when they're in
group therapy trying to figure out why they all have
this group psychosis about a guy in their dreams, which
they even say, like, isn't it weird we all dreamt
about the same guy before any of us knew each other,
and nobody seems to give a shit. They say that
in the in the yeah, but she says like, oh,
it's brought on by guilt and late in sexuality, and

(49:34):
kin K goes, great, now it's my dick that's trying
to kill me. Just the teens are so well written,
and even the worst Nightmare on Elm Street movie, I
feel like they're they're always captured pretty well.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:45):
But so so this is all based actually very loosely
on a true story. By the way, Oh really, that's
something I meant to bring up when we were talking
about Wes Craven, but I guess I could bring it
up now, well not now after this. So I'm going

(50:12):
to give you the very basics of the true story
as I understand it on Nightmare Elm Street. Because it's
been told a bunch of ways, there's not a lot
of information out there about it. I did an episode
of Terrifying and True about the Cambodian I think it
was Cambodian sleep deaths, and there really isn't that much info.

(50:35):
But Wes Craven said that he had had a he
had read a story about some refugees from Laos and
the among people from Vietnam and Laos. They were see,
now I'm making sure I'm not messing this up. Well,
they were Laotian for sure, okay, and they had escaped,

(51:00):
you know, horrible things in their home country. And suddenly
the young men were dying in their sleep. They were
going to sleep and not waking up, and there was
no apparent reason. And according to Craven, one of the
stories he read was that a young man had been
telling his parents like, I can't go to sleep. If
I go to sleep, I'm going to die. And they

(51:20):
were like, oh god. So he was like trying not
to sleep for days and days, and they were like,
this is getting bad because if you don't sleep, you
go crazy. So eventually they didn't know what else to do,
so they just kind of hung out with him, you know,
tried to act like things were normal, and finally he
fell asleep on the couch. So they picked him up
and took him to bed and tucked him in and
we're like, thank god, that's over. You know, once two

(51:41):
wakes up in the morning, he'll he'll feel a lot better.
And in the middle of the night they heard him
screaming and thrashing and when they got to the room,
he was dead in his bed. Wow. Now this I
don't know how true that is. That's what Craven said,
that that's what he read. But he said that that
was scary enough. But then he heard about how when

(52:01):
they were cleaning up his room they found under a
rug this extension cord that led into the closet, and
in the closet there was a little personal coffee maker
that they didn't even know he had. So he had
been secretly drinking coffee and forcing himself not to go
to sleep because he was afraid he was going to die.
And yeah, it was it's it's now the true story.

(52:25):
I believe it's like four or five people died like this,
which is pretty insane.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, that's still a lot.

Speaker 4 (52:31):
And there's never been a full explanation that I've been
able to find, but who knows, there could be more.
This is obviously this is not the true crime portion
of the program. This is this is me just recounting
things that that Wes Craven said that inspired the concept.
So he came up with this concept of like what
if your nightmares were killing you mm hmm, And where
he got The idea for Freddy Krueger is twofold number one. Freddy.

(52:56):
There was a bully he dealt with when he was
a kid named Freddie and number two. One night he
was home with his little brother and they were upstairs
in bed, and he looked out the window next to
his bed and saw this drunk, disheveled vagrant walking down

(53:16):
the street and he just kept staring at the sky.
He had a he had some kind of a jacket
or sweater, and he had a hat like kind of
like Freddy does. And as he was staring at the sky,
the guy just looked over at him and made eye
contact with him. You know, little eight year old Wes Craven,

(53:36):
this old man just looks at him and smiled. And
he said that the grin on his face just scared
the hell out of him, like I'm not supposed to
be interacting with this man at all, Like this is bad.
And supposedly later that night he'd went he'd went downstairs
or something, and if I murmur correctly, and that man
was like standing against the glass in the door of

(53:58):
his front house. But Craven swears that the guy intentionally
scared him, like the guy was being a jerk, like
he was just playing a joke on a kid. That's
the way I remember it. It's been a while since
I heard Craven say it. Tell it. If you want
to know everything there ever is to know about Freddy Krueger,
just watch them Never Sleep Again documentary, which is four
and a half hours long. It covers everything every single movie,

(54:21):
every detail. It's really fascinating.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
With four hour runtime, I would hope.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
It really leaves almost no stone unturned. I mean, it's
nothing compared to Crystal Lake Memories, which is eight and
a half hours long. So but so that story, you know,
scared him a lot as a kid, and that's what
kind of inspired the Freddy Krueger look, Okay, to look
like this vagrant who played a joke on a kid
at night was trying to scare him. And the red

(54:46):
and green sweater came from the idea that he had
read in a science journal that the hardest colors for
the eye to see close together are red and green. Okay,
so that just made him want to do a red
and green striped sweater, which, of course then and I
guess he hadn't thought that people would say, well, that's
a Christmas sweater, but I so and one thing that
does drive people crazy in this film, Freddy's sleeves don't

(55:09):
have stripes on them in the first one. Oh, Freddie's
sleeves do not have stripes in the first movie. They
do in all the other ones, yeah, but not this one.
But you don't see Freddie that much, so that makes
it harder to notice. There are also people I knew
for years who were adamant that Freddy had black stripes
and that it was black. Not at all that one.

(55:32):
I don't recall that at all. But yeah, a lot
of people are just like, what do you mean he
didn't He didn't have any stripes on his sleeves. They
were just red. Yeah. But again, you never see him
in like daylight. You never see him like clear as
a day, as opposed in the sequels where you do
so anyway, So that's kind of the basis of Freddy,

(55:52):
the origin story, the origin of the concept of how
he looked and how he acted. Freddie played by Robert England,
who just killed that role. I mean, he just did
such incredible work with it. And before this film, Robert
England was known for being on v a science fiction

(56:13):
TV show, and then he became the most famous fictional
child murderer of all time, excluding any biblical characters. So,
and he was young guy. He was I think he
was like thirty, that is young when he played Freddie.
And Craven said that when he saw guys who were
the age Freddie was supposed to be, they all just

(56:34):
had like this gentle softness to them. But when he
put Robert in there, Robert was just like, ah, he
just you know, young guy, full of spunk. And he
said that really helped Freddie be scarier. Yeah. Yeah, Freddie
is very scary in this one. You really almost never
see him out of the shadows, and you know, he smiles,
he mutilates himself to scare you. He's just he's just

(56:56):
a nightmare as a person, which is what I think
is so great about Freddy Krueger.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Oh, absolutely, because his entire personality is just to be
as off putting as possible.

Speaker 4 (57:10):
Yeah. I mean he literally at one point in the movie,
you know, Nancy says, who are you? And he just
lifts his sweater up and cuts his stomach open and
it lets a bunch of green goo and bugs fall out.
That's his answer. Yeah, of course, there's that part where
she says, oh my God, and he holds up the
claw and says, this is God, which is a very
Craven type of line. Craven loves stuff like that. He

(57:34):
loved quoting the Bible in his horror movies because that
was his education growing up. Yes, entirely that, because I'm
pretty sure he lived entirely secular as an adult. I'm
almost certain. So he just had very very interesting influences.
So now that Tina's woken up, we meet her friends,

(57:55):
we meet Nancy, we meet Rod, Tina's boyfriend, and we
meet Nancy his boyfriend Glenn played by Johnny Depp in
his feature film debut, although he had I think just
come off of twenty one Jump Street or may have
even still been on twenty one Jump Street at the time,
and this launched his film career because it was a

(58:16):
massive hit. And then he was in cry Baby for
John Waters, which I think was booked through this because
that was a new line cinema movie, and he just
kind of catapulted from there.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Damn but damn.

Speaker 4 (58:29):
As we're about to find out, Tina's not the only
one having nightmares about the gross Man. In the dirty
red sweater and the finger knives. We'll find out more
about that right after this.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
So we've been introduced to Tina and her friends Nancy
and Glenn, and and her boyfriend Rod. And her boyfriend Rod,
who is he's kind of the bad uh, the the
bad kid in Springwood.

