About halfway into A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), teenager Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) goes to The Katja Institute for Sleep Disorders. Her mother (Ronee Blakely) asks the scientist, “What the hell are dreams anyway?” His reply: “Mysteries. Incredible body hocus-pocus. The truth is, we still don’t know what they are or where they come from.” While there has been a large amount of research done on dreams and what they mean, definitive answers tend to trail off into vague generalizations (just like I am doing now). Aside from a logical approach, dreams tend to have an unknowable, poetic aspect to them, perfect for cinematic visualizations. They represent a primal space within our consciousness--uncensored, possibly scary, and always putting forth some kind of truth. Things that our conscious minds are unable to accept are put forth in dreams. This lends itself to horror cinema, and the greater desire to approach our fears in a controlled way. People want to gain mastery over the things they fear. Both dreaming and watching horror films allow for this.
There are countless horror movies that use dreamscapes in an effective way, as well as possibly more that use dreams as an excuse to get away with all kinds of senseless bullshit. The Nightmare on Elm Street series does both of these things. By 1984 the American slasher film cycle had been rolling for years with Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and many other non-franchise pictures. The thing that Wes Craven’s film brought to the genre were the supernatural elements. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was more than Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees because he was a mystical dream stalker that could cross in between conscious and unconscious states. The first movie in the series follows four teenagers as they slowly begin to realize that the same man with red/green striped shirt and “finger knives” has been terrorizing them while they sleep. A Nightmare on Elm Street marks the first screen role of Johnny Depp as Glenn, who is equally charming and annoying, with his crop top t-shirts and red convertible. But the film belongs to his girlfriend Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), one of the most iconic final girls of the 1980s. As Glenn continuously keeps falling asleep, Nancy has a coffee maker under her bed and far too many caffeine pills. When she does eventually fall asleep, she is prepared to meet Freddy, having a book of boobytraps to aid her. Before Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) in Home Alone (1990), there was Nancy Thompson with her sledgehammer and exploding lightbulbs.
The movie says a lot about what it meant to be a white, upper/middle class teen of the 80s. Nancy’s parents are notably divorced, her father (John Saxon) a disgruntled police officer, and her mother a struggling alcoholic. It is easy to see the movie in terms of the very conservative Reagan era--children of divorce inevitably have to face chaos in the form of a whimsically masochistic burn victim from beyond the grave. (The sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) has a similar but more introspective story that is about growing up queer in the same sort of environment.) In the first sequence we see Nancy taking solace in a crucifix, underlining the Christian connotations and themes that continue throughout the series of films. The first two are very much about the anxiety of growing up, even for teens who all seem to have small cathode ray tube TVs in their bedrooms and--in Glenn’s case--convertibles in the driveway.
The third film in the series, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) is possibly the peak, with a complex ensemble cast, spectacular set pieces, and a concentration on the psychological aspects of nightmares. Patricia Arquette in her first leading role plays Kristen, a stressed out teen who is interned in a psychiatric facility after Freddy Krueger slashes one of her wrists. Once there, she meets an ensemble of troubled youths who are all afraid to sleep due to our favorite boiler room bad boy. Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy, this time encouraging Dr Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) to prescribe them an experimental drug called Hypnocil, which allows for dreamless sleep. From the opening scene, we see more attention paid to set design, with Kristen’s black with white floral wallpaper. What follows is a list of set pieces good enough to compete with the best gialli of the 1970s. Freddy controls one patient (Bradley Gregg) like a marionette with bloody veins (or ligaments?) as string. Aspiring actress Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow) memorably gets
her head smashed through a TV screen with Freddy’s one-liner, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” Mohawked drug addict Taryn (Jennifer Rubin) succumbs to Freddy’s orgasmic insertion of needle fingers into her arms. Let’s not forget the wheelchair-bound Dungeons and Dragons nerd Will (Ira Heiden) casting wizard spells, standing on two feet. And then there’s Kincaid, the stoic yet troubled strongman. Of all the movies in the series, Dream Warriors is the one that seems like a whole writers’ room was working behind it. We even get Freddy’s backstory as “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” The movie likens the lucid, collective dreaming of the ensemble to “a group psychosis,” or “sort of a mellow mass hysteria,” as Philip says before he is dispatched.
