Sunday, April 22, 2012

Homework Movie - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)


"What if they make a monster in their dreams?"

"They turn their back on it. Take away its energy, it disappears"


Falling asleep is never a good thing in the theaters, but I can only imagine that when audiences across America saw this movie, sales in coffee and NoDoz shot up quickly! A Nightmare on Elm Street takes the typical horror monster and puts him inside his victim's head. The story centers around four teenagers, and more specifically Nancy Thompson Played by Heather Langenkamp, and their quest to find out who's killing their friends while they are asleep.

In the waking world of Nightmare, the adults are clueless to what's happening to their own children due to the parents mistakes earlier in life when they murdered a man tried of murdering children, but due to a technicality, let go. His lynching brought on this story's killer spirit to exact revenge on the families, including a young Johnny Depp in his first role as Glen Lantz. The special FX are creative and the way the deaths are designed is also.

Wes Craven directed this movie in 1948 after several others in the horror genre that he both wrote and directed. This movie was such a success that it spawned several others in the series with the same characters, but the only other directed by Craven was the New Nightmare a decade later. As a master writer in the horror genre, Craven later designed the Scream series to make fun of the supposed rules of the style he helped define for a generation of moviegoers.

This movie not only created a series that is still popular today, but had also elevated the career of Robert Enguland, who had been acting for 10 years before this series made him a household name as Fred (or Freddy) Kruger. Along with Friday the 13th, this movie stands as a new generation of horror that sees both the good and evil sides of life in the genre. Mrs. Vorhees is a distraught parent that saw her child neglected in Friday, however her actions were a bit extreme in justification.

Recently there was a remake of the popular Nightmare franchise produced by controversial producer/director Michael Bay, that has butchered not only Nightmare on Elm Street, but Texas Chainsaw and he's gotten his hands on TMNT for the 2014 calendar.

"He's dead, honey, cause mommy killed him"


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