A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I can't remember the first time I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street, but I know I had to be around four. I have this one particular memory of sitting alone in my cousins bedroom in Concord, North Carolina, watching A Nightmare on Elm Street in a pitch black room. For a four year-old, I wasn't scared. I was both intrigued and disgusted, but not scared. I don't know if this was my first time watching the original Nightmare, but I know it had to be one of the first. The only scenes I really remember watching from this time was the death of Tina--which is pretty hardcore for a youngster, such as myself--and Nancy's first on-screen encounter with Freddy. I also remember the random sheep that appears in the opening scene, thinking how surrealistic it was, yet true to what things your mind can conjure up while in a dream state. At four, I had this conscious thought, believe it or not; of course, it was much less finely defined, but the thought was there. In the film, when Tina (Amanda Wyss) is killed and they have that great revolving room effect where she is dragged up the wall and across the ceiling, smearing trails of blood behind her, that was the first real horror movie moment that I actively remember. My pupils had to have been fully dilated; there's no way they couldn't have been. That was the greatest thing I'd ever seen in my short, four year life. Likewise, a certain act Freddy (Robert Englund) performs upon himself during Nancy's (Heather Langenkamp) first on-screen encounter with him was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my short, four year life. This particular act included him lifting up his classic red and green sweater--missing of the stripes down the arms, of course--and slicing himself open, spilling a mixture of what looked like, and I what I thought to be, runny egg yolk and rice or noodles. That was fucking disgusting, and I loved it. For years following, I couldn't eat eggs and I couldn't eat rice, because of that one scene. So from that one instance, watching A Nightmare on Elm Street for what I'm considering to be the first time, I immediately fell in love with the idea that Wes Craven so ingenuously created: the idea of Freddy Krueger and the idea that no matter what you do, if you fall asleep, you're dead. That is such a brilliant, brilliant concept, because everybody sleeps; everybody dreams. And whether you want to or not, you need to sleep; and when you sleep, you dream and when you dream, you die. If you're a literary type, you could argue that there is something rather poetic and Shakespearean about that. The film, itself, has an overwhelmingly unique, charming life about it that I can't help but to love.

"This.. Is God."

J. L. Pilkins