Welcome to my house.

Oh god, No, what's wrong with your face?

What do you mean?

You're all like?

I guess I shouldn't have pointed it out those.

No, no, please please share your.

Opinion, your complexion.

You know you want to go there?

It's uh, how do you?

How do you do that?

I have knives on my fingers?

That's right?

Is that connected to the face thing?

Okay?

I tried to let that do and you just brought it right back.

Let me ask you one question, bitch, Are you scared?

Yes?

For the sake of yes, I am very scared.

Say it.

I'm scared.

Hi, I'm screwed.

I'm Freddy.

This podcast is about why horror scares us, what deep dark secrets scary cinema shines a light on.

The discussions are frank and involve conversations about abuse, trauma, and mental health.

There are also spoilers, so keep that in mind too.

Now, sharpen your machetes and straight razors, because this is Cutting Deep into Horror.

Hello, and welcome back to Cutting Deep into Horror.

I am, of course, your host Enrique Kuto here with my Cutting Deep into Horror co host Rachel.

Hey there, everybody, how are you, Rachel, I'm doing all right.

Good, good good?

How's your throat feel?

Your voice feel okay?

Uh?

My voice nice?

Yeah.

I wasn't gonna say anything, but my voice doesn't feel like I've been talking into a microphone every day for twelve hours a day.

Oh it's not twelve hours a day.

You can't you literally can't do that.

It just won't work.

You'll have no voice.

What's the maximum amount of time you can you can talk like.

Without like a noticeable like massive decline and vocal quality.

Probably four hours, and that's spread out over like ten or twelve hours because you have to take.

Breaks, right and rest it and everything.

Yeah, so I try to take the breaks and everything, and that four hours doesn't translate into four hours of recorded material, right it probably.

I think the most I've ever gotten out of a day, a single day of like narrated podcast or audiobook or whatever is about, is just shy of two hours.

And that was like really like the best I've ever done.

Like I felt great that day.

I had nothing else to do.

It was when I was up in the Michigan cabin and I built that little sound booth.

Yeah, I mean I was completely the only rule I had was that before I could wander around taking pictures in the upper peninsul of Michigan, I had to get two hours of audiobook done.

So I did.

But that was also all I did that whole day, other than goof off in Michigan.

So it's a lot easier that way.

It is, it is.

It's a lot easier than here, where I have a million other things I could and should be doing as well, And I have to really try not to get pulled away because you know, adderall only does so much.

It only works as much as you work it.

Yeah, you got to put in, put in the effort.

That's what.

That's what.

What's this, Winston Churchill said when he was taking amphetamines all day long.

So but no, we're back with cutting deep into horror where now need I would say ankle deep in spooky season at least?

Oh yeah, So, and we wanted to talk about one of my all time favorite horror movies and a movie that still creeps me out to this day, a movie that Rachel almost stayed awake through last night, A Nightmare on Elm Street from nineteen eighty four, directed by Wes Craven, Easily one of my favorite horror movies, my favorite horror movie individually, my favorite horror movie franchise, Everything about Ninemer on ELM Street.

I am just all about and have been for basically as long as I can remember.

I was watching those movies so un you know, unbearably young, because I had an older sister who was into them because when she was in high school.

My sister was born in like nineteen seventy eight or seventy nine, so when she was in high school, Freddie was absolutely all the rage.

Yeah, like that, everybody was into it.

When I was in high school, Freddie was like some kids knew, Like there were kids who knew who'd be like, oh, yeah, horror movies are cool.

But he wasn't a pop culture icon anymore.

Yeah, you know, he wasn't on every he wasn't everywhere anymore.

He was you had to find him m hm.

So but I, to me, he was always everywhere because I had the vhstifs because my sister also got too cool for that stuff when she was like, I don't know, sixteen or seventeen.

So I got all her tapes of Freddy, which were parts one through five, the original VHS's and I would watch part one.

I had to like gear myself up to watch it, like amp yourself phone, yeah, because it was scary, and I watching it by myself in my bedroom on my VCR at like freaking eight and eight years old.

So usually I would watch parts three and four.

Yeah, those were my favorites to watch.

They weren't too scary, but they were really fun.

I wouldn't have horrible nightmares from them often.

And when I was even younger, before I even got those tapes, I used to have all night movie watching with my sister, watching those movies, which, in hindsight, wow, what a loser.

She was hanging out with her like, you know, her like eight year younger brother watching movies on Saturday night when she was you know, twelve thirteen years old.

Wow she did not have many friends.

Huh No, no she did not.

But uh but m so I was watching them for a very long time.

I really mean that.

I'm not trying to be cute when it's like, oh, but what does those four probably was four or five like I probably was, and they scared the hell out of me.

They made me afraid a lot of going to sleep.

They also taught me how to abuse caffeine.

I used to.

In Night Brown Elm Street three, it opens with Kristen the main character, and she's trying not to sleep, so she takes a spoonful of Folger's Instant coffee and puts it in her mouth and then washes it down with a Coca cola.

Oooh.

I did that when I was when I was like eight, eight, nine years old.

I did that so I could stay up later watching movies.

That explained so much about you.

Well, I mean, but like yet, I completely averse to caffeine.

Now I really don't take take to it very much.

You got it all out of your system.

Then I stopped doing caffeine hardcore, like I mean, like I mean hardcore stopped when I was just before I was nineteen years old, really because I was into drinking coffee and energy drinks like I think, like everybody else was in our generation, like right at sixteen seventeen years old, and I used to I used to go one better because I used to go right when I was eighteen.

I would go on these crazy long trips and sometimes I'd have to drive through the night, so I would I would make a tea like lipped in tea.

But I would take like a big full stockpot and I would put like forty tea bags in it, and I would steep it overnight and it would turn jet black, like light couldn't go through it.

Yeah, And like I'm pretty sure one swig of it was like a whole cup of coffee worth of caffeine.

It was, and it and it legit nitimately tasted like medicine.

Like it didn't taste good.

It tasted kind of like niquil almost, like that almost licorice.

It was so bitter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I used to drink that.

We called it Henny super Tea when I was because I used to always have it with me when I would travel, this big jug of it, and I remember I would share it with people and they'd be like, oh God, like, oh, could you should put some sugar and lemon in this or something?

And I was like no, and they'd be like why not, and I'd be like because I did that?

And then I drank too much of it.

No, really, like I drank so much I woke up.

I was at a convention and I was pounding it all day and it was this big container of it.

And because I had like I'd sugared it down and put some lemon in it, and I woke up in the morning with like my entire head dried out because it was just so much caffeine and I was pounding it and pounding it.

So yeah, it was not my smartest move ever.

And I'll effective, well, I'll.

Complete the saga of my adventure with caffeine and then maybe even talk about night Bra and Elm Street right after this.

So to wrap up my point about caffeine, So I was drinking this super tea stuff all the time because I outwardly hated how red Bull tasted and I was and coffee tasted bad, so I was like, well, this is even better than coffee.

This is this is brutality in a cup and you are just awake.

In fact, I remember I had a friend of mine took a swig of it and was just like, oh my god, and then they were like whoa, Like I could feel how much caffeine is in this, and I was like, yeah, if it gets any thicker than that, you have to cut it into chunks and smoke it.

So I was I was a caffeine fiend for a hot minute there.

And then I got my first job, like right before I turned nineteen, and it was in an office, and everybody in that office was like most offices, you know, was just very like not before my coffee, where's my coffee?

I need the coffee, where's my coffee mug, where's you know, there's such a focus on coffee, especially in this This would have been two thousand and six, and I feel like that culture was especially big in offices.

You know.

Now there's cuig culture where it's like, not everybody's dying for a hit of caffeine necessarily, or if they are, they're getting it from like their monster energy drink at lunch or whatever.

But back then or and so in the morning, they're wanting their cureig stuff, you know, They're wanting their fancy tea or their you know, carmel bachiado blah blah blah.

You know, that's what they want.

But when I saw how everybody was like a grouchy zombie and excused it because they needed their coffee, I swore it off.

I'm not kidding.

I remember it going through like brutal headaches and every I just was like I don't want to I don't want any more caffeine.

And then I didn't have any caffeine for probably four years.

Aside from emergencies like driving all night.

I would have this all yeah, driving all night and have like one, you know, frappuccino thing or something.

And now I'm in.

I've been a very very sensitive caffeine for a very long time, so I don't enjoy caffeine very much at all.

Yeah, it's a very exciting story.

But to tell you all that is that my relationship to caffeine is directly related to Knightmroren Elm Street and teenager's relationship to caffeine is very important in all the Knight Barren Elm Street movies, and they're all trying to stay awake so that Freddy doesn't kill them.

For those who somehow might not know, that's what a nightmare on Elm Street is about.

I don't know how you could have missed that, but maybe somehow you did.

But we're talking about nightmurare Elm Street, which you can see right now.

I'm trying to find where it's streaming, I think because it was on HBO Max for a minute there, but I don't know if it's still there or not.

But but uh, let's see, so it is on Amazon Prime.

What why is Google suck?

Like Google has gotten so much worse.

Yeah, it doesn't even try anymore.

It's not even trying.

Well, you could definitely rent it on Amazon.

You could rent it on Fandango.

It says Sling TV with subscription, but that it doesn't say to what.

So it's like, well, that's really helpful to what what?

Am I okay?

So AMC okay?

So AMC Plus has Nightmare on Elm Street.

Now that makes a little bit more sense.

I love how I had to click like five things and it doesn't show that AMC has it, just that it has it through Filo.

I really wish there was actually an effective place to find out when things are streaming, because there are a bunch of places trying, yeah, and none of them have ever really been able to nail it.

So anyway, but regardless of all that, if you haven't seen nightmron Elm Street, that's bizarre.

But it's about a killer named Freddy Krueger who is stalking children in their dreams and killing them.

And if you die in your dreams, well you die for real.

So that's that's Nightmarren Elm Street in a nutshell, and I was talking about how the first times I've seen it, like I, Freddy Kruger and Nightmare Elm Street is so ubiquitous it would be impossible for me in my life.