Speaker 4 (59:09):
Yeah, which they don't say it's Ohio in the first movie.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
So yeah, they kind of leave, which is is fun
because that just makes it, uh, it makes it easier
for you to kind of insert yourself in the story.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
But anyway, it's just a very middle class American place. Yeah,
I mean that's that's really what this place is. That's
why the Frontier Justice is so fascinating because it's the like, bright,
shiny suburbs.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
Yeah, it's not the kind of place that you would
expect that to happen.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
In one of the later movies, uh, one of the
characters says, it's just because you and your tennis buddies
torched this guy, I have to die in my sleep.
So yeah, it's great line. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
So yeah, so Tina doesn't want to sleep alone, so
she has, uh, she has a sleepover that night and we.

Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
Start to well, well, do we establish that they're all
having there.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Oh yeah, because as she is explaining to Nancy the
nightmare that she had the night before, the night.

Speaker 4 (01:00:17):
Before before, it is a hard word, I get it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Very difficult word. Nancy has this realization like I've been
having dreams about this guy too, and Glenn kind of
even chimes in and says like, oh, that's weird because
like I've been, I've been having nightmares. Doesn't he say
it at that?

Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
He says he's been having some nightmares, but he doesn't.
He doesn't establish that he's been having similar nightmares.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Just that he's having nightmares.

Speaker 4 (01:00:43):
Well, then when we get to the sleepover you were
talking about, mm hmm, that's when we get the famous
moment where after the after after hilarious scene where Glenn
convinces his mom that he's at a sleepover at his
cousins and he's at the airport by using a sound
effects tape. That's really a funny scene, and it's that's
a great example too. I won't I'm not trying to
go on forever, but like of Wes Craven's sense of

(01:01:04):
humor is very fun and odd, like the idea of
him saying like, yeah, I'm standing because Yep, it's noisy
as always living by the airport, and then it starts
playing like a car crash and people screaming like.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
This, of course I'll call the police, no, I will,
I will, yeh.

Speaker 4 (01:01:20):
It's so funny. But after that, like they're talking about
why they're there, how she doesn't want to sleep alone,
and Tina says the famous line, so what did you dream?
And the music starts building up, and Nancy gives the
first full throated description of Freddy with the finger knives
and the hat and the dirty sweater. And that's when

(01:01:42):
Glenn comes in because she says, you dreamt about the
same guy I did, And Glenn pops in with a
bowl of potato chips and goes, that's impossible. It's it's
so good. It's so good, and I really nothing. I'm
trying not to like commandeer the whole show. But I've
just I've thought about these movies for so many years.

(01:02:03):
I've watched them so many times. Literally, watching nigh Burn Elmstreet,
which I do find to still be a very scary movie,
makes me feel like a kid because I just remember
so many nights by myself just watching these movies on tape,
again and again and again. They're nostalgic, for you, beyond nostalgic.
I mean, it's so nostalgic. So but as he says,

(01:02:26):
that's impossible and all that. We hear the sound that
Freddy does in their Nightmares where he scrapes his claws
against metal. It's being a screeching sound, which I always
thought was a really brilliant way for Freddy to like
unnerve people as they scratches his claws on metal, because
it's such.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
An unnerving sound in and of itself.

Speaker 4 (01:02:49):
I mean, I'm not doing it perfect, but you know,
but they hear a sound that kind of sounds like
that coming from out back. Glenn goes to investigate, and
it turns out it's rod.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
Tina climbing in through the window.

Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
Well no, no, they were out in the backyard. Oh yeah,
Glenn comes in through Nancy's window. Later. Oh yeah, if
you could stay awake for eight minutes, maybe you remember
not gonna happen. No, when you were fighting falling asleep.
I was like, this is just how I enjoy these movies,
except it's later than ten o'clock.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
But you know, I'm old, But do you want from me?

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
I don't know. I mean, you're four months younger than me.
Where's your spry neess? Come on, get spry okay, O
work on it? Okay, good No. But so what happened
earlier is Rod got mad at Tina. He has a
very short fuse. He's just he's just a kid who's
clearly from a rough part of town, doesn't have a
very good home life, and Tina doesn't appear to have

(01:03:44):
a very good home life either. So they're they're kind
of famous for fighting and making up. That's their whole thing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
So when Rod shows up, he's a little perturbed that
there's a guy and a girl staying with his girlfriend.
He's a little ticked at first. Then, of course wise
Nancy tries to smooth things over by saying, you know,
it was a sleepover date, that's all. Glenn was just leaving,
which is a lie because we just saw Glenn. And see,
that's why it's a great piece of humor too, is
it tells the story. It matters. We just saw him

(01:04:14):
convince his mom he was staying at his cousin so
he could sleep over there. But she's lying to try
and play kate Rob because Rob pulls a switchblade. He
also reveals that he had picked He had just grabbed
a piece of like a gardening hoe thing like a hand.
You should know what that is, you garden. The thing
he was using to scrape and make the.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Scrap I'm trying to remember what they're called.

Speaker 4 (01:04:35):
How would you not know you're a gardener?

Speaker 2 (01:04:36):
Come on, because I'm I'm bad, I'm remember thing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
It's like a gardening But he was making the scrape
traping sounds with that. That's when we get the first
hint that Rod is having nightmares too because he did
that because it was scary. So now Rod and Tina
were making up in the bedroom, and a great little
part where you hear them making love and we see
Glenn laying on the couch sighing, and and then after

(01:05:04):
they're done moaning, he goes morality sucks because he's sleeping
in a different room than Nancy. Nancy is sleeping in
Nancy in Tina's bed, and Tina and Rod the master bedroom.
So now as things are calming down, we head into
another nightmare. As Tina is sitting in bed and she

(01:05:26):
hears little pebbles being thrown at the window to get
her attention. When she goes over to the window, one
of the pebbles digs right into the glass like it's
being thrown incredibly hard. And then as she's looking out
trying to figure out exactly what's going on, she hears
a whispering voice. Ta, so so scary, so perfect. Yeah.

(01:05:50):
And of course while this is going on, Rod is
not reacting at all. And that's something that's been consistent
in a lot of the nightmare movies. I like, is
this hole Like in the dreams, people are just responsive
entirely and not like unconscious. Most of the time. They'll
just be like looking at something and they just don't
notice anything that's happening to you, which I find that
to be very scary and very isolating. The idea of

(01:06:11):
being isolated in a room full of people, Yeah, very
very scary. So of course, as you said last night
when we were rewatching this, she heads out back in
just a night shirt with no pants by yourself in
the middle of the night to investigate, because you know
your judgy, I guess, so you just think you're so
much smarter you wouldn't do that. I think you might,

(01:06:32):
but that's just me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Maybe once or twice.

Speaker 4 (01:06:36):
Fair enough, but she's going to investigate what's going on
right after this. So this is where, honestly some of
the highest quality Freddy Krueger moments happened in the whole film,

(01:06:59):
because as we see Freddie in a bunch of different ways,
obviously Freddie's stalking her as she's walking around, you know,
a dream nightmare version of her, how her neighborhood mm hm,
And we see what you mentioned about this strange man.
Freddie's walking along in his arms are so wide that
she couldn't possibly run past him. We see her run

(01:07:20):
away from Freddie and run right into Freddie. We're getting
all kinds of nightmare elements, her running past a tree
and then him jumping out from behind a tree and
the tree is only like two inches thick. Yeah, perfectly
hides him. Nightmare logic stuff. What stands out in this
to you the most?

Speaker 3 (01:07:37):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
You know?

Speaker 4 (01:07:38):
Is it the what he cuts his fingers off or
like what do you what do you feel like really
gets to you in this because this is like I
feel like, the most Freddie gets to play. Yeah, and
we get to really see that, like in a nightmare
kind of anything goes it's his domain.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
The two that really get me the most. I already
mentioned the you know, the long arms and him. I'm
just kind of being able to almost teleport anywhere and hide,
you know, hide behind anything and then just come out
from behind something. Or like you mentioned how she runs
away and then she immediately runs into him. Those I

(01:08:15):
think are the most effective scares for me. They're the
ones that really get me because again, they remind me
so much of how things work, you know, in my nightmare.

Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
Now, what about when he tackles her and she goes
to push him off, grabs his face and his face
comes off. Oh, and there's just the skull with its
mouth wide open and a tongue sticking out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
That one's just gross. That really gets because of how corross,
so bad it is.

Speaker 4 (01:08:40):
I mean, but him cutting his fingers off wasn't gross, right,
And it's just fascinating seeing him doing things just for
the shock value to the victims. Yeah. So, as he's
tackled her down, we get into again. They really front
load this. I mean, there's a lot of good stuff
in this movie, but this is really what makes you

(01:09:02):
stay in your seat. As he's attacking her, we go
back to the bedroom and Tina's thrashing around Rod notices
and he's like, what's going on, And then we get
this creepy shot from under the covers and a silhouetted
Freddie is like under the covers with Tina. And this
is a big thing that Craven talked about as to

(01:09:24):
why this movie is so scary, because it's one of
the things that plays off of is the idea like
he's alone with you in your bed. Yeah, And a
lot of people have pointed out that there were elements
of like virginity, like of like virginity anxiety kind of
being played up. Oh yeah, And that was something that

(01:09:48):
was so kind of in the zeitgeist of Freddy that
it was referenced heavily. At the end of Freddy Versus Jason,
it's referenced a ton that Freddie's basically going to take
her virginity, except he's going to kill her. But he
keeps using double entendres that are referencing sex. Yeah, like
don't worry. Everybody's afraid during their first time. And then

(01:10:11):
he's like, but just relax. It does tend to get
a bit messy, like because yeah, because Freddy's a dirty
old man in your freaking bed, yeah, you know, and
nobody can see him. So she then suddenly just lifts
off the ground, off the bed rather after four slices
go down her chest and she's just floating for a second, bleeding.

(01:10:35):
Rod doesn't know what the hell to think. She is
thrown into him. He gets knocked into the corner, and
then as she's bleeding like crazy, she gets dragged up
the wall up to the ceiling. Whereas she's dying, and
it's by nobody. You don't see Freddy doing it, Yeah,
you just see her being dragged on her own. Rod

(01:10:56):
is just sitting there like screaming and reaching for her.
She reaches for him and then she drops hits the bed,
splashes blood on him, blood everywhere everywhere. And while all
this is happening, Nancy and Glenn are trying to get
into the bedroom. They're like pounding on the door and
it won't open, and when they finally burst it open,
there's blood everywhere. Tina's dead and Rod is nowhere to

(01:11:20):
be found. The window is left open, which is very ominous.
And this is all really clever storytelling because Rod is
kind of the odd man out. He doesn't really fit
in with this group of kids, so he knows that, like,

(01:11:41):
if he sticks around, somebody's gonna, you know, they're gonna
nail his ass. They're just gonna nail his ass. And
that's exactly what happens when we find out that Nancy's
father is the police sheriff.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
Yeah, I think the lieutenant lieutenant.

Speaker 4 (01:11:55):
Something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:11:56):
Yeah, he's one of the main guys at the UH,
at the police department, and he mentions that Rod has
been busted for petty petty larceny and getting into fights
and stuff like that. But Nancy's adam it. She's like,
but it was never that serious, and her parents are
just not really listening to her because her mother even says,

(01:12:16):
I I guess I find murder to be very serious,
and it's like, that's not.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
What she was saying.

Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
She wasn't saying this was a fight. She's saying that
their fights aren't serious. This is nothing like when they fight.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Yeah, this is when you really start to feel like
anytime they talk to the adults, the adult adults do
everything in their power to purposefully misunderstand or misconstrue what
they're saying. Yeah, because yeah, Nancy kept as they're as
not really interrogating her, but questioning her about Rod. She's
just insisting like, yeah, their fights were never that serious. Uh,

(01:12:50):
and they take it every which way except that.

Speaker 4 (01:12:53):
Yeah, she's trying to say that this is a surprise, Yeah,
because they're uncharacteristic. Yeah, and it does. I mean, Rod
doesn't seem I mean, he seems like he's mostly just
really insecure and and like threatens violence because he just
wants to feel respected, you know. Yeah, he's just a
really insecure kid. Yeah, sough. But yeah. So so now

(01:13:16):
we get to now that we've discovered Nancy as the
main character, we go home with her. Her mom is
there in the morning, telling her like, oh, you shouldn't
go to school. She insists on going to school, saying
that she'll just go crazy if she sits around the house.
She's also chugging a glass of coffee.

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):
And her mom's like, you don't need that.

Speaker 4 (01:13:34):
Well, and her mom's like, did you get any sleep
last night? And she's like, I'll sleep in study hall,
which is true. So but and we start to notice
immediately something is a little off with her mother. Mm hm.
And as we'll find we find out very quickly her
mom's drunk. Her mom is constantly pounding bottle after bottle
of vodka. Yeah, and her dad is never at the house.

(01:13:59):
So clearly there's something you know, not going well in
the Nancy Thompson household. Mm hmm, and her mom is yeah,
it's just kind of blitzed and just kind of repeating
the same things, saying, oh, you know, you'll be fine,
you just need to get some well. And the cruel
irony is that is usually what cures things that have

(01:14:22):
no cure.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Yeah, you know, oh you have a cold, Well, just
sleep it off.

Speaker 4 (01:14:27):
Drink water and rest. That's it. And it's the same thing, Oh,
you know your best friend died, like you need to
you know, rest, you need to you know, cry it
out and rest. The only thing that's going to make
it make you feel better is days going by. But
in this case, it's like every time you go to sleep,
you're rolling the dice to die. So it's pretty cool

(01:14:49):
because like, I mean, I could I have a lot
and I will get to it to say about the
parents at night run Elm Street, and there's a lot
of negative things to say, but generally speaking, it's like
a you know, a perfect Uno card to say, like,
you just need some rest. Usually when we're at our worst,
we do just need some rest. Yeah. Yeah, when I

(01:15:10):
decide I need to solve all the problems in the world,
it's usually around one am when I should just go
to bed. So now Nancy's heading to school, but someone
is following her and we'll find out who after this.

(01:15:38):
So as Nancy is noticing someone's following her, she gets
tackled and pulled behind a bush by Rod, who's basically
trying to tell her I didn't do it, and Nancy
immediately believes her, although she is challenging to him. She's
kind of like, well, you were the only one there.
He's like, I didn't do it. Turns out the cops

(01:15:58):
come out. They apper hend him, and Nancy is livid
because her father used her. That's her exactly where she
used me, And he's like, what the hell were you
doing going to school today anyway, which also suggests a
solid lack of parental synergy, which we were talking about
before between him and his wife. So things are getting

(01:16:22):
really wild now. Nancy has become convinced her dreams have
something to do with all of this. Yeah, and the
only person she can confide in because her father is
too busy, you know, medicating with work, and her mother's
too busy medicating with vodka. Is Glenn, her boyfriend, who
does seem to be a very sensitive, honest guy, and

(01:16:46):
we discover that he comes in by climbing, by climbing
a trellis to get into her bedroom. But yet there's
no hanky panky. There's a very clear element to that,
to that that you know that they have not gone
any any you know, having on all the way to
go back to a high school. Yeah, euphemism, but she
tells him like, I think something's going on in my dreams.

(01:17:08):
He's try he's at first he's dismissive, but when she
says she's serious, he does take her as seriously as
he can. She asks him to do one favor and
just be there, be her backup.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
Yeah, be there while she sleeps.

Speaker 4 (01:17:23):
You spoiled it. But yeah, because we don't know that
she's going to sleep, because because the next part is
she's walking down the street, we don't know. It's a dream.
But nice job. I mean, hopefully if they're all, if
they're listening, they should have already seen the damn movie.
But so she's walking down the street and she asks
if if he's there, and he pops out from behind
a tree and says like, yeah, I'm doing what you said.

(01:17:45):
So she goes by the jailhouse and sees all kinds
of creepy shit. She sees she's being haunted by Tina
in a body bag a few different times. We had
that one where she was at school MM, which we
kind of glossed her because there's a lot to talk
about in this movie and I have I'm too busy
talking about like my relationship with caffeine to get into it.

