Saturday, April 23, 2011
Nightmares
I feel like Nightmare on Elm Street could have been very scary to some people because of the dream aspect. When we dream, sometimes it feels so real and there have been countless movies about dreams whether they be to tell the future, to see superstitious things like ghosts and lost ones, or if they are nightmares. The film was probably one of the first films to utilize the aspect of dreams to haunt someone and uses the supernatural very well because we don't know if Freddy is real or part of some group of people's imagination. The fact that Freddy is not a made up person and that he was actually alive at some point makes it all the creepier because he represents a ghost trying to come back and torture the people that got rid of him. Back when this was first released I could tell why it was such a big success on how it scared people because it was a unique experience.
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I agree with everything you say here. As a kid I as terrified by Freddy without ever having seen the film. Just the whole concept that someone can kill you in your dreams is scary because everyone has to sleep at some point. Therefore, no one can really ever escape Freddy. This would have been very creepy to see when it was new and all the subsequent dream films were not yet released. In dreams you get people when they are most vulnerable and have no control over what is going on - unless of course you get into lucid dreaming!
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point about using sleep as a fear factor - we all have to sleep at some point and, you're right, there is no escaping it. That is surely the most effective part of Elm Street because it messes with the minds of the people watching it. Dreams are hard enough to explain as is - no one really understand why they happen and there is no way to control them. It's easy to make a movie such as this frightening because it takes something very unknown and makes it terrifying, even fatal.
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