It would be impossible for me to tell you which one I saw first and when exactly, because in my mind, Freddy Krueger has always been a thing.

Yeah.

No, I mean not far off.

You know.

He does when you're sleeping, you know.

But and he is clause so very much like Santa Claus.

Very well done, very well done.

I'm gonna pretend like I meant to do that.

Oh I know, of course you did.

Of course she did.

Yeah.

But yeah, So that was my first time watching.

It was forever ago.

I don't exactly know, and I don't know if I watched the first one first, but the first one was always the scariest one, And it was always the one that if I had friends over from school, I would make them watch.

I'd make them watch Nightmare one to scare the hell out of them.

The scariest one.

You gotta go with the scariest one.

Yeah, And and I remember one time I had a friend who was over and I showed him Nightmann ELM Street.

And when we started watching part two, I put on my Freddy Krueger glove like I'd hid in my closet, and I like turned to him and like did like a silly Freddy voice like you know, hey, da da da, and he screamed and ran out of my bedroom like trying to get out of the house.

He was so startled.

And then his and then he called down.

But then his parents called my mom and were like, did your son show my son a scary movie?

And my mom was literally just like grow up, like just don't don't let him come over.

Then I'm sorry.

The world's not the world's not the way you wanted to be, all right, that was my mom's response.

So there you go.

That sounds yeah, that sounds like you're well yeah.

So, so do you remember your first time seeing thatt MANELM Street.

I do, because it was with you.

Really yeah, so it was actually like one of the first, one of the first horror movies that you showed me.

Because even though I worked at Hollywood Video, which was when I kind of like really got to get into cinema, Yeah, I wasn't I wasn't really into horror that much.

So aside from things like The Host, I was into.

I was into uh Korean horror, I guess, because I guess there was like The Host and the Tale of Two Sisters, but I didn't really see a lot of horror movies.

So it's you were the person introducing me to horror, and you asked which which villain I was like the most interested in, and I was like, easily Freddy Krueger because that seems like the scariest is somebody that can get you in your dreams.

So you showed me.

You showed me the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Oh okay, wow, I mean I think I remember that I was the first to show you, but it still just seems crazy that you, especially working at a video store, hadn't seen it yet.

Yeah.

So wow.

Well, I'm glad I could be of service.

But after this quick break, I want to know what your first impressions were.

But that'll be We'll be right after this.

So I show you Nightmare on Elm Street.

Was it a I apologize, I don't remember.

I don't know if I remember the details.

Was it like, did I have the projector yet.

Or no, no, you did not have.

You just watched it on TV?

Yeah, okay, I mean just on TV.

I'm sure I had like a big game.

Can It was a big screen TV.

It was like large, not as big as the one you have now, No.

No, what is I don't I wish I could.

I can't.

I can't.

I can't have a bigger TV because a stand won't hold it without being mounted to the walls.

If it's much bigger, so and I can't mount it to the wall, I'd lose all my storage for my Blu rays.

So yeah, therein lies the conundrum.

Yeah, and it would also be four feet further back, so then you're almost like losing the purpose of a big, bigger TV.

But then I have one hundred and twenty inch projection screen, which a knight rynolal Street looked amazing on that new four K by the way, yeah, it looked green.

I was very pleased with that.

And of course we watched the uncut version, which is which is for the first time ever, was released on the four K disc.

It literally, guys, don't feel bad if all you have is the Blu ray or something.

It's it's like forty seconds.

Yeah, it was not that much different.

No, it's just more of the most bloody moments of the movie.

So like when Tina hits the bed, it's and it's covered in blood.

Originally there was a splat, like a noticeable splash of blood, and in the original version you just heard it and you saw Rod get a little blood on him, and then this version you see or hit it and you see it splat on him.

There's more blood during Johnny Depp scene.

It's just stuff like that's nothing crazy because nightmren Elm Street was not a notoriously censored film.

Yeah in America, I mean or censor's even the wrong word, but cut because it's not really censorship, it's the NPAA.

But also screw them.

But no, the only film that was really of Nightmare on Elm Streets that was like beat to hell by the NPAA was Part five, really Part five there there supposedly the box set that comes out, it'll by the time you're hearing this, it'll already be out the four K box set and I'll already have it, thank goodness.

But supposedly there's gonna be a remastered uncut Part five finally, which is something that we've been hoping for forever.

There was an uncut part five on VHS, but for some reason it never made it to DVD or blu Ray huh.

Well, I mean the reason is probably that they would have to recreate a film version because it was probably created from a tape.

But anyway, so we sit down, we put it on the TV.

What were your thoughts.

I thought it was amazing because it was I mean, it was one of the first classic horror films that i'd seen.

I mean classic as in the eighties, classic is in the eighties.

Yeah, I mean yeah, I guess I could have rephrased that.

Well, now I'm trying to think, like, what would you consider horror that I had seen before, because like that was mostly relegated to monster movies like Godzilla, Them.

Oh them is a classic horror movie?

Well?

And is I'm just picking on you.

It is a classic.

I don't know how else you could define it.

It's just also sometimes when people think classic, they think Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein.

But that's like literal classic, that's it's like the beginning of sound movies.

Yeah.

Yeah, so as far as eighties classic, that was, you know, one of the very first ones I saw.

So it was a very scary experience, but it was also like a delightful experience to finally partake in that piece of pop culture that I'd missed out on, you know.

H I think so yeah.

I mean when I was a kid, one thing that would get me like a little bit of friends was that I had all these horror movies.

Because some kids, that was like a big deal to get to see a Freddie Krueger movie or see a Jason Vorhees movie.

That was a big deal.

And I had them, you know, I didn't have to I didn't even have to rent them or anything.

I just had them between the VHS tapes I got from my sister and the ones my Betty taped off a satellite.

She would tape every movie off of satellite.

My copy of Freddie's Dead, which is Ambonnel Street Part six up until the DVD which that that first DVD box at for Nightmarnel Street was incredible.

It had an interact, It had a disc full of extras that were an interactive game.

Then you unlocked the extras through solving puzzles.

Ooh, that's fun.

It was really incredible, and it like pushed the absolute limit of DVD technology.

It was really really cool.

As somebody who's programmed a ton of DVDs, I look back at it and I'm fascinated by it.

Oh yeah, But but for until I got that set, my copy of Freddie's Dead was a VHS tape with a label with my aunt Betty's handwriting and pencil on the label and just said Freddy's Dead.

So Betty loved her horror movies.

I'm Betty was those who wouldn't know my great aunt, so she's more like a grandmother than an aunt.

And she loved her horror movies, and she loved her bad horror movies.

But she would never like talk about that.

It's just you would you would find like in the Horror of the Blood Monsters, I found a copy.

I found a copy of Horror of the Blood Monsters in Betty's little cabinet with like VHS tapes, And years later I actually found that VHS.

That addition, because I have it, I bought a copy on eBay.

But the funny thing is I didn't remember.

I remembered the cover a little bit, but what I really really remembered was on the back a guy with horrible looking vampire fangs and fake blood that looked like it was like plastic on your chin, Like it didn't look like it was actually liquid.

It looked like it was solid but meant to look like blood.

It looked that bad, and I no joke.

When I started thinking about it, I was like, that sounds like an al Adamson movie would because they were horrible.

So I started looking at al Adamson VHS tapes.

I remembered a few other things.

It had a monster on the front.

I remember that the tape was mostly white.

So I started hunting and hunting, and sure enough I found a couple that weren't it.

Then I found one and when I looked at the pictures of the back, there was the horrible looking vampire with the fangs and the blood that didn't look like blood on his chin.

And that was Horror of the blood monsters.

And it was an al Adamson movie.

And not only that, extra points al Adamson, who was a king of schlock in the sixties and seventies.

The vampire on the back was al Adamson.

So there you go.

But that was a funny moment, just going wow.

So Aunt Betty had a Horror of the Blood Monsters vhs that you had to send away for.

I mean, she's really wanted it.

Yeah, but you know, she wouldn't like sit down and show you horror movies, you know, but she'd give you a tape.

You know.

She had satellite dish when that wasn't very common, so she'd pulled down all kinds of channels, so she was always taping stuff.

She had a wall of vhs next to her lazy boy aw and she would just hand them to You'd be like, you like them horror movies, right, Rick, just give me one.

So anyway, But so it blew your mind a bit, Yeah, it did.

Was what was the thing that scared you the most or grabbed you the most, just off the top of your head.

A lot of the the nightmare and dream imagery that they relied on really creeped me out, and revisiting it last night, I was reminded how effective and simple some of those scares are.

So the uh, the scene where Freddy's kind of like pushing his way through a wall, I thought that was really scary.

I mean, where it's like the wall stretching, he's kind of imprinting through it exactly.

Yeah, that's that's an incredible image and very very scary.

Yeah, that one, That one really got me.

And the stairs becoming like sticky and like sticking, you know, sinking into the stairs.

Yeah, your feet going through it and it being full of like bisquic, Yeah, be sticky gunk.

Almost like you're stuck in a glue trap.

Yeah.

Yeah, that one, that one really got me.

And of course the uh Freddy with the DeLong twisted arms.

Oh yeah, where Yeah it was so that you can't run past him.

His arms are extending from ten feet each way.

Yeah.

Yeah, really bizarre images.

I from what I understand, Wes Craven, the writer and director of Ameralm Street had was a very prolific dreamer.

Mm hmm, and that was one of the big elements that inspired the film.

And we'll talk a lot about that because Wes Craven is a fascinating guy and nightmares in general.

Right after this, so before we dig in a further or cut deeper, So are you a prolific dreamer?

Do you have a lot of nightmares?

Do you have or have you had a lot of nightmares or anything like that.

I have had a lot of nightmares.

I had terrible nightmares as like a young child into my teen years.

So uh, and this is I'm gonna sound like such a big white bitch, but that's that's why I became a lucid dreamer, so I could at least like get out of dreams.

I don't dream as much now, but every once in a while, all still that part of you is dead.