(01:18:09):
But so she again sees Tina in a body bag,
but this time a centipede crawls out of her mouth
and there's this pile of like writhing eels in front
of her. It's very creepy stuff, very Nightmary stuff. So
then she looks in through the window to the jail
cell and sees Rod sleeping as Freddie walks through the

(01:18:29):
bars and just kind of smiles at her as he's
going to likely kill Rod, as he kills everybody. She
wakes up suddenly because her alarm goes off and reveals
that Glenn is asleep in the chair next to her
bed and she that's when she reveals that like all
she asked was that he stay awake and watch her

(01:18:50):
and wake her up if he thought she was having
a nightmare. As they're talking, she realizes Glenn, you know,
Glenn's in danger. So they start running to the to
the police apartment at a police station, and we see
a bed sheet basically come to life and hang Glenn
in his cell, making it look like a suicide, which
is something that in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies,
they go back and forth on trying to make the

(01:19:13):
deaths look like they make sense. Yeah, outside of Freddy
doing it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's substantial,
like strange, and sometimes it's like, uh, you know, like
oh they burned alive. They must have been smoking when
they went to sleep. It could be that simple, or
it could be like Glenn, it looks like he irenat
Glenna Rod it looks like he hung himself in his cell.

(01:19:36):
So she gets there and says, like, I need to
see him right now, reveals he's dead and her dad
was there, which is one of the another reveal that
like Okay, he like lives here, Yeah, like he's not
not even going home to sleep. No, no, well, and
like when he sees his wife, he just goes hello, Marge,
like he has not seen her in a while. So

(01:19:56):
now things are really getting out of hand. And they
take Nancy to the dream Clinic, which is an awesome sequence,
but it's also a great sequence because not only do
you get to see Joe Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit,
play the sleep doctor, but it also helps cement in
the idea that basically adults cannot help you anymore. Yeah,

(01:20:19):
because she goes in, they hook her up to the machines,
she falls asleep, and sure enough, he's like looking at
the data as she's sleeping, and he says, like, right now,
a nightmare would be a plus or minus five or
six would be a nightmare. And as she starts to
toss and turn, and we hear like when they show
a shot of her, we hear that of the clause

(01:20:42):
the machine is saying like forty five and stuff, which
he even says like it's never been this high, It's
never been this high. And I thought that was so
cool that like the nightmares actually have like a physiological effect, yes,
which is that your nightmares get so extreme yeah, its
it tops the charts well, because the other thing top
in the chow. The other thing is that sometimes when
Freddie kills people in other movies, sometimes in reality, you're

(01:21:05):
doing it to yourself. Yeah, so that it can be
written out as a suicide or whatever. I always thought
it was interesting how it was never consistent though, Like
sometimes it'll look like an accident. Sometimes it looked like
you killed yourself. Sometimes it looks like whatever. It just
depends on what Freddie wants to manipulate people to believe.
I guess, you know, whether he wants you to be
afraid of Freddie or he wants people to not ask

(01:21:26):
too many questions. So they pull her out of the
nightmare and there's a big reveal which is under the blankets.
First of all, her arm is cut horribly.

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):
Yeah, so they got like scratches.

Speaker 4 (01:21:40):
Deep scratches. So they're trying to bandage her up. And
then she pulls Freddie's hat from under her blanket and
her eyes get wide. He says, I brought this back
from my dream. So now we've officially established that the
adults can't help.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
Yeah, I mean they're not able to do anything.

Speaker 4 (01:22:03):
No, No, they cannot help a doctor could not help.
All he could do is observe it. And now we
have a hat from her dream, which somehow people are
trying to ignore. But when she talks about her talks
to her mom about it. She says, like, where'd you
put it? I know you didn't throw it away. She
finds the hat in a drawer and says, look, it

(01:22:25):
even has his name in it, fred Krueger. Mom, who's
fred Krueger? You must know? Like I could tell you no.
And this is where things get extra and where I
think that we really get into the meat of what
the movie is about thematically or what have you, because

(01:22:45):
her mom kind of calms down and says, you don't
need to worry about fred Krueger. Come with me, and
they're going to head into the basement so she can
explain what's going on. And this is where we for
the first time ever, if you're watching Freddy Krueger movie,
we find out actually exactly who Freddy is. It's about
halfway through the movie, but you'll have to wait till

(01:23:06):
after this. So Nancy's mother takes her to the basement
and reveals something in an old boiler in their basement,

(01:23:26):
an old rag and it has Freddy Krueger's glove in it,
and she tells this story about how there was a
guy named fred Krueger who lived in spring Wood, about
I think she was less than ten years ago. Noor no, no,
it had to be more than ten years It was
about ten or fifteen years ago, and how he killed kids,

(01:23:47):
and then the whole thing I'd explained earlier, and how
they burned him alive, and she gives one of the
best lines like he can't hurt you, He can't hurt
you because Mommy killed him, which is such a perfect
Night on Elm Street moment to like really make you
understand what you're getting. So now we're into the territory
of where I really think the movie is talking, which

(01:24:11):
is the sins of the Father shall be visited upon
the children. Yes, because these kids, if they were alive
when Freddie was killed, they weren't young. They were too
young to remember anything. And although it's not canon because
they removed it from the script before filming. Originally she

(01:24:31):
even tells Nancy she had an older brother that she
just doesn't remember because she was so young when he
was killed. So one of the elements that they kind
of didn't run with was that most of these kids
were siblings and now they're all only children. And that's
something really important to point out too. And almost all
the name on Elmstreet movies, everybody's an only child. Oh yeah, yeah,

(01:24:53):
and that makes sense. There are very few there are,
Like I think in the whole series there are only
a couple of siblings.

Speaker 3 (01:25:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:01):
In fact, the only one I can think of right
off the top of my head is Alison Rick from
part four. She's the kind of the quiet, shy girl
who becomes the hero alx. Okay, yeah, she has the
brother who does karate. But I don't think I can
think of anybody else that's a brother and sister, or
a brother and brother or sister and sister.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
Yeah, I don't remember any other siblings.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:25:20):
Series, Well, and it makes sense that there wouldn't be,
because Freddie killed like an entire generation of children. Yeah.
So what we now are realizing is that this is,
for better or worse, the parents fault. Yeah. Now, they
acted in the best interest of their kids, you know,

(01:25:41):
because this guy was like literally a dead to rights
proven child murderer. So it is hard to really like
look down on them for vigilante justice when it's like, no,
they found evidence he killed kids and then it all
got marked on inadmissible.

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
Yeah, I can't. I can't blame them for taking justice
into their own hands. You can't. You can't watch a
child murderer just walk free.

Speaker 4 (01:26:04):
Well, and I'm a big woos and I don't believe
in the death penalty. I don't believe in a lot
of these things. I don't think mob justice is a
good thing. But in a circumstance, specifically like this, they
literally knew for a fact he'd done it, and he
was getting zero punishment. Not he wasn't getting the death penalty,

(01:26:24):
not he's getting parole in twenty five years. He was
getting nothing. He was walking free exactly. So I see
why they were like, fuck that we're ending this now,
especially since, like I mean, I'm assuming he killed twenty
kids over the course of maybe three or four years.
That's a lot twenty kids that alone. When she said

(01:26:45):
that in the movie, I was like, wow, they said
twenty in the movie. Because again I'm trying to think,
I'm trying to say when I'm thinking outside of the
first movie, so that you know, I'm kind of pontificating
from the night Brown Elm Street lore right, but in
the movie she says, twenty a lot of dead children
for one small community to bear. Yeah, like that's we're
talking like curfews for everybody, including adults. Yeah, once your

(01:27:10):
five kids.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Oh absolutely, no, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (01:27:14):
It's serious, you know. So one of the things I
love about this concept though, the sins of the father
being visited upon the children. Aside from being biblical, which
is Wes Craven's jam, is now the parents are in
denial that they could have caused these problems. And I

