Nightmare on Elm Street Nostalgia

 A colleague and I are working on an edited collection, (Don't) Look Back: Nostalgia in Horror and Slasher Films.

More than other projects, popular culture lends itself to responding as an aca-fan, identifying first our personal experience or response to something, then using that as a way into analysis of the text.

Given the topic of the edited collection, you'd think I would be occupied by my own nostalgia and initial experiences with horror films, but my chapter takes a different approach, so until this week I actually hadn't thought about my first introduction to horror and how it led to a lifetime interest and professional bent.

When I was growing up we were not allowed to watch violent films. This included action films but definitely included horror. Mom thought sex scenes were okay but violence was bad and would warp our brains. Not even cartoon violence was allowed, I remember her banning The Simpsons. I also remember sitting in a theatre with family and friends watching The Success of My Success and the moms being very traumatized at the amount of sex scenes (more hinting than actual scenes) and I remember Mom making some comment about oh shit, didn't know about THIS.

I remember when I watched Star Wars on VHS asking Mom what this scene was, and her telling me "furniture from the house." It was YEARS before I realized that no, those were the burned bodies of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

But my childhood exposure to violence was limited. I remember her even restricting Tom and Jerry. So I was totally unprepared in every single way to watch Nightmare on Elm Street when I was 9 years old.

I was at my Girl Scout leader's house for a sleepover. I remember she was Mormon, and they had a lot of kids, most of whom made up the troop. I remember thinking she had old hair, shortish, put in curlers tight to her head. They had a separate den which was not a room I'd ever encountered before. One of the older children, NOT a Girl Scout somehow got a copy of the recently released VHS of Nightmare on Elm Street.

I have a clear image in my head of us laying in sleeping bags in like a U around the TV and VCR. I also remember the older girls leaving almost as soon as they pressed "play" in what I'm sure they thought was a joke to scare the younger ones. Except I also remember everyone falling asleep in the first few minutes, as we didn't start the movie until late into the sleepover. 

But not me.

I sat inches from the tv, riveted. 

I was terrified the Girl Scout leader would come in and catch me and I'd get in trouble.

I was quickly terrified by the movie.

But I could not look away. I was glued to that screen. I felt that even as terrified as I was, I'd be okay if I could make it to the end, see how it ended. That surely that ending, the resolution, would enable me to put it behind me.

Narrator: it did not.

I did not, at 9, understand the ending. I don't think most adults watching it did, and there's been over the years a fair amount of discussion about original intentions and sequel set-up battles the ending created. I just knew that it wasn't fair, it was not how things were supposed to be. It was not right. But I was also confused because Tina and Rod and Glen were alive, when they weren't supposed to be, so that was good. And Nancy's mom was sober and coherent (even at 9 I knew those signs) which I KNEW was good. But I did not understand the trade off. That the price for these good things was evil one. Or that the temptation of wanting what you could not have left you open to evil. 

They were complicated thoughts that I did not quite have language for, but I remember they all bothered me, and I think that this unsettling, the fact that I could not sit with it, put it in a box I could understand, was part of the reason why I could not let it go.

While the ending and it's not-logic dream answer is part of the reason I could not let go of the movie, either as a child or as an academic (I've written more about Freddy than anything else), the central reason I could not let go of this movie, why it haunted and terrified me as a 9 year old and stuck with me as an adult was this 5 second scene.

This scene sets up the uncanny, the unexpected with Tina, set up as the main character but then killed in the beginning of the film. So from the get go we, the audience, do not know what to expect. The rules have been thrown out the window, there is no expectation we can follow. Instead our attention shifts to Rod and Nancy and Glen, not people we really paid attention to. Yet Tina still manages to be the center of the narrative. She literally haunts Nancy, yet it's not really her. 

Nancy has fallen asleep in class but as the movie and series sets up, not only can she not tell the difference between being awake and asleep, but the nightmares she experiences while asleep can affect her waking life.

She walks out of class after seeing an image through the classroom window and follows this bloody trail down the hall, seeing Tina's bloody body in a see-through body bag. But it is not Tina in that bag, or being dragged down the hall. It is not Tina's voice we hear. And this is part of the haunting I think. We don't know on first viewing that this is not Tina but we know something is not right. As the movie goes on we learn nothing can be trusted. We do not know what we experience awake or asleep. We do not know if or when we are safe, as even, especially, in our dreams we are most vulnerable and the nighmares we experience in sleep can follow us into the real world.

Tina standing there in a clear body bag, drenched in bright red blood, stands for all these things, representing the center of the ideas and story of the film. She is not the center of the narrative, but she is the point. Her trauma, her haunting, her pain, is quickly forgotten, serving only to torment others. What her family, or even boyfriend Rod, experience are quickly moved on from. She becomes just a tool for Krueger to torment Nancy with.

At 9 I did not understand all of this. I could not analyze or break down or describe the threads seen in this scene. But I understood the point. I knew that the point of this scene was to tell me I was not safe. That I would never be safe. That the world of rules and safety and justice did not exist. I'd already had a not great childhood by 9, so this was not new information for me. But the knowledge that other people knew this, that there was a great awareness that this is what the world was really like, that was new for me. And as much as it terrified me I think part of me was vindicated knowing I was not crazy or making things up to believe that sometimes we did not win. And it did not work out okay. I also understood the idea that the monster might not always act the way you expected and could be charming, although they were never to be trusted.

I had nightmares for weeks. Everything about Nightmare on Elm Street terrified me. Krueger scared the crap out of me, but I remember being confused, because he was also funny, and I knew I wasn't supposed to like him but I kinda did (a feeling and impression the sequels emphasized and leaned into, making for a very confusing presentation of a serial killer).

I remember going into my mom's room the first night home, terrified, and ashamed to tell her what happened because I KNEW I was not supposed to be watching that movie. She let me sleep with her that first night but the next night told me I had to deal with it. 

I don't remember where I got the idea, perhaps from Nancy herself, but even though the logic of the movie and my own abuse history told me this would not work, I remember when I had nightmares about Freddy imagining I was turning my back on him, pretending he wasn't there, trying to take away his power. 

It did not always work. But eventually I stopped having nightmares about Freddy although I never left him far behind.

The idea that you encountered monsters all the time, often on their terms, and often lost even when you thought you'd won, was one I was familiar with. Other than a lifetime fascination with bogeymen and the monsters that were always just out of sight, I think the thing I took with me was that you always had to fight. Even when you know "the dice are loaded," even though you know "the war is over" and "the good guys lost," that "the fight was fixed," "the poor stay poor, the rich get rich."

You show up, you fight, you lose, and sequel after sequel, through each exponentially bad experience, trauma on top of trauma, you keep going.

Because what other choice do you have?

"That's how it goes."