Yeah.

Yeah, the the whimsy died years ago.

Now, when you say you became a lucid dreamer, do you mean that you actively became one or just that it was kind of you just kind of turned out to be one.

I actively became one.

I like did research on how to uh, how to lucid dream and started practicing, you know, practicing different different techniques.

Sometimes I would lucid dream as a kid, and my big one was I'm not kidding.

When a dream got really scary, I used to imagine that I turned off a VCR.

Oh that's that's good, and I would wake up.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's I didn't have a ton of really scary dreams, although I will tell you I had one very scary Freddy Krueger dream.

And it was Freddy and he was like standing on this like this platform, you know, like ah haha, you know, all his glory, and it was like the net at Chuck E Cheese.

You know that you climb the net, Yeah, big white name.

It was like that, but it was over top of molten lava and it was just like the lava was just like rushing by.

And that was the scariest Freddy Krueger nightmare I had.

That is really scary.

It was a hell of an image.

Yeah, But otherwise, I mean I'd have nightmares.

I'd have nightmares I was running from things or whatever.

But I was never a very big dreamer in general.

And the only times as an adult I've had like super duper vivid dreams have been when I've been on medications.

Like when I first started taking zolof years ago, I had friggin' dreams out the wazoo.

Not necessarily nightmares, just dreams like constantly.

I was used to going to sleep and not remembering my dreams, and all of a sudden, I was just like I would I would nod off for five minutes and I would remember my dreams like it was super weird.

And then when I stopped taking well that eased up.

Anyway, and then I stopped taking it, so obviously I didn't have those dreams anymore.

Now I'm on synthroid for my thyroid, and a side effect of that, well, an effect of having a hypothyroid is you don't remember your dreams.

So that's a very high simplification.

But so the medication has made me dream a lot lately.

Mostly fine.

Had a couple of nightmares.

Last week.

I had a nightmare that like messed me up for the whole day.

Yeah, that was that was a bad one.

But generally I'm fine.

I'm fine.

So you don't find yourself having the big nightmares these days, no, not really.

Every once in a while, you know, life will get to you and I'll have, you know, I'll have a really intense stream or a stress stream.

Stress dreams are what I have.

They're not necessarily scary, but they're frustrating the.

Exactly where it's not like, oh no, I'm being chased by something.

It's more like, oh no, I just realized that I've got to buy new tires for my car, and so I have to sit there waiting in the tire shop like the whole dream.

Wow, tough gig.

Yeah, it's not not too fun, poor baby.

But yeah, as a child, I would have really really bad nightmares.

And I think that's why the the stairs sequence grabs me so much, is because one of the recurring themes I would have is like trying to run away from something or trying to get to safety, and like the the ground starting to get sticky or starting to swallow me up, So that that just reminded me of the nightmares I would have as a kid, So it's super effective for me.

That makes sense, That's That's kind of what I was getting at, was, Yeah, if you had a lot of nightmares and it reminded you of them.

So an interesting thing about Wes Craven is he I mean, he became kind of synonymous with horror movies and he's a was unfortunately lost him a few years back, man in twenty fifteen.

It feels much more recent.

But Wes Craven was originally a college teacher.

He was a college professor, or maybe he was a high school teacher who yeah, he was a high school teacher who had dreams of making movies.

But it's so much more interesting than that because he grew up in a very very devout evangelical Baptist family.

So he did not watch television or see movies until he was in college.

Oh wow.

And he didn't read very many books that weren't related to, you know, religion and his faith.

So Craven never watched movies through the lens of anything other than analytics.

Like analytically, I guess the way to put it.

Because he had no nostalgia for movies.

Yeah, he had no nostalgia for like, oh, well, that movie's kind of silly, but I liked I've liked it a long time.

He didn't have any movies he liked for a long time.

He didn't have any movies he grew up with.

So he always looked at movies very differently than most people.

And when he made his splash, before he was able to make movies, he was just volunteering on sets and working on sets.

Supposedly, and I think it's true he directed a porno movie.

Back then.

That was not uncommon, especially if you're on the East Coast, if you could get because making movies back then was pretty much the same no matter what the movie was.

You needed a crew, you needed lights, you had to have a film editor, you had to know how to do all this stuff.

Yeah, so you know.

But his first film as a director was The Last House on the Left, which I don't think you've seen.

I have not.

It is a very powerful, upsetting movie.

It's loosely based on Oh gosh, what is it called.

I can't believe I'm not remembering.

It's like the there's this Swedish Spring or something like that.

It's an old story about these bad guys who end up staying in the house of the of the parents of the woman they just murdered, not unknowingly, and the parents figure it out first and attack them and kill them.

Oh but that's like a very basic concept of Last House on the Left.

But it's a very grisly movie.

Wes Craven was very adamant that if he's going to show horrific things, then it should be horrific.

So there's a scene where they like murder somebody and they like cut their stomach open, and then there's a two minute sequence of everybody just kind of sitting there after they did it, just kind of like living in the reality the bad guys ooh, including like how are they going to wash their hands and stuff like, because they're in the Woods, Like it's really rough and very very smart and scary.

So that was great.

Then, of course his big hit that was kind of a hit, and then his other bigger hit was The Hills Have Eyes, which is a kind of cannibal survival movie, also pretty damn good.

But he came up with a Nightmare on Elm Street and really wanted to make it because, in his words, the way he understood being scared was nightmares.

Because he didn't have books or movies or TV shows that were scary, or even radio that was scary.

So the original horror movie in his life was nightmares.

So he had a lot he'd spent a lot of time thinking about his own nightmares and what they meant and why he was scared of them.

I like that, Yeah, I mean he's a really fascinating guy.

There's he never wrote a biography or a memoir sadly, but there is one.

There was one written by about him.

I wish I could remember the title off the tome my head, but I read it and it's very interesting.

Yeah, he's a very very interesting guy.

And we'll talk more about that and how Nightmre and Elm Street came to be.

Right after this, so yes, Wes Craven fascinating guy, super fascinating guy, made a lot of really interesting movies.

I know you're a huge fan of Red Eye, which is one of his later films that was really good, really shocking.

He had a very troubled career.

He was always trying to get out of the horror ghetto, as they like to call it, because he tried to get so many movies off the ground, and ironically enough, he had a horrible time getting Nightmare and Elm Street off the ground.

Everyone turned it down.

Oh really everybody did.

Why they said, in his words, why would anybody be scared of this?

If it's just a dream, That's what they would say.

If you die in your dreams, than you dian.

Really, they just didn't think that it would be scary.

So the way that the film ended up getting made was he talked to a guy named Bob Shay who owned a at the time, very small, very boutique distribution company called New Line Cinema.

And I'm not being sarcastic.

It was a little company called New Line Cinema and they had had just a few modest hits with Evil Dead and Pink Flamingos and a few other films, but they had never had anything really huge.

They had just started having offices in California.

I think, wow, that's how early they were in eighty so, and this would have been like eighty two or eighty three.

And making nightmron elm Street on a budget of about one point one million dollars.

It's important to keep in mind that that's a lot of money compared to say Halloween with its like one hundred and something thousand dollars budget or two hundred thousand dollars budget thirteenth around the same two hundred thousand dollars budget, Ayron Elms Street was a lot.

More expect yeah, I mean all the effects on everything.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's just a much bigger movie, much more scope and scale.

And Craven had a horrible time getting the money together, and even Shay couldn't just come up with the money.

He had to mortgage his home and bring in some outside investors, and he was hustling all the time to get the movie made.

And it's one of the reasons there are so many sequels is that Bob Shay, because it was such a massive financial risk for him, he demanded a lot for his money.

As far as the rights, the film rights, sequel rights, etc.

Go.

He demanded a lot, and famously he didn't pay Craven his royalties, which Craven was owed royalties for all of the sequels and stuff and suppose reportedly never gotten them.

So when they started talking to him about making nightbron elm Street Part seven to bring him back to try and reinvigorate the franchise, he had one meeting with Bob and Bob said, like, I understand that I haven't like handled whatever, so I hope this help, and apparently slit him a check for an amount of money.

Nobody knows how much it was, but it was probably a lot.

And that because you gotta remember, we had Freddy Krueger movies every year, and then by nineteen ninety we're doing teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and by the end of the nineties it's freaking Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, yeah, so Freddy Freddy kind of skyrocketed New Line.

Bob Shay used to call New Line Cinema the house that Freddie built because unlike most series, and this is very serious, like very for real, most films, the sequels The benefit to them is not that they will make more money.

It's that they'll hopefully make the same amount of money with half or even less than half as much advertising, because the first film has established the market the market for it, right, So it's very normal for sequels to make less money than their predecessors and still be hits.

People sometimes think that that's not the case because in really incredible exceptions like Knight, Brown, elm Street, John Wick, whatever, each movie's bigger.

But that's super not normal.

Yeah, yeah, so you can't hope that.

You can't expect that to be what your movie does.

If you make sequels, you can't expect it to be bigger and bigger and bigger.

Well, Night, Brown Elm Street.

Not only was each film bigger than the last, but then the VHS sales were bigger than the last as well, to the point where they were breaking records.

Part three and Part four I believe both broke VHS rental sale records entirely back to back.

Damn.

So it was printing money.

It was making so much money, And of course there was the nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety Freddy's Nightmares TV series.

There was so much merchandise.

Freddie was everywhere.

And the thing that it's easy for people to forget because of that is how scary Freddie actually was in the beginning, because he did become kind of a cartoon character of a child killing maniac.

I don't know what to tell you there, but that's the way it is.

So they would he had grown into so much.

But that first film was sincerely scary and unusual in the best kind of ways.

It reminds me a lot of when we were talking about Evil Dead last time, how Evil Dead spawned a series of films in a TV series that were a lot more lighthearted.

But that first movie is so scary and so claustrophobic and really is incredible to look at on its own.

And that's how I feel about Nightmren Elm Street.

I think I know Freddy lore backwards and forwards.

I've been obsessed with Freddy Krueger for forever.