(01:27:35):
feel like if you look at the time period that
this movie was made nineteen eighties, it was made, released
in eighty four, probably shot in eighty three, you have
the baby boomers kind of starting to wane, the kids
that were being born in the late seventies or Gen X,

(01:27:55):
and they have different problems than their parents had, and
some of the those problems are their parents' fault, you know.
And not just not just little things like the little
things like the economy or you know, who's president. I
mean things like depression, anxiety. There's a lot of things
that mess kids up, and a lot of times it's

(01:28:19):
like the parents want to deny their their part in it. Yeah,
and that's what I feel like the movie is trying
to get across, is that the parents will not accept
any responsibility. They'll do anything except accept responsibility to help
their kids. Anything else is just denial. And in some ways,
and this is just my own insane ramblings, but in

(01:28:41):
some ways, I feel like it's Cold War related. Okay,
elaborate the anxiety of being under a constant threat, the
idea that it's kind of your parents fault because those
were the leaders they elected and it's the country they built.
And then of course one of the big Cold War fears,
which is enemies from without or from within. Yeah, so

(01:29:06):
a big Cold War thing is like, oh, well, the
enemy is Russia. They're over there, and then people be like,
but what if they're here? And they were, I mean,
there were Russian spies, tons of them in the United States,
and there were Russian sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, but there was
also a ton of fear. I mean, McCarthyism was just
making lists of people that they believed sympathized with the

(01:29:29):
Soviet Union to try to ruin their lives. Yeah, so
you see what I'm saying, like, so they're like, you know,
Mom and Dad, I'm in danger. And they're like, what's
going on? Is it the guy down the street? And
they're like, no, when I go to sleep in my
own bed, in the house you built and bought to
keep us all safe, I'm not safe. That's that's my

(01:29:50):
that's my thought.

Speaker 2 (01:29:51):
No, I absolutely have to agree. And we were we
were kind of discussing it last night.

Speaker 4 (01:29:56):
I was trying to keep you away. Poor poor Rachel.
She she stays up extra late to watch these movies
for the show, and sometimes it's she's had a long
day and it's really hard on her, but I make
it through. You did a pretty good job. This one
was the roughest one you've.

Speaker 2 (01:30:11):
Had to watch, Yeah, which is kind of ironic considering
it's you know, it was funny, but I was sitting
there pounding, a pounding a caffeinated beverage.

Speaker 4 (01:30:20):
But let's take a break and then you can tell
me how right I am about my diagnosis after this.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
So, as we were watching the movie again together last
night and you were discussing it with me, helped me
stay away. We we really started to hone in on
the denial of all of the adults which you were,
which you were kind of talking about, because there's so

(01:31:01):
many points where if any one of the adults would
have given an ounce of credibility to what the teens
were going through, they would have been they would have
handled things so much differently. So like, for instance, when
Nancy has a nightmare in school, she in the nightmare

(01:31:23):
burns herself on the boiler to wake herself, to wake
herself up, And when she wakes up, she's got a
burn on her arm, and no one addresses it. No one,
you know, no one pays attention.

Speaker 4 (01:31:35):
Yeah. She even tells Glenn when he asked about She's like,
I burned my arm in study hall or in English lid. Yeah,
and he's like what, like how yeah, yeah, no, that's
a great example, and yeah, nobody seems to care that
much about that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:50):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:31:50):
There's also an element of speaking of like generational differences.
There's also an element of it could be taken as
like a very extreme MAS four for the fact that
generations face totally different challenges in many ways. So of
the idea of like that challenge makes no sense to me.
Like when I was your age, I didn't worry about
this and that and this and that I did this.
So it's like, no, but you don't understand I'm getting

(01:32:12):
murdered in my dreams. That doesn't make any sense. Nobody
got murdered in the dreams when I was a kid.
What are you talking about, Like, just get a good
job at a factory. Yeah, yeah, that's that's kind of
the way I feel almost is that that's because I
love that. Every Nightmare and elm Street movie there is
a glut of adults who don't listen to the kids,

(01:32:32):
a glut of them, and as the movies progress, there
are the occasional adult who does believe them, but they
are few and far between, m very much. In fact,
I mean basically Nancy herself in part three and the
doctor whose name's escaping right now from part three. That's
like two of them, only adults who like really give
a crap. And then the therapist in part six who

(01:32:54):
turns out spoiler if you've never seen Part six to
be Freddie's daughter. But she cares, you know, because her
job is to take care of these kids. So but
like in part four and five, there's no adults that
believe them either, and there's no adults in part two
that believe in them either nothing. So it's and that's
kind of one of the things I think that makes
it makes it really click with kids, young people as

(01:33:17):
you're on your own mm hmm, Like the only time
you can really win is when you accept that the
adults aren't gonna help. This is up to you. This
is this is your time to prove what you're made of,
the kind of thing, and also but also to play
into like the negative aspects of the younger society. But
also because you're smarter than those people and you know more,
who cares if they have forty years more of life experience,

(01:33:38):
you know how to deal with this. So it is
a double edge. It's a double edged razor glove.

Speaker 2 (01:33:44):
I see what you did there, And I just thought
of this too, But especially in this first one, there
is kind of a mirror relationship between what the kids
are going through now with the adults and realizing that
the authority figures in their lives are not going to
do anything to help them, and also how their parents

(01:34:07):
would have felt years before realizing that the authority figures
in their life were not going to do anything to
protect them against Freddy's.

Speaker 4 (01:34:16):
Oh, that's a really good point, because the courts and
the police all failed them when their own children were
being murdered the most innocent, most necessitating of protection group.

Speaker 2 (01:34:28):
Yes, that there is literally why we have society is
to take care of the children and the elderly.

Speaker 4 (01:34:33):
Yeah. Well, and I thought i'd have a joke. I
didn't come up with them. But I also want to
point out this is the era the eighties, was the
era in the nineties, little bit was the era of
stranger Danger and the Satanic Panic. Oh yeah, we're kind
of related. The idea that there were these strange people
that you know, who knows where they live or why,

(01:34:54):
but that will just randomly be like I have a
kitten in my car, I like to kill children. Who
the hell are I don't know. I just exist for fear,
you know. Like, but that's kind of what they come
off as. But the thing we learned from Stranger Danger
and the Satanic Panic was that most victimization of children
did not happen from people they did not know.

Speaker 2 (01:35:15):
No, generally, it's immediate family members.

Speaker 4 (01:35:19):
Yeah, it's or or caregivers or school people. And I
don't think I'm almost certain that it's not established in
Nightmare Elm Street, but it is in Nightmare Elm Street two,
in Nightmare Elm Street two and beyond. Freddie works at
the school. Oh yeah, he's the janitor. Yeah, so he's

(01:35:39):
literally hanging around the kids all day long. And that
could also feedback into the idea of the parents being
blaming themselves, because it's like, this guy is right in
front of us every day. He's not cleaning up, you know,
vomit from the floors.

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
How did we not see it?

Speaker 4 (01:35:54):
How did we not know that this guy was a psycho?
And I think that's a really a really tense and
valuable concept to consider, as well as the effect on
a community of like a guy you just knew and
he did all these heinous things. It's why I mean,
luckily there aren't a lot of examples of like like
serious mass murderers or serial killers who live in really,

(01:36:17):
really really small communities. Because imagine if you had a
community of like five hundred or or not evenived five
thousand people and a guy you see at the grocery
store like every fifth time you go kills like eighteen people.
I mean, that would fracture me deeply. I would be
afraid would I would like go, I would go to
the other town to get groceries. Yeah, I would, I would.

(01:36:40):
But you know, since I lived near a city with
like about you know, a little under a million people
in it, if somebody turns out to be a psycho,
that have to be really close to me for me
to care, I mean to care in the to care,
let's be yeah, like we all compartmentalize what bothers us
and what doesn't. So yeah, it's it's that's a really
interesting element too, because as we progress in the movie,

(01:37:03):
now Nancy is basically, you know, realized I have to
fight Freddie directly myself. She starts reading the Improvised Anti
Personnel Devices Book, which I love that booby traps and
anti personnel devices. And Glenn also shares a really interesting
point about how he's he's actually been reading about dreams,

(01:37:23):
which also suggests he's having nightmares. And I often I
wondered if Glenn was like not remembering them or something
like he was just remembering he's waking up scared. Oh, possibly,
because I don't think he would have he would have
kept it to himself once once Nancy was like really
desperate and scared and felt like she was just insane.

