Sitting around last month, a few of us were talking about the late Wes Craven and his impact on the horror genre. The inevitable question came up: what is it about a Craven film that manages to get under the skin and stay there? After much discussion, we arrived at a simple answer: Wes took our darkest, simplest fears and gave them faces – in essence, he made sure that we faced very real monsters in a way that amplified the extremity of the nature of the fear. What struck me was how he treated parents in terms of the very real fears that parents face, from the instinct to protect your child to the desire to avenge any wrongdoing. He often went after the notions of parental protection and child loss; he did it with The Last House on the Left, and repeated it again with A Nightmare on Elm Street. In this context, what sets Elm Street apart from Last House isn’t the special effects, nor was it the surprise ending; it was the blunt presentation that a parent is powerless to protect a child from what makes it afraid, placing the onus of adaptation and survival onto the child.
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| You’re on your own, kid. |
The first consideration that we need to review in this context is the degree of parental involvement in each of our four main teenagers’ lives. The degree to which each manages to survive seems to correlate to the presence of parents in the child’s life. Tina begins the film waking from a nightmare, only to have her dismissive mother get pulled away from her by her boyfriend. When Tina is later murdered, it takes place without a present parent in the home, as the mother has gone to Las Vegas with said boyfriend; as her father is stated to have walked out on the family 10 years prior, Tina was pretty much left to fend for herself while her mother was on vacation. Couple this with the unchaperoned sleepover (including sex with her boyfriend in her mother’s bed – not shaming, just a bit surprised that the first impulse is to go for her mom’s bed, which, yeah, no – anywhere but where your parents get it on), and this signifies that the latchkey kid dies first. Our next contestant, Rod, doesn’t seem to have any parents at all – he’s drawn as a caricature of a rebellious loner, someone who seemed to materialize without parents at all. However, Rod is taken into police custody, which signals a type of watchful authority over him. Glen manages to make it longer than Rod and Tina, in part because we get to see his married mother/father team; however, his parents aren’t effective. Glen’s mother dismisses her son’s loud television and music habits with a shrug, while his father offers a half-assed edict that his son shouldn’t hang out with the neighbors that are obviously losing it. It’s our final girl, Nancy, that has the highest degree of involvement, though her divorced mother is far more involved than her father. Nancy’s mother clearly cares about her well-being, from little reminders against falling asleep in the bathtub to urging her to stay home from school to rest after the trauma of Tina’s murder. The best example, though, comes just after the funeral of Rod: when her father tells her mother that the distressed girl should stay home and rest “until she gets over the shock”, her mother snaps, “I’ve got something better. I’m going to get her some help.” Mom is not only present; Mom is actively attempting to care for her child. Which makes Nancy’s mother Marge that much more powerless when the time for confrontation comes. While Marge expresses concern over her daughter verbally and rushes to action when her daughter needs her in the bathroom, she ultimately is not effective. Sure, she issues verbal warnings, but really, Marge does not actually help.
In fact, it’s Marge’s actions long before the events of the film that trigger the horrible situation. The recounting of Freddy Krueger’s demise is haunting on many different levels: “He was a filthy child murderer who killed at least 20 kids in the neighborhood. Kids we all knew. .. It drove us crazy when we didn’t know who it was. But it was even worse after they caught him. All the lawyers got fat and the judge got famous but somebody forgot to sign the search warrant in the right place and Krueger was freed just like that… A bunch of us parents tracked him down after they let him out. We found him in an old, abandoned boiler room where he used to take his kids. … Took gasoline, poured it all around the place, and made a trail of it out the door. Then lit the whole thing up and watched it burn.” This is a bit like history repeating itself: the parents could not stop the child-killer, and when a technicality prevented the delivery of justice, the parents stepped up to avenge their children. They literally tried the violator by fire to gain justice and a sense of protection for their children. This backfires horribly because, in doing so, they have given Krueger access to the dreamscape, which cannnot be killed. Everyone has to sleep to survive. The push of Krueger into this realm means that the children will inevitably have to confront the boogeyman, and the parents are the ones that placed them into harm’s way. It is inevitable. Marge mistakenly believes that her daughter is safe when telling Nancy, “He’s dead honey, because Mommy killed him.” However, once we get closer to the film’s climax, Marge is drunk off her ass and can’t protect her child, placing her trust in the locked doors rather than actively seeking a solution to stop the supernatural psycho. Marge insists on protecting her daughter in the physical realm, reducing Nancy to a child that needs that protection depsite that she is growing up.
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| Drunk? Yes. But at least she cares. |
That Nancy takes action indicates that she is progressing into the realm of adulthood, another inevitability of life. Nancy has to burn herself in order to be awakened from the dream, the first step in her journey toward action as self-preservation. Later, she is the one that devises the plan to lure Freddy out of her dreams and into the waking world, which she the booby traps. Ultimately, though, she (initially) defeats him by stating that she does not believe in him. This is a decision that she has to make for herself: she consciously needs to grow up and leave the fear of bedtime behind her like so many children before her. That she has to literally fight back speaks to the struggle that everyone must endure during their formative years: you have to face what makes you afraid, and you can’t always rely on your parents. Sometimes, in order to do it right, you need to do it yourself. No outsourcing of the inner demons to mommy and daddy.
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| You laugh because it’s true. |
Jump-scare ending aside, A Nightmare on Elm Street takes the fear of something happening to your child and pairs it with the need to grow up. Both have the potential to be scary and traumatic for all parties involved. Ultimately, the failure of a parent to protect his or her child from the demons of the world is inevitable. Sometimes, unintentional mistakes are made. And sometimes, the best you can do is arm your kid to fight back against the evils of the world. Thanks for helping us articulating that one, Wes. We’ll miss you.