But when I watched Nightmare Elm Street and take it as just the one film, it's way more.

It's very exciting, it's very scary.

Yeah, you know, if I don't if I pretend I don't know about the sequels, then I can interpret the ending a million different ways things like that.

So that's my you know, my whole rant.

Wes Craven was a genius.

He made a lot of movies.

Some of them were really great, some of them were not so great, but he was always making something interesting.

Nightmare ELM Street, by the way, its initial box office earn was fifty seven million dollars against a one million dollar budget, so a mild success, yeah, I would say so.

And the sequel did even more than that, really, oh gosh, yeah, and they rushed part two.

I like Part two.

I don't think it's it's that bad.

It does have like the gay subtexts, which I actually think just makes the movie more interesting.

But it was made for three million and made thirty million, so see that was a little bit smaller, although it was in theaters less long.

But then Part three they spent four point six and it made forty four million, and at this point VHS sales were exploding.

Then they spent six point five on Nightmare Lmstreet four and it made forty nine point four million.

Wow.

So then the decline began with Part five, which they spent eight and made twenty two and then Freddy's Dead, which was made nineteen ninety one, where they spent about eleven million and made about thirty five.

So it's a decline for the series.

But if that was just numbers for a movie, just any movie, wouldn't that still be considered like a success.

Yeah, it would.

It's just at some point you're like, people are clearly getting tired of this concept.

Yeah, so if we keep like, do we just keep going until we lose money?

Is that the goal?

You know?

So then after five years they had Wes Craven come back to New Nightmare and it was not a very big hit.

It was very well received, but it was not a big hit.

They spent eight million dollars and made about twenty but of course HS was massive back then.

So but then, of course they're all dwarfed by Freddy versus Jason, which cost thirty million and made one hundred and sixteen million, But.

That had the power of two franchises behind it, so like, yeah, well what's crazy?

That point I want to point out is Knight brehn elm Street remake from twenty ten, which I was not a huge fan of, although one of my favorite moments in it is when they say, like we should just meth to like stay awake, and then he's like, where do you get meth?

And he's like, I don't know.

They don't do it because they literally have no idea how to buy meth, which is just a really funny exchange.

It cost thirty five million dollars and made one hundred and seventeen million, and for some reason it never spawned a sequel because it was actually very successful, wow comparatively, Yeah so, but yeah, so that's kind of a rundown of Freddy's history.

The house that Freddy built.

We'll talk about the actual movie maybe if You're Lucky, if You're good, when we get back.

So, the opening of Nightmare and elm Street is so brilliantly simple and iconic, much like Freddy Krueger himself.

It opens with these dirty hands and a work bench full of garbage and he's making something mm hm.

And as we see him making something out of metal and sharpening it, it's slowly revealed that it's a leather glove with knives attached to it, and not just attached, but attached through hinged metal, so that their claws, I mean, they'll they have pressure.

You can, you know, yeah, you can really get purchase with them.

And just that concept is fascinating to me.

The idea of the finger knives, It's just it's so simple but so evil, Like who would think to make a glove with knives on it to kill people?

Yeah?

Like why wouldn't you just.

Use a knife or a Yeah, it would be simpler.

Yeah, but he built it.

And that's because Freddy is is devious as hell.

And I mean we find out pretty early on, well not that early on, but Freddy's a child killer.

Mm hmm.

That's what happened when he was alive.

He was a child murderer and he had killed potentially twenty children if we follow just the lore of this of this film.

I'm not gonna dig into all the stuff from the later movies.

He killed potentially twenty children.

But he was released on a technicality because the search warrant was not filled out properly.

So literally he was to stand trial.

They had found evidence that he had killed these children, and then he had to be let go because the judge was like, I can't he This search warrant makes all of the evidence in admissible.

So the parents all get together and they burn him alive.

Some good old Frontier Justice in the Suburbs.

Yeah, because we as we go from the making of the Glove, we head into Tina's nightmare, which is a very great primer for the movie.

It's this, you know, young blonde woman in her nightgown running around a boiler room which Freddie supposedly took the kids that he killed to this old, abandoned boiler room, and he's stalking her.

There's all kinds of bizarre dream imagery.

There's a sheep running past her and stuff.

There's just all these odd choices that I can only imagine we're actually in someone, whether it's Craven or somebody who he knews nightmares, because it's so out of left field.

I can't imagine it being made up.

Yeah, so what do you think of this whole sequence where he's stalking this young woman.

I think it's a beautiful introduction because not only does it immediately prime us for the nightmare logic that we're going to be following, it also gives us a great introduction to Freddy, his backstory and kind of his motive, which his motive is pretty simple.

It's just be evil.

No, I mean, I mean that's and in this movie in particular.

I mean, he's that's really his entire purpose.

Yeah, he just wants to be evil.

He just wants to be terrorizing people until he kills them.

M he's playing with his food for lack of mit term.

Yeah, he I mean, he's very much like a predator in that way, because a lot of the dream sequences are very much a game of cat and mouse between him and his next victim.

But it's also a great introduction to Tina and kind of sets us up for the fake out later on because we kind of expect Tina to be the heroine, to be the final girl, especially because she's the first person we're introduced to.

She's the person that we kind of learn about Freddie with.

So I think it's it's a great way of introducing the story.

Well.

And she's young and pretty.

She's the blonde girl.

She has the look, she has a Hollywood look, you know, the Hollywood look of a high school senior.

Yeah, which is you know, which would would be the Hollywood look of a high school senior back then.

Was like a drop dead, gorgeous twenty four year old woman.

And that's one thing that's easy to forget because, like I said, this movie has become so ubiquitous.

Everybody thinks of Nancy Heather langing Camp as the lead because she is and she's incredible, But if you didn't know anything, it would feel like Tina's the lead character.

Yeah, because Nancy is just here and there, here and there, and they cast Heather langing Camp, which was brilliant, a brilliant move.

She looks like an awkward teen girl.

Yeah, yeah, she doesn't.

She was about twenty or twenty one at the time, but she just looked like she hadn't quite gotten out of her awkward phase yet.

She still had that kind of babyface.

I don't know how to describe it, because she is a beautiful woman, but like she just looks a little awkward.

Yeah, And I think that that's so perfect for Nancy, because Nancy is kind of an average girl who at turns out is anything but exactly.

So I yeah, I think that that's That's something that I always think about.

So Tina, of course, running away from Freddy.

Freddie jumps up behind her.

We get our first really big jump scare, and she wakes up in bed screaming.

Her mother comes in and you know, she says, sorry, I was having a bad dream, and her mom says, must have been some dream and there are four slits down her nightgown.

Yeah, And her mother, because the parents are all about not listening to the kids and explaining away their fears, says, you got to you gotta either cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dream.

And it's one or the other.

And that's my favorite thing about night Brown elm'street about all the films is that the instincts of the parents.

It's like, Mom, Dad, I'll die if I go to sleep.

And the first thing is like, all you need is a good night's sleep, and you don't feel better.

It's like, what, what are you even listening?

Yeah, it's like, no, you you're you're just freaking out over nothing.

Oh hormones.

Well, I mean that's not a horrible statement.

You know.

Hormones do do all kinds of crazy things to you.

It's true.

But there was a in Nightmare three when they're in group therapy trying to figure out why they all have this group psychosis about a guy in their dreams, which they even say, like, isn't it weird we all dreamt about the same guy before any of us knew each other, and nobody seems to give a shit.

They say that in the in the yeah, but she says like, oh, it's brought on by guilt and late in sexuality, and kin K goes, great, now it's my dick that's trying to kill me.

Just the teens are so well written, and even the worst Nightmare on Elm Street movie, I feel like they're they're always captured pretty well.

Yeah.

But so so this is all based actually very loosely on a true story.

By the way, Oh really, that's something I meant to bring up when we were talking about Wes Craven, but I guess I could bring it up now, well not now after this.

So I'm going to give you the very basics of the true story as I understand it on Nightmare Elm Street.

Because it's been told a bunch of ways, there's not a lot of information out there about it.

I did an episode of Terrifying and True about the Cambodian I think it was Cambodian sleep deaths, and there really isn't that much info.

But Wes Craven said that he had had a he had read a story about some refugees from Laos and the among people from Vietnam and Laos.

They were see, now I'm making sure I'm not messing this up.

Well, they were Laotian for sure, okay, and they had escaped, you know, horrible things in their home country.

And suddenly the young men were dying in their sleep.

They were going to sleep and not waking up, and there was no apparent reason.

And according to Craven, one of the stories he read was that a young man had been telling his parents like, I can't go to sleep.

If I go to sleep, I'm going to die.

And they were like, oh god.

So he was like trying not to sleep for days and days, and they were like, this is getting bad because if you don't sleep, you go crazy.

So eventually they didn't know what else to do, so they just kind of hung out with him, you know, tried to act like things were normal, and finally he fell asleep on the couch.

So they picked him up and took him to bed and tucked him in and we're like, thank god, that's over.

You know, once two wakes up in the morning, he'll he'll feel a lot better.

And in the middle of the night they heard him screaming and thrashing and when they got to the room, he was dead in his bed.

Wow.

Now this I don't know how true that is.

That's what Craven said, that that's what he read.

But he said that that was scary enough.

But then he heard about how when they were cleaning up his room they found under a rug this extension cord that led into the closet, and in the closet there was a little personal coffee maker that they didn't even know he had.

So he had been secretly drinking coffee and forcing himself not to go to sleep because he was afraid he was going to die.

And yeah, it was it's it's now the true story.

I believe it's like four or five people died like this, which is pretty insane.

Yeah, that's still a lot.

And there's never been a full explanation that I've been able to find, but who knows, there could be more.

This is obviously this is not the true crime portion of the program.

This is this is me just recounting things that that Wes Craven said that inspired the concept.

So he came up with this concept of like what if your nightmares were killing you mm hmm, And where he got The idea for Freddy Krueger is twofold number one.

Freddy.

There was a bully he dealt with when he was a kid named Freddie and number two.

