Archive for October, 2011

Nightmare on Elm Street

By Selena Routh 

Wes Craven, the father of “slasher” flics, started the Freddy Krueger Nightmare franchise in 1984 with the film Nightmare on Elm Street. The film was both a critical and a box-office hit, and launched a new generation of horror films. Craven made the movie for less than $2 million, and this was recouped during the first week of release.

The story is set in a small Ohio town (Springwood), where bad things start to happen to local teenagers. The connection is that all of the kids are children of the people who killed Freddy Krueger, and he has returned from the dead to exact revenge. He attacks people in their dreams, which segues into real life. Freddy has some great gloves to work with, with razor sharp blades sticking out of the fingers, but keeping his thumbs free.

In 1984, the internet was still in its infancy, and texting wasn’t even a tangible concept. If the original version (there was a 2010 remake) were made today, the movie might have been a bit different. Below are a few of the differences you might notice.

1. Ready Freddy – The original Freddy was already prepared for a world with texting. He had eight-bladed gloves which kept his thumbs free for texting, something he would later do with Lon Chaney, Jason and Darth Vader.
2. Warnings – There has been considerable and heated debate about whether-or-not the targeted teens would have been able to save themselves if they’d been able to text warnings to each other. The consensus is that, although text-capabilities would seem to be an advantage for the kids, Freddy Krueger was no slouch when it came to being tech savvy and he had been planning this revenge for quite some time. He would have had signals scrambled through his connections with the late Alexander Graham Bell.
3. Jailhouse – The jailhouse where the character Rod was incarcerated when everybody thought he had killed his girlfriend was prone to electrical interference from the local power station, so it is unlikely that any of the youngsters would get enough bars to be able to text warnings. Freddy had thought of almost everything before he went off to haunt dreams.
4. Johnny Depp – Freddy was always jealous of Johnny Depp. Not for his good looks (Freddy was convinced he was the better looking of the two), but for the pair of headphones that Depp had. When Freddy ended Depp’s big-screen debut in suitably bloody fashion, he kept the headphones as a souvenir.
5. The Remake – True to Hollywood form, which dictates that if something is pretty good the first time around an inferior remake is the proper way to display admiration for the original. Looking at his prospects for 2010, Freddy didn’t like the idea of having to inhabit a different body; he had become quite comfortable in his Robert Englund suit. He also knew that texting technology would advance to the point where he would be tied up all day on Facebook and Twitter, and might not have the time to slash sleeping teenagers.

Freddy ended up having a good run as a scary dude, but now spends most of his time grooming cats at a pet salon that he and his cousin, Edward Scissorhands, own in the Hamptons.