Hacker Cinema
A Nightmare on Elm Street
1984 · Film · 91 min
Directed by Wes Craven
Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop's daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers' children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world...
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9 comments on Hacker News
I think this is a great breakdown and analysis, though "‘Terminator’ Really Is a Horror Movie" is something a lot of people at or near the time of its release, including my eleven year old self watching it for the first time, understood intuitively. In my mind (and perhaps even in my local video store) it was always grouped with Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street
I remember watching the Watership Down film as a young child and being rather disturbed. I think it set me up well for watching Nightmare on Elm Street when I was about 9 though.
However, I've turned into a fairly well rounded individual (I don't try to murder rabbits or children in their dreams at least). The only downside is that I don't find horror films or rabbits particularly interesting.
Something recently made me think of Moses the raven though.
While I did specify theaters sort of like I expected a whole theater complex to be devoted to it, the more common example (at least around me) is for theaters to devote a portion of some theaters (as in "screens", the "theater" terminology is long past the point of being savable as referring to one distinct thing) to running specialty programs. For example, a weekly horror series where a couple showings a couple nights a week are Hellraiser this week, and Nightmare on Elm Street next week, and there's posters on the wall advertising the schedule and there have been fliers out for months outlining the schedule.
Theaters do that not just because they have arrangements with local governments, but because it's profitable. The way the theater industry works (or at least did when I worked in it at the entry level twenty years ago and had it explained to me) is that new releases have about 80% or more of their ticket sale cost go to the distributor/producer, and the rest the theater, and that percentage goes farther in the theater's favor every week after release (making movies that draw crowds for a long time much more lucrative). That's why concession purchases are so expensive, it's where they make a lion's share of the profit.
Older movies are likely much less costly to get and run, and could also possibly be offered to patrons for cheaper admittance. Concessions, of course, cost as they always do, and they still make that money. I suspect in a lot of cases, theaters might turn a better profit offering tickets at half price for older movies, making more money per ticket and for concession sales for each admittance, as long as they can fill the seats.
Things like that are what appeared to be going on in my area prior to the pandemic, where they would do a cult film series and have the 7 PM and 9 PM showings on Thursdays devoted to the cult film of the week (not sure if they ran one or two screens for it, possibly depended on attendance and how good the other movies where doing on the 14 screens it has).
Often movie theaters run special programs for periods of the year (or continuously), where they take a showing or two a week on a less busy night, and dedicate it to a series of movies they advertise through fliers. Since it's all planned out in advance for a few months, it's easy to see what's coming whenever you're at that theater. For example, they might to a horror themed series of movies, and you get Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, etc, each their own week and advertised together on a flier or poster months in advance with the date of each.
Nightmare on elm street is a horror movie from my childhood, I hate elm trees and the email tool and the language because they all bring horrible memories.
> Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is.
Shouldn't we be banning slasher flicks then?
When I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street as a kid, I never once thought "I wish I could murder people in their dreams with a glove full of knives."
Study after study refutes your unsubstantiated claim, so the burden of proof is on you here.
As a huge fan of his work I'm sad we don't get to see another reinvention of horror akin to what he did with scream.
Craven sort of puttered in the first 20 years of his career - first a professor, then a porn director (why not), then with a couple of smaller hits (last house on the left).
prior to Scream his big moment was clearly nightmare on elmstreet - he was 45 when it came out.
And I think the HN crowd that's gone through fundraising can relate to how this risky director with a big, crazy idea had to work to put it together:
"the film's original investors backed out at one point or another during pre-production. The original budget was merely $700,000. "It ended up at $1.1 million ... Half the funding came from a Yugoslavian guy who had a girlfriend he wanted in movies."[1]
How cool, will miss this guy who clearly brought the hustle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street
There are a lot of people who don't know what this is like; as someone who used to regularly experience this, I'd like to share some of my experience.
I have been in real situations that legitimately threatened my life and safety, and sleep paralysis consistently gave me comparable levels of stress and fear in each episode.
Imagine having a bad nightmare, so bad that you wake up from it. But when you wake up, your eyes are open and you cannot move. You see things that your mind logically knows cannot actually be there, but they are real for you. The REM dream state continues, overlapping reality.
In one case I woke up one my side to a large, dimly lit figure on the side of the bed, staring at me with red eyes. It just stared at me, while I physically felt something at the bottom of the bed dragging my body off. I couldn't move or even shift my head.
I was aware that I was awake, that this wasn't a dream anymore, but that this sort of paranormal situation should't be happening. I couldn't move, couldn't struggle - then the thing staring at me unhinged its jaws wider than should be humanly possible and screamed at me at the top of its lungs. It sounded like a human mixed with the shrill cry of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
I just remember trying to yell but not making noise, and feeling like I was drowning. I knew I was awake but the supernatural sense of wrongness was almost more terrifying than the hallucination.
Then, after what felt like minutes of struggling to breath, and the figure almost eating me, it all vanished, and I shook my body so violently I threw myself off the bed (seriously). I think I actually ran to the lights, turned them on and sat shuddering on my bed in the blanket for a while.
It's no joke. I used to regularly have these, and I sympathize with anyone who has had them. They're primarily caused by stress and anxiety (and have a high incidence in people with PTSD). It's not like a nightmare where you can convince yourself it wasn't real, because the things I hallucinated were as real to me as the lamp and nightstand.
Obviously I should say I didn't consume anything the night before. It's almost debilitating, and caused me insomnia for quite a while.
It was hard to describe to people - they are not the same things as night terrors. I would talk to people about it and they would say it was a bad nightmare. But it felt so real, it was like that scene from the Matrix with Neo and the bug.
Afterwards, details were always fully lucid and clear, and never became fuzzy. I eventually realized that the level of obsession I would get into when trying to get people to understand that it wasn't just a nightmare mirrored the hysterical reactions you would see from characters in Nightmare on Elm Street or the Exorcist. I never really believed in things like alien abduction, but I can fully understand why repeated exposure to sleep paralysis would cause someone to seriously question reality.
I'm with you. Not sure what the appropriate age is, but my friends read their 4 year old the books... and, don't think that was necessarily the best idea. I'm actually screening the Aristocats tonight to see if it's OK :)
That being said, my babysitter growing up lived in the woods... we ate bear stew for most dinners... and they only rented me horror movies. I saw all Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday 13th movies by the time I was about 8. Yeah, I had some twisted nightmares once in a while, but I think most kids do anyhow, and... I turned out alright!