One night he was home with his little brother and they were upstairs in bed, and he looked out the window next to his bed and saw this drunk, disheveled vagrant walking down the street and he just kept staring at the sky.

He had a he had some kind of a jacket or sweater, and he had a hat like kind of like Freddy does.

And as he was staring at the sky, the guy just looked over at him and made eye contact with him.

You know, little eight year old Wes Craven, this old man just looks at him and smiled.

And he said that the grin on his face just scared the hell out of him, like I'm not supposed to be interacting with this man at all, Like this is bad.

And supposedly later that night he'd went he'd went downstairs or something, and if I murmur correctly, and that man was like standing against the glass in the door of his front house.

But Craven swears that the guy intentionally scared him, like the guy was being a jerk, like he was just playing a joke on a kid.

That's the way I remember it.

It's been a while since I heard Craven say it.

Tell it.

If you want to know everything there ever is to know about Freddy Krueger, just watch them Never Sleep Again documentary, which is four and a half hours long.

It covers everything every single movie, every detail.

It's really fascinating.

With four hour runtime, I would hope.

It really leaves almost no stone unturned.

I mean, it's nothing compared to Crystal Lake Memories, which is eight and a half hours long.

So but so that story, you know, scared him a lot as a kid, and that's what kind of inspired the Freddy Krueger look, Okay, to look like this vagrant who played a joke on a kid at night was trying to scare him.

And the red and green sweater came from the idea that he had read in a science journal that the hardest colors for the eye to see close together are red and green.

Okay, so that just made him want to do a red and green striped sweater, which, of course then and I guess he hadn't thought that people would say, well, that's a Christmas sweater, but I so and one thing that does drive people crazy in this film, Freddy's sleeves don't have stripes on them in the first one.

Oh, Freddie's sleeves do not have stripes in the first movie.

They do in all the other ones, yeah, but not this one.

But you don't see Freddie that much, so that makes it harder to notice.

There are also people I knew for years who were adamant that Freddy had black stripes and that it was black.

Not at all that one.

I don't recall that at all.

But yeah, a lot of people are just like, what do you mean he didn't He didn't have any stripes on his sleeves.

They were just red.

Yeah.

But again, you never see him in like daylight.

You never see him like clear as a day, as opposed in the sequels where you do so anyway, So that's kind of the basis of Freddy, the origin story, the origin of the concept of how he looked and how he acted.

Freddie played by Robert England, who just killed that role.

I mean, he just did such incredible work with it.

And before this film, Robert England was known for being on v a science fiction TV show, and then he became the most famous fictional child murderer of all time, excluding any biblical characters.

So, and he was young guy.

He was I think he was like thirty, that is young when he played Freddie.

And Craven said that when he saw guys who were the age Freddie was supposed to be, they all just had like this gentle softness to them.

But when he put Robert in there, Robert was just like, ah, he just you know, young guy, full of spunk.

And he said that really helped Freddie be scarier.

Yeah.

Yeah, Freddie is very scary in this one.

You really almost never see him out of the shadows, and you know, he smiles, he mutilates himself to scare you.

He's just he's just a nightmare as a person, which is what I think is so great about Freddy Krueger.

Oh, absolutely, because his entire personality is just to be as off putting as possible.

Yeah.

I mean he literally at one point in the movie, you know, Nancy says, who are you?

And he just lifts his sweater up and cuts his stomach open and it lets a bunch of green goo and bugs fall out.

That's his answer.

Yeah, of course, there's that part where she says, oh my God, and he holds up the claw and says, this is God, which is a very Craven type of line.

Craven loves stuff like that.

He loved quoting the Bible in his horror movies because that was his education growing up.

Yes, entirely that, because I'm pretty sure he lived entirely secular as an adult.

I'm almost certain.

So he just had very very interesting influences.

So now that Tina's woken up, we meet her friends, we meet Nancy, we meet Rod, Tina's boyfriend, and we meet Nancy his boyfriend Glenn played by Johnny Depp in his feature film debut, although he had I think just come off of twenty one Jump Street or may have even still been on twenty one Jump Street at the time, and this launched his film career because it was a massive hit.

And then he was in cry Baby for John Waters, which I think was booked through this because that was a new line cinema movie, and he just kind of catapulted from there.

Damn but damn.

As we're about to find out, Tina's not the only one having nightmares about the gross Man.

In the dirty red sweater and the finger knives.

We'll find out more about that right after this.

So we've been introduced to Tina and her friends Nancy and Glenn, and and her boyfriend Rod.

And her boyfriend Rod, who is he's kind of the bad uh, the the bad kid in Springwood.

Yeah, which they don't say it's Ohio in the first movie.

So yeah, they kind of leave, which is is fun because that just makes it, uh, it makes it easier for you to kind of insert yourself in the story.

But anyway, it's just a very middle class American place.

Yeah, I mean that's that's really what this place is.

That's why the Frontier Justice is so fascinating because it's the like, bright, shiny suburbs.

Yeah, it's not the kind of place that you would expect that to happen.

In one of the later movies, uh, one of the characters says, it's just because you and your tennis buddies torched this guy, I have to die in my sleep.

So yeah, it's great line.

Yeah.

So yeah, so Tina doesn't want to sleep alone, so she has, uh, she has a sleepover that night and we.

Start to well, well, do we establish that they're all having there.

Oh yeah, because as she is explaining to Nancy the nightmare that she had the night before, the night.

Before before, it is a hard word, I get it.

Very difficult word.

Nancy has this realization like I've been having dreams about this guy too, and Glenn kind of even chimes in and says like, oh, that's weird because like I've been, I've been having nightmares.

Doesn't he say it at that?

He says he's been having some nightmares, but he doesn't.

He doesn't establish that he's been having similar nightmares.

Just that he's having nightmares.

Well, then when we get to the sleepover you were talking about, mm hmm, that's when we get the famous moment where after the after after hilarious scene where Glenn convinces his mom that he's at a sleepover at his cousins and he's at the airport by using a sound effects tape.

That's really a funny scene, and it's that's a great example too.

I won't I'm not trying to go on forever, but like of Wes Craven's sense of humor is very fun and odd, like the idea of him saying like, yeah, I'm standing because Yep, it's noisy as always living by the airport, and then it starts playing like a car crash and people screaming like.

This, of course I'll call the police, no, I will, I will, yeh.

It's so funny.

But after that, like they're talking about why they're there, how she doesn't want to sleep alone, and Tina says the famous line, so what did you dream?

And the music starts building up, and Nancy gives the first full throated description of Freddy with the finger knives and the hat and the dirty sweater.

And that's when Glenn comes in because she says, you dreamt about the same guy I did, And Glenn pops in with a bowl of potato chips and goes, that's impossible.

It's it's so good.

It's so good, and I really nothing.

I'm trying not to like commandeer the whole show.

But I've just I've thought about these movies for so many years.

I've watched them so many times.

Literally, watching nigh Burn Elmstreet, which I do find to still be a very scary movie, makes me feel like a kid because I just remember so many nights by myself just watching these movies on tape, again and again and again.

They're nostalgic, for you, beyond nostalgic.

I mean, it's so nostalgic.

So but as he says, that's impossible and all that.

We hear the sound that Freddy does in their Nightmares where he scrapes his claws against metal.

It's being a screeching sound, which I always thought was a really brilliant way for Freddy to like unnerve people as they scratches his claws on metal, because it's such.

An unnerving sound in and of itself.

I mean, I'm not doing it perfect, but you know, but they hear a sound that kind of sounds like that coming from out back.

Glenn goes to investigate, and it turns out it's rod.

Tina climbing in through the window.

Well no, no, they were out in the backyard.

Oh yeah, Glenn comes in through Nancy's window.

Later.

Oh yeah, if you could stay awake for eight minutes, maybe you remember not gonna happen.

No, when you were fighting falling asleep.

I was like, this is just how I enjoy these movies, except it's later than ten o'clock.

But you know, I'm old, But do you want from me?

I don't know.

I mean, you're four months younger than me.

Where's your spry neess?

Come on, get spry okay, O work on it?

Okay, good No.

But so what happened earlier is Rod got mad at Tina.

He has a very short fuse.

He's just he's just a kid who's clearly from a rough part of town, doesn't have a very good home life, and Tina doesn't appear to have a very good home life either.

So they're they're kind of famous for fighting and making up.

That's their whole thing.

Mm hmm.

So when Rod shows up, he's a little perturbed that there's a guy and a girl staying with his girlfriend.

He's a little ticked at first.

Then, of course wise Nancy tries to smooth things over by saying, you know, it was a sleepover date, that's all.

Glenn was just leaving, which is a lie because we just saw Glenn.

And see, that's why it's a great piece of humor too, is it tells the story.

It matters.

We just saw him convince his mom he was staying at his cousin so he could sleep over there.

But she's lying to try and play kate Rob because Rob pulls a switchblade.

He also reveals that he had picked He had just grabbed a piece of like a gardening hoe thing like a hand.

You should know what that is, you garden.

The thing he was using to scrape and make the.

Scrap I'm trying to remember what they're called.

How would you not know you're a gardener?

Come on, because I'm I'm bad, I'm remember thing.

It's like a gardening But he was making the scrape traping sounds with that.

That's when we get the first hint that Rod is having nightmares too because he did that because it was scary.

So now Rod and Tina were making up in the bedroom, and a great little part where you hear them making love and we see Glenn laying on the couch sighing, and and then after they're done moaning, he goes morality sucks because he's sleeping in a different room than Nancy.

Nancy is sleeping in Nancy in Tina's bed, and Tina and Rod the master bedroom.

So now as things are calming down, we head into another nightmare.

As Tina is sitting in bed and she hears little pebbles being thrown at the window to get her attention.

When she goes over to the window, one of the pebbles digs right into the glass like it's being thrown incredibly hard.

And then as she's looking out trying to figure out exactly what's going on, she hears a whispering voice.

Ta, so so scary, so perfect.

Yeah.

And of course while this is going on, Rod is not reacting at all.

And that's something that's been consistent in a lot of the nightmare movies.