Speaker 2 (01:37:41):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (01:37:42):
Oh and her hair, her hair started turning gray.

Speaker 2 (01:37:45):
Oh, that's right, when she wakes up in the sleep clinic.

Speaker 4 (01:37:48):
Yeah, a streak of her hair turns gray, which only
happens under extreme duress. Yeah, under extreme dress, hair can
turn gray like suddenly, and it's very rare and very extreme.
In a great touch in the movie as well. But
so Glenn says that he's been reading about and I
think it was an Aborigine tribe who they learned to

(01:38:11):
control their dreams and when they have a bad dream,
they take the energy away from it, they turn their
back on it, remove the energy, and then there's no
more bad dreams. But she did say, like, but what
if that doesn't work? He's like, well, or she's like,
but what if it't doesn't work for somebody. He's like,
I guess they don't wake up to tell anybody. Which
I just love that line too, because he's still a
teenage boy. He's trying to be supportive of her, but

(01:38:33):
he's trying to be keep things light. He's trying to
like be there for her in a really difficult way
in a really difficult time. So, but my point is
that as we as. She tells Glenn like, I need
you to not fall asleep. I need you to be
ready because I'm gonna pull Freddy out of my dreams.
That's her big moment, her big eureka. If I could

(01:38:53):
pull his hat through, maybe I can pull the whole
guy into the real world. Well and I can kill
him or well, originally her plan is I'm gonna have
my dad kill him, or or Glenn's gonna kill him,
because you know, Glenn's a jock and dad's a cop. Yeah,
so like, come on, So originally your plan is for
Glenn to show up with a baseball bat and help

(01:39:15):
her just brain this guy and give him to the cops.
It's a pretty wild idea, but I do think it's
pretty boss. It's pretty bitching. But as this is all
going on, there's one obstacle in the way, and that's
Glenn's parents. And we'll talk about that more after this.

(01:39:48):
So Glenn's parents, who seem to mean well, all the
parents seem to mean well. They her, particularly his father,
seems to feel like Nancy is a bad influence, that
she's gone crazy just like her mom. Because the whole
town's kind of talking about what a drunk she drunk
she is, and how she put bars on all the

(01:40:09):
windows of the house, which is another great example of
fear from without, not from within. You put bars in
the house, it literally goes both ways. It turns the
house into a cage.

Speaker 2 (01:40:20):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (01:40:21):
And in a moment shortly after this the scene we're
talking about, she reveals that she's locked the doors from
the inside, so Nancy can't even leave, and she says, like,
I want you to. You're gonna get a good night's
sleep if it kills me. So talk about like going
all in on the wrong thing. But Glenn's parents, you know,
as Nancy is calling talking to Glenn and stuff, she

(01:40:42):
tries to call him on the phone, and their attitude
is like that girl, I don't want that girl anywhere
near my son. She's the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:40:48):
Again.

Speaker 4 (01:40:49):
It's from without, not from within. Yeah, they're all about like, no, No,
danger comes from over there, Danger comes from across the street,
Danger comes from down the road. Danger comes from the city,
ten miles down the road. That's where danger comes from.
Danger isn't in our house. So the problem is that girl.
It couldn't be that our son is in real danger
it couldn't be that our son has a real problem,

(01:41:10):
it's her m hm. And that I feel like that's
what really cements my feeling about about that idea in
the film.

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
I have to agree, and it's I mean, it's kind
of part of the human condition. And I think that's
what makes that makes this movie so relatable and has
made it such I mean, among many other things has
made it such a long standing film, is because there

(01:41:38):
is there is this feeling that we all get that
the danger is always somewhere else.

Speaker 4 (01:41:48):
Well, like when we talked about about it comes at Night,
was that what it was called the movie?

Speaker 3 (01:41:54):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (01:41:56):
Remember yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:41:57):
That No, very no, it's very very very similar to that,
because it's a it's a way we comfort ourselves because
if we ever truly recognized, and especially in a nightmare
on Elm Street, but if we ever truly realize like
how close the danger can be, uh, we'd never rest.

(01:42:17):
And that's kind of that's kind of where the kids
are is. The kids are at that intersection of realizing
that the danger comes with it within and the parents
are the ones who are like, no, no, no, it's
you know, like you were saying across the street or
it's somebody else, uh, not that it could ever not
that it could ever be home.

Speaker 4 (01:42:36):
Yeah, you know. And then on top of all that,
then it'd be a it'd be a side effect of
a collective trauma they all caused. Yeah, so it's it's
a pretty intense concept. But I really especially this part
where he's just constantly looking over the house saying like
that girl is the problem. And it's like, meanwhile, your
son is upstairs in bed, falling asleep, and Freddie's probably

(01:42:58):
gonna get him.

Speaker 3 (01:42:59):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:42:59):
Nancy tries to call the mom, is like being nice,
and then he finally he just takes the phone and
says he's a sleep we'll call you in the morning,
and just hangs up and then he takes the phone
off the hook so they can go to sleep. I
remember that, Yeah, it's it's yeah. So now as Glenn
is laying in his bed, Freddy's arm comes out from
the bed, pulls him into the bed, and we get

(01:43:21):
probably the second most iconic death scene in the film,
where his bed just gushers like five times the amount
of blood in the human body. Yeah, it just shoots
right out of the bed.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
It's a kind of a mind blowing effect it is.

Speaker 4 (01:43:38):
And how it makes sense is the part that I
struggle with the most. But you know, because they never
show his body. He's just in the bed and then
he gets like blended, I guess, yeah, just gets liquefied.
So as this is happening, Nancy gets a phone call
and it's Freddy on the phone cheers, the cloth scratches,

(01:43:58):
and it says, I'm your boyfriend now, and then a
tongue comes out of the phone and tries to lick
her face again. Creepy old man where he shouldn't be
in a young girl's bedroom, you know. So she now
knows Glenn is dead. She tries to get out of
her house. She can't. She finally calls Glenn's house again

(01:44:22):
after the police have all arrived and everything, and gets
her dad on the phone on the because he's there
investigating it, and tells him her plan. Says, I'm gonna
get the guy who's doing this. I just need to
be there ag get him. He's like, well, just tell
me where he is and I'll get him. And so
she says it's fred Krueger, dad, and he just shuts down. Yeah,
he's like all right, and She's like, I need to
know you're gonna bust the door down when I get him,

(01:44:44):
because she's completely trapped in that house. Yeah. So he
just kind of reluctantly says, yeah, okay. She puts her
mom to bed, which is a fascinating sequence. The more
I watch this movie, the more I harp on her
tucking her own mother into bed. It's a really interesting
scene because she's literally tucking her into this bed and

(01:45:06):
telling her like, everything's going to be okay, and her
mom is like realizing that she can't do anything, like
she can't.

Speaker 1 (01:45:13):
Help m.

Speaker 2 (01:45:15):
Yeah her. It's a very tender scene, and it again
is it's one of those moments where you kind of
see the relationship between the parents and the children mirrored
and reversed a little bit because again, like I said,
the kids feeling helpless because the authority figures can't or

(01:45:39):
won't do anything for them, it's very similar to how
the parents felt. And then this is kind of what
Nancy's mom wishes she could have done for Nancy. Nancy's
mom wishes she could have just tucked her in and
tell her, you know, everything will be all right, just
get some rest and it'll all be over, but she

(01:45:59):
never forgot that. But Nancy got to reciprocate that for
her mom, which is just a very cool way of
showing their relationship, you know, kind of the relationship had
been turned on its head because her mom was in denial.

