The World is Elm Street

Halloween month has begun so I watched the original 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street last night. The only thing I remembered from the previous time I watched it was that on that occasion I also didn't remember anything about it from the time before that. Watching the movie last night, I didn't even remember stuff from the Red Letter Media review of it I'd watched a couple weeks earlier. I guess this is just a movie that doesn't stick, at least for me.

Heather Langenkamp, the lead, the film's heroine, always seems like her nose and upper lip are numb but she gives a convincing enough, sincere performance. The piece of trivia everyone knows is this was Johnny Depp's first movie, playing Langenkamp's boyfriend. It was weird watching this after watching the Ebenezer trailer.

I see a lot of people saying it looks like an old Tim Burton movie, back when Burton had a noticeably consistent aesthetic. It's directed by Ti West, the director of the X/Pearl movies. It seems he may have learned something from the fact that Pearl received far more praise than the other two movies in that series and decided he has more of a knack for slightly fantastical, Victorian or Edwardian period films. I hope, for his sake, Pearl wasn't mostly Mia Goth's labour of love, as it was reported to be. Maybe she should be a director.

You don't really see any of the familiar zaniness in Depp's Nightmare on Elm Street performance. He was playing the cool teenage boyfriend, that was the job. The arc of his career kind of reminds me of Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, both of whom have always had a distinctive affect but at some point in their career lapsed into almost exclusively playing broad, exaggerated versions of their former personae. In Nicholson's case, the switchover can be pinpointed to his performance as the Joker.

Freddy Kruger is surprisingly restrained in the first movie, too. He hadn't become the cartoon character yet. At the point he appeared, there was already a series of popular slasher monsters of the '70s and '80s, there was already Leatherface and Michael Myers. You can see why the makers of Nightmare figured Freddy needed a hook, which turned out to be his razor fingered glove and fedora. I wonder why no-one calls me Freddy Kruger when they see me wearing my fedora. I suppose I ought to get a stripey red shirt. People have started in on the Indiana Jones cracks here in New York and New Jersey now, too. It's really strange. Yesterday a fat guy in a Captain America t-shirt yelled "Dr. Jones!" at me. Talk about glass houses.