I like, is this hole Like in the dreams, people are just responsive entirely and not like unconscious.

Most of the time.

They'll just be like looking at something and they just don't notice anything that's happening to you, which I find that to be very scary and very isolating.

The idea of being isolated in a room full of people, Yeah, very very scary.

So of course, as you said last night when we were rewatching this, she heads out back in just a night shirt with no pants by yourself in the middle of the night to investigate, because you know your judgy, I guess, so you just think you're so much smarter you wouldn't do that.

I think you might, but that's just me.

Maybe once or twice.

Fair enough, but she's going to investigate what's going on right after this.

So this is where, honestly some of the highest quality Freddy Krueger moments happened in the whole film, because as we see Freddie in a bunch of different ways, obviously Freddie's stalking her as she's walking around, you know, a dream nightmare version of her, how her neighborhood mm hm, And we see what you mentioned about this strange man.

Freddie's walking along in his arms are so wide that she couldn't possibly run past him.

We see her run away from Freddie and run right into Freddie.

We're getting all kinds of nightmare elements, her running past a tree and then him jumping out from behind a tree and the tree is only like two inches thick.

Yeah, perfectly hides him.

Nightmare logic stuff.

What stands out in this to you the most?

Is it?

You know?

Is it the what he cuts his fingers off or like what do you what do you feel like really gets to you in this because this is like I feel like, the most Freddie gets to play.

Yeah, and we get to really see that, like in a nightmare kind of anything goes it's his domain.

The two that really get me the most.

I already mentioned the you know, the long arms and him.

I'm just kind of being able to almost teleport anywhere and hide, you know, hide behind anything and then just come out from behind something.

Or like you mentioned how she runs away and then she immediately runs into him.

Those I think are the most effective scares for me.

They're the ones that really get me because again, they remind me so much of how things work, you know, in my nightmare.

Now, what about when he tackles her and she goes to push him off, grabs his face and his face comes off.

Oh, and there's just the skull with its mouth wide open and a tongue sticking out of it.

That one's just gross.

That really gets because of how corross, so bad it is.

I mean, but him cutting his fingers off wasn't gross, right, And it's just fascinating seeing him doing things just for the shock value to the victims.

Yeah.

So, as he's tackled her down, we get into again.

They really front load this.

I mean, there's a lot of good stuff in this movie, but this is really what makes you stay in your seat.

As he's attacking her, we go back to the bedroom and Tina's thrashing around Rod notices and he's like, what's going on, And then we get this creepy shot from under the covers and a silhouetted Freddie is like under the covers with Tina.

And this is a big thing that Craven talked about as to why this movie is so scary, because it's one of the things that plays off of is the idea like he's alone with you in your bed.

Yeah, And a lot of people have pointed out that there were elements of like virginity, like of like virginity anxiety kind of being played up.

Oh yeah, And that was something that was so kind of in the zeitgeist of Freddy that it was referenced heavily.

At the end of Freddy Versus Jason, it's referenced a ton that Freddie's basically going to take her virginity, except he's going to kill her.

But he keeps using double entendres that are referencing sex.

Yeah, like don't worry.

Everybody's afraid during their first time.

And then he's like, but just relax.

It does tend to get a bit messy, like because yeah, because Freddy's a dirty old man in your freaking bed, yeah, you know, and nobody can see him.

So she then suddenly just lifts off the ground, off the bed rather after four slices go down her chest and she's just floating for a second, bleeding.

Rod doesn't know what the hell to think.

She is thrown into him.

He gets knocked into the corner, and then as she's bleeding like crazy, she gets dragged up the wall up to the ceiling.

Whereas she's dying, and it's by nobody.

You don't see Freddy doing it, Yeah, you just see her being dragged on her own.

Rod is just sitting there like screaming and reaching for her.

She reaches for him and then she drops hits the bed, splashes blood on him, blood everywhere everywhere.

And while all this is happening, Nancy and Glenn are trying to get into the bedroom.

They're like pounding on the door and it won't open, and when they finally burst it open, there's blood everywhere.

Tina's dead and Rod is nowhere to be found.

The window is left open, which is very ominous.

And this is all really clever storytelling because Rod is kind of the odd man out.

He doesn't really fit in with this group of kids, so he knows that, like, if he sticks around, somebody's gonna, you know, they're gonna nail his ass.

They're just gonna nail his ass.

And that's exactly what happens when we find out that Nancy's father is the police sheriff.

Yeah, I think the lieutenant lieutenant.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's one of the main guys at the UH, at the police department, and he mentions that Rod has been busted for petty petty larceny and getting into fights and stuff like that.

But Nancy's adam it.

She's like, but it was never that serious, and her parents are just not really listening to her because her mother even says, I I guess I find murder to be very serious, and it's like, that's not.

What she was saying.

She wasn't saying this was a fight.

She's saying that their fights aren't serious.

This is nothing like when they fight.

Yeah, this is when you really start to feel like anytime they talk to the adults, the adult adults do everything in their power to purposefully misunderstand or misconstrue what they're saying.

Yeah, because yeah, Nancy kept as they're as not really interrogating her, but questioning her about Rod.

She's just insisting like, yeah, their fights were never that serious.

Uh, and they take it every which way except that.

Yeah, she's trying to say that this is a surprise, Yeah, because they're uncharacteristic.

Yeah, and it does.

I mean, Rod doesn't seem I mean, he seems like he's mostly just really insecure and and like threatens violence because he just wants to feel respected, you know.

Yeah, he's just a really insecure kid.

Yeah, sough.

But yeah.

So so now we get to now that we've discovered Nancy as the main character, we go home with her.

Her mom is there in the morning, telling her like, oh, you shouldn't go to school.

She insists on going to school, saying that she'll just go crazy if she sits around the house.

She's also chugging a glass of coffee.

And her mom's like, you don't need that.

Well, and her mom's like, did you get any sleep last night?

And she's like, I'll sleep in study hall, which is true.

So but and we start to notice immediately something is a little off with her mother.

Mm hm.

And as we'll find we find out very quickly her mom's drunk.

Her mom is constantly pounding bottle after bottle of vodka.

Yeah, and her dad is never at the house.

So clearly there's something you know, not going well in the Nancy Thompson household.

Mm hmm, and her mom is yeah, it's just kind of blitzed and just kind of repeating the same things, saying, oh, you know, you'll be fine, you just need to get some well.

And the cruel irony is that is usually what cures things that have no cure.

Yeah, you know, oh you have a cold, Well, just sleep it off.

Drink water and rest.

That's it.

And it's the same thing, Oh, you know your best friend died, like you need to you know, rest, you need to you know, cry it out and rest.

The only thing that's going to make it make you feel better is days going by.

But in this case, it's like every time you go to sleep, you're rolling the dice to die.

So it's pretty cool because like, I mean, I could I have a lot and I will get to it to say about the parents at night run Elm Street, and there's a lot of negative things to say, but generally speaking, it's like a you know, a perfect Uno card to say, like, you just need some rest.

Usually when we're at our worst, we do just need some rest.

Yeah.

Yeah, when I decide I need to solve all the problems in the world, it's usually around one am when I should just go to bed.

So now Nancy's heading to school, but someone is following her and we'll find out who after this.

So as Nancy is noticing someone's following her, she gets tackled and pulled behind a bush by Rod, who's basically trying to tell her I didn't do it, and Nancy immediately believes her, although she is challenging to him.

She's kind of like, well, you were the only one there.

He's like, I didn't do it.

Turns out the cops come out.

They apper hend him, and Nancy is livid because her father used her.

That's her exactly where she used me, And he's like, what the hell were you doing going to school today anyway, which also suggests a solid lack of parental synergy, which we were talking about before between him and his wife.

So things are getting really wild now.

Nancy has become convinced her dreams have something to do with all of this.

Yeah, and the only person she can confide in because her father is too busy, you know, medicating with work, and her mother's too busy medicating with vodka.

Is Glenn, her boyfriend, who does seem to be a very sensitive, honest guy, and we discover that he comes in by climbing, by climbing a trellis to get into her bedroom.

But yet there's no hanky panky.

There's a very clear element to that, to that that you know that they have not gone any any you know, having on all the way to go back to a high school.

Yeah, euphemism, but she tells him like, I think something's going on in my dreams.

He's try he's at first he's dismissive, but when she says she's serious, he does take her as seriously as he can.

She asks him to do one favor and just be there, be her backup.

Yeah, be there while she sleeps.

You spoiled it.

But yeah, because we don't know that she's going to sleep, because because the next part is she's walking down the street, we don't know.

It's a dream.

But nice job.

I mean, hopefully if they're all, if they're listening, they should have already seen the damn movie.

But so she's walking down the street and she asks if if he's there, and he pops out from behind a tree and says like, yeah, I'm doing what you said.

So she goes by the jailhouse and sees all kinds of creepy shit.

She sees she's being haunted by Tina in a body bag a few different times.

We had that one where she was at school MM, which we kind of glossed her because there's a lot to talk about in this movie and I have I'm too busy talking about like my relationship with caffeine to get into it.

But so she again sees Tina in a body bag, but this time a centipede crawls out of her mouth and there's this pile of like writhing eels in front of her.

It's very creepy stuff, very Nightmary stuff.

So then she looks in through the window to the jail cell and sees Rod sleeping as Freddie walks through the bars and just kind of smiles at her as he's going to likely kill Rod, as he kills everybody.

She wakes up suddenly because her alarm goes off and reveals that Glenn is asleep in the chair next to her bed and she that's when she reveals that like all she asked was that he stay awake and watch her and wake her up if he thought she was having a nightmare.

As they're talking, she realizes Glenn, you know, Glenn's in danger.

So they start running to the to the police apartment at a police station, and we see a bed sheet basically come to life and hang Glenn in his cell, making it look like a suicide, which is something that in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, they go back and forth on trying to make the deaths look like they make sense.

Yeah, outside of Freddy doing it.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes it's substantial, like strange, and sometimes it's like, uh, you know, like oh they burned alive.