Speaker 4 (01:46:17):
Well, and there's a moment that really changed the scene
for me the more I thought about it. Where As
she's laying in bed getting ready to go to sleep,
she goes to open up her bottle of vodka and
take a glug, and then she doesn't. She puts the
cat back on and puts it on the nightstand, And
I felt like that was almost like a penance, Like
the reason she can't help and the reason she's useless

(01:46:38):
is because she's drunk and because she's been hiding in
a bottle this whole time. Yeah, so she's never been
able to come through for Nancy when she needed her.
So in a way, she's like, well, I can't do
it anymore, you know, even if even if it won't
help to stop now, I feel like a you know,
big pile of shit over it. So I'm gonna stop. Yeah.

(01:46:58):
So one thing she says to Nancy that I always
loved though, is she says. You know, she's like, I
have to face him, and she's like, of course you do.
That's what you do. You face things. That's your power,
that's who you are. And I thought that was a
really interesting little moment where it's like she's not totally
asleep at the wheel. She knows the woman she's raising
mm hm, and she admires her to an extent.

Speaker 1 (01:47:20):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:47:21):
So now it's time to put together a bunch of
booby traps and anti personnel devices because Freddy's coming over
for dinner right after this. So she puts together all

(01:47:45):
these fun booby traps, and all of them.

Speaker 2 (01:47:48):
Kevin mckellister proud is what I said last night.

Speaker 4 (01:47:50):
Well he wasn't alive yet, so if anything, he stole
a lot from this movie. And the Hills have Eyes.
There's a lot of booby traps in the first three
West Craven horror movies, Last House on the Left, Hills
have Eyes, and I'm ren elm Street all have booby traps, huh,
but this one has a ton of them. So she's
like rigging a light bulb full of black powder. She's

(01:48:13):
emptying shotgun shells into things, She's rigging up a ten
pound sledgehammer to swing down when a door opened.

Speaker 2 (01:48:22):
Favorite.

Speaker 4 (01:48:23):
She's just got all kinds of plans for Freddy. So
now she has to go to sleep. She sets a
timer on her watch so that it'll wake her up
in ten minutes, and when she goes into her dream,
she knows she's in a dream and she can look
at her watch and see how long she has left.
So she starts looking for Freddy, and of course, now
where is he? Of course, now you can't find him right.

Speaker 2 (01:48:46):
Yeah, when you want him.

Speaker 4 (01:48:48):
But I love it, so she starts running from him.
He's going after chasing her around. I love it because
when the watch gets down to ten seconds, she just
turns to Freddy and just tackles. After all all this
time running from him and being scared of him and
him killing everybody, she just freaking jumps right on top
of him. They land on the trellis that's been dropped

(01:49:09):
down because when they put the bars up, they cut
the trellis down, so there's no way to climb up
on the roof. She wakes up in her bed, and
I love the shot because you see the trails and
everything on her, and then it pulls away as the
camera pulls back, so it's like it was never there. Yeah,
it's a very simple trick, but it's highly effective. And
she's awake, but she's alone. And I remember the first

(01:49:31):
time I watched it, or I'm guessing the first time
I watched it, God only knows. I just remember being
so nervous, like just where is he? Where is he?

Speaker 2 (01:49:38):
Like where the hell is is now? He could be
literally anywhere?

Speaker 4 (01:49:41):
Or maybe it doesn't work. That's the scary thing is
what if he can't be brought in, what if it's
different than a hat. But sure enough he jumps out
and starts chasing her. And what I love is there's
a real element of like you're in the real world now, motherfucker,
because she is way less afraid of him. He's getting

(01:50:01):
hit by sledgehammers, falling downstairs, having light bulbs explode next
to him, and she chases him down into her basement. Yeah,
and that's one of my favorites because he comes after
her and tries to sneak up on her and like
rub his claw to like screech it, and she just
goes around the other way while he's doing it, So
she literally walks behind him while he's trying to like

(01:50:23):
cat and mouser and just hits him with a jug
full of kerosene. I'm cutting it down short because like
it's what am I gonna sit here and describe all
these movie traps? But like she is whooping his ass,
beating the hell out of him, and then covers him kerosene,
lights him on fire, and then runs away as he
tries to chase after her. While he's on fire, she's

(01:50:44):
breaking the windows yelling for the cops across the street,
which is probably the last big laugh of the movie.
There are on a ton of huge laughs, but one
of my favorite laughs is where she's like, please help
help and this cop sitting on the front lawn and
he's like, everything's gonna be okay because they're at Glenn's
house across the Street's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay.
She just goes dad, my dad, you asshole. So after

(01:51:07):
he gets her dad, oh, but she yells that, then
she's running around a few more things happen. This might
have happened just before he caught on fire, but but
I love that after that, after yells that, like get
my dad, you asshole, and then she's screaming and yelling
some more. It's like thirty seconds. Layers like maybe I
should get the chief. Well, yeah, she fucking asked for
her dad, dude. So now they shut up and busted

(01:51:30):
the doors down. They're like, what the hell's going on here?
There's you know, footprints of fires all over. They're super cool.
The first thought I have when I saw I see
them as I'm always like, rubber cement. That's how you
do that. You just paint the foot footsteps with rubber
cement because then when it dries it it lights, Yeah,
and it burns. That's like the way to set anything
on fire for a movie that you don't that doesn't

(01:51:51):
traditionally burn very well. Rubber cement, Yeah, it is highly flammable,
it is, and it sticks to things so you can
rub it onto stuff. But but no, So now is
where the movie gets really weird. And I still don't
like I've started to figure out I think what I
think is going on. But I've been struggling with this

(01:52:12):
for a while. I mean for a long time I've wondered,
like the endings always kind of like perturbed me a
little bit. She gets so the dad and her end
up running upstairs following the footprints, and Freddy is on
top of her mother in the bed, just like thrashing her.
They throw a sheet over to put the flames out,
pull it away. Freddy's gone, and now her body, which
is like horribly burned, almost a skeleton, is laying there

(01:52:36):
and it starts ascending or descending down through the bed
through like some kind of warp. And I used to
always think that was just some wild shit, but I
think I figured it out. I mean, I think it's obvious,
and maybe I'm just a little slow, but that moment
is that it's still a dream. Ohkay, that's what I think.
And I think that's probably obvious. But because I've been

(01:52:58):
watching the movie so long, it's hard for me to
get perspective.

Speaker 3 (01:53:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:53:01):
Sometimes, yeah, because after that and her dad says, you know,
like whatever, she says, like you go ahead. The moment
she says like you go ahead, I'll be right down
while she's sitting in this room, because the body goes
through the bed and then the bed just looks normal again.

Speaker 2 (01:53:15):
Like yeah, no trace of the mortal or anything.

Speaker 4 (01:53:19):
But when she says like I'll be down in a second,
I feel like that's the moment She's like, only I
can stop Freddy, Like there's nobody else who can help me, period,
And sure enough the door closes behind her and Freddie
is you know, lifts up out of the bed rips
the sheet open. It's a really cool reveal, and he
is just as evil as he's ever been in any

(01:53:39):
of the movies. And as he stands there just puffing
and puffing and sincerely just being the most evil, slimy
look that Freddie has ever had, she seems to know
exactly what to do. And we'll talk about that right
after this. As Freddie's standing there glaring at her, all

(01:54:09):
happy and glee to Killer, she says, I don't I
take all the energy I ever gave you away? And
his response is you know you what? And she's like,
I take it all away. You're nothing, your shit. I
want my friends back, and he's just like, what do
you do it? What are you demanding? And she's like,
I want my friends back, and I want all this
because you're nothing, basically, And now that I've realized like

(01:54:31):
that that her mom going into the bed was just
the symbol that she never woke up like that, it
was still a dream that made me realize. That's why
she leaned into like, well, then I have to beat
him in the dream world, which is what Glenn had
talked about. Yeah. Yeah, because she's used to fighting on
her terms, which is why she was so brave against
Freddie when he was or at least when she believed

(01:54:52):
he was in the real world. So after that, he
jumps to attack her, and he fades away. Then she
opens the door, the bedroom door, and walks out. And
now it's morning and it's the daytime. She walked out
the front door of the house and she's dressed for school.
It's foggy as hell, and her mom is saying, you know,
how are you? Oh, I slept pretty well, And then

(01:55:12):
she says, like, I guess you bought him out when
you can't remember the night before. You know, I just
don't feel like drinking anymore. It's like a really bizarre
but in a right like it doesn't feel like bad riding.
It just feels like it's meant to be odd. Yeah.
A car pulls up and Glenn's driving and Rod and
Tina are in the car, so she says, you know,
love you, mom and gets in the car, and then

(01:55:35):
the fucking it's a convertible and the top comes down
and it's got Freddy's stripes on it. The windows roll
up and the kids are all freaking out because they're
not doing that. The car drives away as we see
little kids off in the distance playing a jump rope
and singing the Freddy Krueger nursery rhyme yep, come in
for I used to sing that all the time and

(01:55:56):
write it on things all the time. So as it
drives away and the little girls are playing jump rope,
and the little girl imagery that started in this movie
and then went through all the other ones was eventually
became signifying the ghosts of the children he killed. Oh
that they're just kind of around where he is.