Dream Warriors only elaborates on the surreal aspects of the first two films. In the opening scene of the original Elm Street we see Nancy walk past a randomly placed lamb in a long corridor, something that director Wes Craven referred to as his “tribute to Buñuel,” in the commentary track of the New Line Productions 2010 disc release. Buñuel comes to mind again in part 3 with Dr Gordon’s story of the kid who cut off his eyelids to avoid sleeping, reminiscent of the eyeball-slicing opening of Un Chien Andalou (1929). The second and third film both include droopy, melting objects as an indicator of a character’s entrance into dream world, referencing the melting clocks of Salvador Dali’s well known painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931). The series is also full of visual gags and one-liners by Freddy that resemble a hellish combination of surrealism and comedy, for example the tongue-equipped phone in part one. Freddy starts off with little dialog in the original film, but by part three, is comfortable making whimsical faces and yelling, “Where’s the fucking bourbon!?”
One of the most compelling things about the Elm Street series comes about in Dream Warriors, with the idea of collective dreaming. This brings to mind Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, which is a far larger concept that goes beyond just dream states, but in these films we see it played out in a more literal manner. The young psychiatric patients must work together and dream together in order to defeat Krueger in a symbolic journey into adulthood. That being said, collective dreaming is not actually possible in real life--although I’m sure there are people somewhere on the internet who would disagree with me. It is a hallucination that lends itself to good storytelling. A far more possible concept that is similar is lucid dreaming, in which individuals are able to have awareness and some control over their dreamstates. Getting into the habit of lucid dreaming involves thinking about your future dreams when you are awake. As you go about your day, make sure to check that you are in reality by pushing on walls, touching your fingers together in rhythmic ways, or jumping with the intention of flying. The habit of doing these things will then eventually be reflected in your dreams, where different results could be possible. It is predominantly about being mindful in order to have a more intentional relationship with your dreaming self.
One of the most well known cinematic mentions of lucid dreaming comes in a conversation between Leonardo Dicaprio and Ellen Page’s characters in Inception (2010), but overall that film is mindless and unsatisfying, replacing dreams with spectacle. I recall reading an interview with director Christopher Nolan at the time of the film’s release in which the journalist suggested he must have read a great deal of Freud in preparation. Nolan’s reply was something along the lines of ‘No. I just made it all up.’ Quite frankly, it shows. The Elm Street films do a much better job with notions of lucid dreams and their application. Since the teenagers are so stressed out about not sleeping in order to avoid dreams, they are constantly thinking about it, providing them with a greater self awareness once they do suddenly find themselves in dreamland. The general notion of collective dreaming is just a version of lucid dreaming taken to its most extreme, in which we can even share consciousness with other people. Freddy’s inevitable--but never final--defeat at the end of each movie acts as a successful completion of what lucid dreaming techniques are supposed to do. Using these practices, people are able to treat their dreams as a form of therapy in order to get past whatever psychic barriers are holding them back in their waking life.
As something of an addendum, I want to talk about horror films as dreamscapes in a more general way, specifically in context to the recent film Skinamarink (2022). It may seem odd comparing Kyle Edward Ball’s film to the Elm Street series, just because they are so different in style and delivery. The general preoccupation with dreamstates endures in both. Skinamarink is an experimental film that shows long, solitary shots of a house at night. Although we occasionally see and hear children, the real characters of the film are the house itself and the narcotic, hypnotic haze invoked by the film’s style. It is all about nostalgia for those late nights many people of my generation experienced, the blue light of the TV screen flickering before us, turning whatever room we are in into a sort of television box unto itself. With volume turned low in order to avoid waking the parents, we watched late night TV and quite often movies that were less appropriate in daylight--either trashy erotic films or gory horror pictures. The Elm Street series is just one of many possibilities that is appropriate for this kind of late-night experience. Ball’s film acts just as much as a container for other cinema to be filtered through, than a piece of cinema itself. Although many viewers were disappointed if not outright angry at the pace and content of Skinamarink upon its release on Shudder last year, I stand by it more as a movie about spectatorship than some kind of milestone in the horror genre. It has more in common with something like Begotten (1989) than it does the Scream series. It is something I recommend more as a mind exercise to get you more attuned to how movies and lucid dreaming interact with each other. It lends itself to the whole concept of “movies to sleep to” because it seriously does not seem to matter if you doze off and miss chunks, even up to the thirty or forty minutes that could probably have been edited out in order to make a tighter picture. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this movies-to-sleep-to practice is often done with comfort films, but with Skinamarink we have a flickering framework that evokes nostalgia and encourages restful sleep and dreams.