They must have been smoking when they went to sleep.

It could be that simple, or it could be like Glenn, it looks like he irenat Glenna Rod it looks like he hung himself in his cell.

So she gets there and says, like, I need to see him right now, reveals he's dead and her dad was there, which is one of the another reveal that like Okay, he like lives here, Yeah, like he's not not even going home to sleep.

No, no, well, and like when he sees his wife, he just goes hello, Marge, like he has not seen her in a while.

So now things are really getting out of hand.

And they take Nancy to the dream Clinic, which is an awesome sequence, but it's also a great sequence because not only do you get to see Joe Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit, play the sleep doctor, but it also helps cement in the idea that basically adults cannot help you anymore.

Yeah, because she goes in, they hook her up to the machines, she falls asleep, and sure enough, he's like looking at the data as she's sleeping, and he says, like, right now, a nightmare would be a plus or minus five or six would be a nightmare.

And as she starts to toss and turn, and we hear like when they show a shot of her, we hear that of the clause the machine is saying like forty five and stuff, which he even says like it's never been this high, It's never been this high.

And I thought that was so cool that like the nightmares actually have like a physiological effect, yes, which is that your nightmares get so extreme yeah, its it tops the charts well, because the other thing top in the chow.

The other thing is that sometimes when Freddie kills people in other movies, sometimes in reality, you're doing it to yourself.

Yeah, so that it can be written out as a suicide or whatever.

I always thought it was interesting how it was never consistent though, Like sometimes it'll look like an accident.

Sometimes it looked like you killed yourself.

Sometimes it looks like whatever.

It just depends on what Freddie wants to manipulate people to believe.

I guess, you know, whether he wants you to be afraid of Freddie or he wants people to not ask too many questions.

So they pull her out of the nightmare and there's a big reveal which is under the blankets.

First of all, her arm is cut horribly.

Yeah, so they got like scratches.

Deep scratches.

So they're trying to bandage her up.

And then she pulls Freddie's hat from under her blanket and her eyes get wide.

He says, I brought this back from my dream.

So now we've officially established that the adults can't help.

Yeah, I mean they're not able to do anything.

No, No, they cannot help a doctor could not help.

All he could do is observe it.

And now we have a hat from her dream, which somehow people are trying to ignore.

But when she talks about her talks to her mom about it.

She says, like, where'd you put it?

I know you didn't throw it away.

She finds the hat in a drawer and says, look, it even has his name in it, fred Krueger.

Mom, who's fred Krueger?

You must know?

Like I could tell you no.

And this is where things get extra and where I think that we really get into the meat of what the movie is about thematically or what have you, because her mom kind of calms down and says, you don't need to worry about fred Krueger.

Come with me, and they're going to head into the basement so she can explain what's going on.

And this is where we for the first time ever, if you're watching Freddy Krueger movie, we find out actually exactly who Freddy is.

It's about halfway through the movie, but you'll have to wait till after this.

So Nancy's mother takes her to the basement and reveals something in an old boiler in their basement, an old rag and it has Freddy Krueger's glove in it, and she tells this story about how there was a guy named fred Krueger who lived in spring Wood, about I think she was less than ten years ago.

Noor no, no, it had to be more than ten years It was about ten or fifteen years ago, and how he killed kids, and then the whole thing I'd explained earlier, and how they burned him alive, and she gives one of the best lines like he can't hurt you, He can't hurt you because Mommy killed him, which is such a perfect Night on Elm Street moment to like really make you understand what you're getting.

So now we're into the territory of where I really think the movie is talking, which is the sins of the Father shall be visited upon the children.

Yes, because these kids, if they were alive when Freddie was killed, they weren't young.

They were too young to remember anything.

And although it's not canon because they removed it from the script before filming.

Originally she even tells Nancy she had an older brother that she just doesn't remember because she was so young when he was killed.

So one of the elements that they kind of didn't run with was that most of these kids were siblings and now they're all only children.

And that's something really important to point out too.

And almost all the name on Elmstreet movies, everybody's an only child.

Oh yeah, yeah, and that makes sense.

There are very few there are, Like I think in the whole series there are only a couple of siblings.

Yeah.

In fact, the only one I can think of right off the top of my head is Alison Rick from part four.

She's the kind of the quiet, shy girl who becomes the hero alx.

Okay, yeah, she has the brother who does karate.

But I don't think I can think of anybody else that's a brother and sister, or a brother and brother or sister and sister.

Yeah, I don't remember any other siblings.

Yeah.

Series, Well, and it makes sense that there wouldn't be, because Freddie killed like an entire generation of children.

Yeah.

So what we now are realizing is that this is, for better or worse, the parents fault.

Yeah.

Now, they acted in the best interest of their kids, you know, because this guy was like literally a dead to rights proven child murderer.

So it is hard to really like look down on them for vigilante justice when it's like, no, they found evidence he killed kids and then it all got marked on inadmissible.

Yeah, I can't.

I can't blame them for taking justice into their own hands.

You can't.

You can't watch a child murderer just walk free.

Well, and I'm a big woos and I don't believe in the death penalty.

I don't believe in a lot of these things.

I don't think mob justice is a good thing.

But in a circumstance, specifically like this, they literally knew for a fact he'd done it, and he was getting zero punishment.

Not he wasn't getting the death penalty, not he's getting parole in twenty five years.

He was getting nothing.

He was walking free exactly.

So I see why they were like, fuck that we're ending this now, especially since, like I mean, I'm assuming he killed twenty kids over the course of maybe three or four years.

That's a lot twenty kids that alone.

When she said that in the movie, I was like, wow, they said twenty in the movie.

Because again I'm trying to think, I'm trying to say when I'm thinking outside of the first movie, so that you know, I'm kind of pontificating from the night Brown Elm Street lore right, but in the movie she says, twenty a lot of dead children for one small community to bear.

Yeah, like that's we're talking like curfews for everybody, including adults.

Yeah, once your five kids.

Oh absolutely, no, absolutely.

It's serious, you know.

So one of the things I love about this concept though, the sins of the father being visited upon the children.

Aside from being biblical, which is Wes Craven's jam, is now the parents are in denial that they could have caused these problems.

And I feel like if you look at the time period that this movie was made nineteen eighties, it was made, released in eighty four, probably shot in eighty three, you have the baby boomers kind of starting to wane, the kids that were being born in the late seventies or Gen X, and they have different problems than their parents had, and some of the those problems are their parents' fault, you know.

And not just not just little things like the little things like the economy or you know, who's president.

I mean things like depression, anxiety.

There's a lot of things that mess kids up, and a lot of times it's like the parents want to deny their their part in it.

Yeah, and that's what I feel like the movie is trying to get across, is that the parents will not accept any responsibility.

They'll do anything except accept responsibility to help their kids.

Anything else is just denial.

And in some ways, and this is just my own insane ramblings, but in some ways, I feel like it's Cold War related.

Okay, elaborate the anxiety of being under a constant threat, the idea that it's kind of your parents fault because those were the leaders they elected and it's the country they built.

And then of course one of the big Cold War fears, which is enemies from without or from within.

Yeah, so a big Cold War thing is like, oh, well, the enemy is Russia.

They're over there, and then people be like, but what if they're here?

And they were, I mean, there were Russian spies, tons of them in the United States, and there were Russian sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, but there was also a ton of fear.

I mean, McCarthyism was just making lists of people that they believed sympathized with the Soviet Union to try to ruin their lives.

Yeah, so you see what I'm saying, like, so they're like, you know, Mom and Dad, I'm in danger.

And they're like, what's going on?

Is it the guy down the street?

And they're like, no, when I go to sleep in my own bed, in the house you built and bought to keep us all safe, I'm not safe.

That's that's my that's my thought.

No, I absolutely have to agree.

And we were we were kind of discussing it last night.

I was trying to keep you away.

Poor poor Rachel.

She she stays up extra late to watch these movies for the show, and sometimes it's she's had a long day and it's really hard on her, but I make it through.

You did a pretty good job.

This one was the roughest one you've.

Had to watch, Yeah, which is kind of ironic considering it's you know, it was funny, but I was sitting there pounding, a pounding a caffeinated beverage.

But let's take a break and then you can tell me how right I am about my diagnosis after this.

So, as we were watching the movie again together last night and you were discussing it with me, helped me stay away.

We we really started to hone in on the denial of all of the adults which you were, which you were kind of talking about, because there's so many points where if any one of the adults would have given an ounce of credibility to what the teens were going through, they would have been they would have handled things so much differently.

So like, for instance, when Nancy has a nightmare in school, she in the nightmare burns herself on the boiler to wake herself, to wake herself up, And when she wakes up, she's got a burn on her arm, and no one addresses it.

No one, you know, no one pays attention.

Yeah.

She even tells Glenn when he asked about She's like, I burned my arm in study hall or in English lid.

Yeah, and he's like what, like how yeah, yeah, no, that's a great example, and yeah, nobody seems to care that much about that.

No.

There's also an element of speaking of like generational differences.

There's also an element of it could be taken as like a very extreme MAS four for the fact that generations face totally different challenges in many ways.

So of the idea of like that challenge makes no sense to me.

Like when I was your age, I didn't worry about this and that and this and that I did this.

So it's like, no, but you don't understand I'm getting murdered in my dreams.

That doesn't make any sense.

Nobody got murdered in the dreams when I was a kid.

What are you talking about, Like, just get a good job at a factory.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's kind of the way I feel almost is that that's because I love that.

Every Nightmare and elm Street movie there is a glut of adults who don't listen to the kids, a glut of them, and as the movies progress, there are the occasional adult who does believe them, but they are few and far between, m very much.

In fact, I mean basically Nancy herself in part three and the doctor whose name's escaping right now from part three.

That's like two of them, only adults who like really give a crap.

And then the therapist in part six who turns out spoiler if you've never seen Part six to be Freddie's daughter.

But she cares, you know, because her job is to take care of these kids.

So but like in part four and five, there's no adults that believe them either, and there's no adults in part two that believe in them either nothing.