Speaker 1 (01:56:17):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:56:17):
That's in the later movies, not this one. And then
Freddy's hand punches through the door and grabs the mom
and pulls her through this little door hole. It looks
a little silly, but it is very shocking and sudden,
and then the film is over or is it, because
then there's eight more sequels. But I like this ending.
I know Wes Craven didn't want the ending where she

(01:56:38):
got pulled through the door and I get why it's
a little cheesy, but it is a hell of a sting.
It really is like the end of Carrie where the
hand jumps out and everybody screams. I mean, it has
to be there, right, But the idea that it's still
that she's still in the nightmare. I feel like maybe
the reason she believed she could beat fred like that

(01:57:01):
was that all of it was a nightmare, everything the
whole movie, Yeah, or or at least most of it,
Like at some point she fell asleep and just didn't
wake back up. It's all been a nightmare. And that's
why she was like, I want my friends back because
this is just a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (01:57:19):
Ooh.

Speaker 4 (01:57:20):
So that's why I think she was so cocky and
so positive she could beat Freddie. And and she did
beat Freddie. I mean, if we follow, if we include
the sequels, she did somewhat beat Freddie.

Speaker 2 (01:57:34):
Yeah as much as one kid.

Speaker 4 (01:57:35):
Yeah. Now, if we're just whole looking at the movie
as a standalone, it appears she did not succeed in
defeating Freddie. That in reality, she's still in a nightmare
and Freddie is still in charge, and they never really
even in the sequel, say exactly what happened to Nancy
other than she moved away. They never say what happened
to her mother. We find out what happened to her
father in part three, that he just became a drunk,

(01:57:57):
much like her mother was, probably because he didn't believe
his daughter when she needed him.

Speaker 3 (01:58:02):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:58:02):
She goes to college and becomes a sleep expert. So
there's all kinds of stuff in the sequels. But if
we look at the movie just as a standalone, which
is where it is the scariest, it's just that you
can't beat him. You know, you can't beat Freddie. You
know he's here, He's here, He's gonna this is your
nightmare forever. And honestly, I think that one of the

(01:58:22):
reasons I never made those connections is it is hard
for me to think of the film by itself and
not the whole lore of Freddie that I've been, you know,
consuming my whole life, because if I look at it
as there's no more story after that, then they clearly lost.
So yeah, so that's my thought. But what about you,

(01:58:43):
what do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:58:45):
I No, I am always I'm always a little surprised
with the end, just because it is a very downer
ending to a movie without using like totally downer imagery.
I think that's kind of genius, and I do like

(01:59:07):
the way that they set it up for the sequels.
I think that's, you know, a clever way of showing
that Freddy's still out there, just waiting to come to
your dreams. It's I don't know, I definitely think that
this one definitely is scariest as a standalone movie. Freddy

(01:59:33):
gets to be pretty goofy pretty fast in the series,
in the in the whole series of movies, and that
doesn't negate how scary the concept is, but it does,
like after a while, it's just like, oh, yeah, goofy,
goofy can't be Freddy.

Speaker 4 (01:59:50):
Like I mean, by eighty seven, he was hosting music
videos on MTV. Yeah, that's a cultural icon. He just yeah,
he was a child murderer any young men making jokes
and playing a fool. But in this one, Freddy is
just straight up evil and that's what they tried to
recapture a new nightmare, Yeah, which they did a decent amount.

(02:00:12):
I think, so he's definitely scarier.

Speaker 2 (02:00:14):
Yeah, I would have to agree, but yeah, I think
that there is a primal sort of fear that goes
with nightmares. And I think they really did a great
job of capturing that primal fear of getting the dream
imagery of having, you know, having a pursuer who is

(02:00:40):
always behind you, no matter where you go, no matter
what corner you duck behind, He's always going to show up.
And I don't know, I think that's a I think
that's a great premise for a villain. And I think
that this job. I think that this movie really pulled
it off. And I think that the ending makes that

(02:01:03):
kind of makes that terror real because there is no
escaping it.

Speaker 4 (02:01:09):
Yeah, I mean, I would agree. And I think that
just the idea that the one place in the world
you're supposed to be the most safest and at ease
is in your own bed. So and in your dreams.
I mean, because even if where you are isn't safe,
your dreams can be somewhere else. Yeah, but not a
Freddy's around. No, not Freddie's around. So I hope, I
hope you guys have enjoyed me. He's mostly me spurging

(02:01:30):
out about night ren ELM Street. But Rachel, Rachel said
stuff too that was valuable. I just can't help myself.
I really have loved this movie for as long as
I can think, and when I watched any of the movies,
I just immediately get the biggest smile on my face.
I mean Michelle, my co host on Monthly Spooky, when
she had shoulder surgery. I went to take care of
her for a few for about a week when she

(02:01:51):
was recovering, and I had brought my nightmarre elm Street
box set specifically to watch Part four because it's a
comfort movie for me. And then I found out she
had never seen any of them, so we proceeded to
watch all of them back to back, all seven of
the original films, not including Freddy Versus Jason, like to
a day.

Speaker 2 (02:02:10):
So that's a really good way to recover from surgery.

Speaker 3 (02:02:14):
It was.

Speaker 4 (02:02:14):
And then I made her on our old podcast. I
made her recite from memory the plot of each one,
like a year after we'd done it. It was really funny.
It was really really funny. So anyway, on that note,
thank you guys for hanging out with us on cutting
deep into horror. I do love sitting and picking apart
some of this the mentality of horror, it really what

(02:02:37):
scares us is so interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:02:39):
So I would have to agree. I think that's why we're.

Speaker 4 (02:02:43):
Here on earth as people.

Speaker 2 (02:02:46):
Yes, in that's just in general. Yeah, we're here to
be scared.

Speaker 4 (02:02:52):
Okay, yeah, jeez, it feels a little dark, but fair enough.
Is there anything else you'd like to say about Nyburn
elm Street before we wrap our wrap our time up?

Speaker 2 (02:03:01):
I just it's a great way to kick off Spooky season.

Speaker 4 (02:03:05):
So and whatever you do, don't fall asleep. So what's
our next film? Do you happen to have that ready?

Speaker 2 (02:03:16):
Yeah, it's going to be Candyman?

Speaker 4 (02:03:17):
Oh Man, Tony Todd rest in peace? We lost him
this year. Yeah, Tony Todd's Candyman. That is a damn
fine film. So thank you guys so much for joining us.
I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did
talking about films after watching them. So make sure if
you want to support us, you had to Weeklyspooky dot
com slash join for as little as one dollar a month.

(02:03:38):
You get two bonus episodes every single month, as well
as my undying gratitude for your help. And if you
want to help us in a way that doesn't cost
you a single red scent, just go to your favorite
podcasting app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Make sure you're
subscribed and leave us. A five star rating makes a
huge difference, and we'll see you guys next time. For myself,
for my executive producers Rob Fields and Bubbletobia dot com

(02:03:59):
our producer Dan. While they're in our composery, mattis Let's
cut deep

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Cutting Deep into Horror | A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — Wes Craven’s Slasher Masterpiece with Freddy Krueger

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Cutting Deep into Horror | A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — Wes Craven’s Slasher Masterpiece with Freddy Krueger