Is A Nightmare On Elm Street actually still scary?
Every child of the 1980s can recall their first encounter with Freddy Krueger. Me, I was seven years old, on a visit to a video rental boutique on Edinburgh’s western outskirts. As always, my parents steered me towards the family section, but a face at the back of the shop caught my eye, leering from the horror shelves.
It was horribly scarred, as if plastered in uncooked bacon; the eyes were vacant beneath the brim of a mangy fedora; the teeth rotten stumps. Its owner’s left hand was raised, and covered in a bladed glove, which pointed up to the title in straggly scarlet letters: “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors.” I decided to stop looking, only to find that I couldn’t. Here it was, I remember thinking to myself: the scariest picture in the world.
When I saw the Wes Craven-directed original at a friend’s house five years later, it came as a weird form of relief that Freddy was every bit as petrifying as the grim visage billed. The premise alone chilled me witless: an undead serial-killing ghoul dicing up his teenage victims in their dreams. (Good luck getting to sleep after that.)
The kills were visceral, but also nasty. Freddy savoured the build-up, and often guiltily made you do likewise, as when his talons ticklingly breach the surface of the bathwater between Heather Langenkamp’s legs. The central performance by Robert Englund dripped with malevolence, his flame-ravaged make-up even more unsettling in motion than on the cover of a VHS case.
Sensible viewing for a 12-year-old? Absolutely not, as the bright red 18 certificate logo on the box made abundantly clear. But the British Board of Film Classification believes today’s teenagers are made of sterner stuff. Earlier this month, the first A Nightmare on Elm Street film was downgraded to a 15, in advance of its September re-release. The certification decision describes “sustained sequences of intense threat and horror” and “strong gory images”, including a literal geyser of blood that erupts from a mattress. But because today’s audiences are less averse to fantastical violence – something the BBFC tracks in its ongoing public consultations – the rating was bumped down to reflect 2020s tastes.
“Although the film features various bloody moments, it is relatively discreet in terms of gore and stronger injury detail,” a spokesperson explained. “The kills often leave more to the imagination than visceral detail, and largely occur within a fantasy context. Compared to more recent precedents for violence and horror [classified] at 18 – such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Immaculate or Saw X – the film is now containable at 15 and we reclassified it accordingly.”
Containable is an interesting word. Via their phones, today’s teens have unrestricted access to clips of real-world depravity and violence that make Craven’s film look like an episode of Bluey in comparison. But that doesn’t mean the slashers of the 1980s are no longer scary: it’s more that reality has furnished us with better things to worry about.
Besides, scariness in and of itself is tricky to rate. The Others, Nicole Kidman’s 2001 chiller about ghosts in a mansion, is wildly disquieting – but almost entirely thanks to its masterfully sustained eerie atmosphere, and therefore is (rightly) a 12. When the BBFC rated the Daniel Radcliffe-starring version of The Woman in Black 12A in 2012, it received 134 complaints from terrorised viewers, despite having worked with the distributor to trim everything that would have nudged it up to 15. But even without the quantifiably creepier and more startling content, it remained a very scary film.
Further up the scale, 18-rated horrors are now rare. Even this year’s profoundly sinister Longlegs, with its sustained and extreme scenes of Nicolas Cage, didn’t hit the levels of ghastliness required. The overtly sexualised violence of Ti West’s MaXXXine made the cut though: that red badge is less a guide to tone than a warning that viewers are in for a rough ride.
On rewatching A Nightmare on Elm Street yesterday I still found it every bit as unnerving. In a strange way, the relative innocence of its era works in its favour. The teenagers might be annoying, but they also feel authentically vulnerable. Practical effects, like Freddy’s impossibly long arms wiggling in silhouette, look more nightmarish than slick computer graphics ever could. And with a little historical distance, the 80s aesthetic lends even the real-life scenes an air of dreamy unease. To those of us who believe horror can be not just fun but formative, these aren’t reasons to shield 15-year-olds from the film so much as actively herd them towards it.
While they’re there, they may also want to check out the classic entries in the Halloween, Evil Dead, Carrie and Living Dead franchises, which retain much of the power they held in the 1970s and 80s (and in a handful of cases, their 18 certificates). It’s no exaggeration to say that during the VHS rental boom, movies like those, with their lurid content and forbidden aura, helped mint an entire generation of film lovers.
Every viewing was a trophy for younger viewers who’d goggled at the box art and heard breathless reports from older friends, but couldn’t yet pass for 18 at the cinema ticket booth. And while a lack of budget or major studio backing could ruin a film’s theatrical chances, at the video shop, it didn’t matter a jot.
In the end, the slasher movement’s throat was slit by its own success. The churn of sequels tested even horror fans’ patience, while the genre’s reliance on formulae made it ripe for spoofing. In the end, Craven himself was first to plunge the knife in. In 1996’s Scream, directed by Craven and written by Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson, clever-clever 1990s teens – the same ones who’d hungrily rented A Nightmare on Elm Street et cetera multiple times – tried to use their cinematic nous to outwit a real masked killer at large in the suburbs. So history repeated – not quite as farce, but a winking postmodern jape.
The 10-year cycle of meta-slashers which followed birthed franchises of its own, from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Final Destination and Urban Legend. At their best they were sexy and jumpy, and understood their viewers were too savvy for shock, so made sure to cut them in on the joke. As such, they were rarely that scary, and a pillowy comfort zone sprung up from which audiences would have to be prised.
Three things shook us out. Reality, in the form of the found footage style pioneered by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Trauma, in the post-9/11 nihilism of the carcass-mangling Saw films. And the uncanny, in skin-prickling Japanese horrors like Ring, Audition and The Grudge, which played by their own set of rules, then completely unknown in the west.
The VHSes might have been replaced by DVDs, but the cases still promised sleepless nights: Ring’s featured a single bloodshot eye caught between straggles of black hair, rolled back as if in agony. That film I saw as a jaded, Scream-literate 20-year-old, and it still scared me half-stupid. Freddy Krueger would have been proud.