So it's and that's kind of one of the things I think that makes it makes it really click with kids, young people as you're on your own mm hmm, Like the only time you can really win is when you accept that the adults aren't gonna help.

This is up to you.

This is this is your time to prove what you're made of, the kind of thing, and also but also to play into like the negative aspects of the younger society.

But also because you're smarter than those people and you know more, who cares if they have forty years more of life experience, you know how to deal with this.

So it is a double edge.

It's a double edged razor glove.

I see what you did there, And I just thought of this too, But especially in this first one, there is kind of a mirror relationship between what the kids are going through now with the adults and realizing that the authority figures in their lives are not going to do anything to help them, and also how their parents would have felt years before realizing that the authority figures in their life were not going to do anything to protect them against Freddy's.

Oh, that's a really good point, because the courts and the police all failed them when their own children were being murdered the most innocent, most necessitating of protection group.

Yes, that there is literally why we have society is to take care of the children and the elderly.

Yeah.

Well, and I thought i'd have a joke.

I didn't come up with them.

But I also want to point out this is the era the eighties, was the era in the nineties, little bit was the era of stranger Danger and the Satanic Panic.

Oh yeah, we're kind of related.

The idea that there were these strange people that you know, who knows where they live or why, but that will just randomly be like I have a kitten in my car, I like to kill children.

Who the hell are I don't know.

I just exist for fear, you know.

Like, but that's kind of what they come off as.

But the thing we learned from Stranger Danger and the Satanic Panic was that most victimization of children did not happen from people they did not know.

No, generally, it's immediate family members.

Yeah, it's or or caregivers or school people.

And I don't think I'm almost certain that it's not established in Nightmare Elm Street, but it is in Nightmare Elm Street two, in Nightmare Elm Street two and beyond.

Freddie works at the school.

Oh yeah, he's the janitor.

Yeah, so he's literally hanging around the kids all day long.

And that could also feedback into the idea of the parents being blaming themselves, because it's like, this guy is right in front of us every day.

He's not cleaning up, you know, vomit from the floors.

How did we not see it?

How did we not know that this guy was a psycho?

And I think that's a really a really tense and valuable concept to consider, as well as the effect on a community of like a guy you just knew and he did all these heinous things.

It's why I mean, luckily there aren't a lot of examples of like like serious mass murderers or serial killers who live in really, really really small communities.

Because imagine if you had a community of like five hundred or or not evenived five thousand people and a guy you see at the grocery store like every fifth time you go kills like eighteen people.

I mean, that would fracture me deeply.

I would be afraid would I would like go, I would go to the other town to get groceries.

Yeah, I would, I would.

But you know, since I lived near a city with like about you know, a little under a million people in it, if somebody turns out to be a psycho, that have to be really close to me for me to care, I mean to care in the to care, let's be yeah, like we all compartmentalize what bothers us and what doesn't.

So yeah, it's it's that's a really interesting element too, because as we progress in the movie, now Nancy is basically, you know, realized I have to fight Freddie directly myself.

She starts reading the Improvised Anti Personnel Devices Book, which I love that booby traps and anti personnel devices.

And Glenn also shares a really interesting point about how he's he's actually been reading about dreams, which also suggests he's having nightmares.

And I often I wondered if Glenn was like not remembering them or something like he was just remembering he's waking up scared.

Oh, possibly, because I don't think he would have he would have kept it to himself once once Nancy was like really desperate and scared and felt like she was just insane.

Mm hmm.

Oh and her hair, her hair started turning gray.

Oh, that's right, when she wakes up in the sleep clinic.

Yeah, a streak of her hair turns gray, which only happens under extreme duress.

Yeah, under extreme dress, hair can turn gray like suddenly, and it's very rare and very extreme.

In a great touch in the movie as well.

But so Glenn says that he's been reading about and I think it was an Aborigine tribe who they learned to control their dreams and when they have a bad dream, they take the energy away from it, they turn their back on it, remove the energy, and then there's no more bad dreams.

But she did say, like, but what if that doesn't work?

He's like, well, or she's like, but what if it't doesn't work for somebody.

He's like, I guess they don't wake up to tell anybody.

Which I just love that line too, because he's still a teenage boy.

He's trying to be supportive of her, but he's trying to be keep things light.

He's trying to like be there for her in a really difficult way in a really difficult time.

So, but my point is that as we as.

She tells Glenn like, I need you to not fall asleep.

I need you to be ready because I'm gonna pull Freddy out of my dreams.

That's her big moment, her big eureka.

If I could pull his hat through, maybe I can pull the whole guy into the real world.

Well and I can kill him or well, originally her plan is I'm gonna have my dad kill him, or or Glenn's gonna kill him, because you know, Glenn's a jock and dad's a cop.

Yeah, so like, come on, So originally your plan is for Glenn to show up with a baseball bat and help her just brain this guy and give him to the cops.

It's a pretty wild idea, but I do think it's pretty boss.

It's pretty bitching.

But as this is all going on, there's one obstacle in the way, and that's Glenn's parents.

And we'll talk about that more after this.

So Glenn's parents, who seem to mean well, all the parents seem to mean well.

They her, particularly his father, seems to feel like Nancy is a bad influence, that she's gone crazy just like her mom.

Because the whole town's kind of talking about what a drunk she drunk she is, and how she put bars on all the windows of the house, which is another great example of fear from without, not from within.

You put bars in the house, it literally goes both ways.

It turns the house into a cage.

Mm hmm.

And in a moment shortly after this the scene we're talking about, she reveals that she's locked the doors from the inside, so Nancy can't even leave, and she says, like, I want you to.

You're gonna get a good night's sleep if it kills me.

So talk about like going all in on the wrong thing.

But Glenn's parents, you know, as Nancy is calling talking to Glenn and stuff, she tries to call him on the phone, and their attitude is like that girl, I don't want that girl anywhere near my son.

She's the problem.

Again.

It's from without, not from within.

Yeah, they're all about like, no, No, danger comes from over there, Danger comes from across the street, Danger comes from down the road.

Danger comes from the city, ten miles down the road.

That's where danger comes from.

Danger isn't in our house.

So the problem is that girl.

It couldn't be that our son is in real danger it couldn't be that our son has a real problem, it's her m hm.

And that I feel like that's what really cements my feeling about about that idea in the film.

I have to agree, and it's I mean, it's kind of part of the human condition.

And I think that's what makes that makes this movie so relatable and has made it such I mean, among many other things has made it such a long standing film, is because there is there is this feeling that we all get that the danger is always somewhere else.

Well, like when we talked about about it comes at Night, was that what it was called the movie?

Uh?

Remember yeah?

That No, very no, it's very very very similar to that, because it's a it's a way we comfort ourselves because if we ever truly recognized, and especially in a nightmare on Elm Street, but if we ever truly realize like how close the danger can be, uh, we'd never rest.

And that's kind of that's kind of where the kids are is.

The kids are at that intersection of realizing that the danger comes with it within and the parents are the ones who are like, no, no, no, it's you know, like you were saying across the street or it's somebody else, uh, not that it could ever not that it could ever be home.

Yeah, you know.

And then on top of all that, then it'd be a it'd be a side effect of a collective trauma they all caused.

Yeah, so it's it's a pretty intense concept.

But I really especially this part where he's just constantly looking over the house saying like that girl is the problem.

And it's like, meanwhile, your son is upstairs in bed, falling asleep, and Freddie's probably gonna get him.

Now.

Nancy tries to call the mom, is like being nice, and then he finally he just takes the phone and says he's a sleep we'll call you in the morning, and just hangs up and then he takes the phone off the hook so they can go to sleep.

I remember that, Yeah, it's it's yeah.

So now as Glenn is laying in his bed, Freddy's arm comes out from the bed, pulls him into the bed, and we get probably the second most iconic death scene in the film, where his bed just gushers like five times the amount of blood in the human body.

Yeah, it just shoots right out of the bed.

It's a kind of a mind blowing effect it is.

And how it makes sense is the part that I struggle with the most.

But you know, because they never show his body.

He's just in the bed and then he gets like blended, I guess, yeah, just gets liquefied.

So as this is happening, Nancy gets a phone call and it's Freddy on the phone cheers, the cloth scratches, and it says, I'm your boyfriend now, and then a tongue comes out of the phone and tries to lick her face again.

Creepy old man where he shouldn't be in a young girl's bedroom, you know.

So she now knows Glenn is dead.

She tries to get out of her house.

She can't.

She finally calls Glenn's house again after the police have all arrived and everything, and gets her dad on the phone on the because he's there investigating it, and tells him her plan.

Says, I'm gonna get the guy who's doing this.

I just need to be there ag get him.

He's like, well, just tell me where he is and I'll get him.

And so she says it's fred Krueger, dad, and he just shuts down.

Yeah, he's like all right, and She's like, I need to know you're gonna bust the door down when I get him, because she's completely trapped in that house.

Yeah.

So he just kind of reluctantly says, yeah, okay.

She puts her mom to bed, which is a fascinating sequence.

The more I watch this movie, the more I harp on her tucking her own mother into bed.

It's a really interesting scene because she's literally tucking her into this bed and telling her like, everything's going to be okay, and her mom is like realizing that she can't do anything, like she can't.

Help m.

Yeah her.

It's a very tender scene, and it again is it's one of those moments where you kind of see the relationship between the parents and the children mirrored and reversed a little bit because again, like I said, the kids feeling helpless because the authority figures can't or won't do anything for them, it's very similar to how the parents felt.

And then this is kind of what Nancy's mom wishes she could have done for Nancy.

Nancy's mom wishes she could have just tucked her in and tell her, you know, everything will be all right, just get some rest and it'll all be over, but she never forgot that.

But Nancy got to reciprocate that for her mom, which is just a very cool way of showing their relationship, you know, kind of the relationship had been turned on its head because her mom was in denial.

Well, and there's a moment that really changed the scene for me the more I thought about it.

Where As she's laying in bed getting ready to go to sleep, she goes to open up her bottle of vodka and take a glug, and then she doesn't.

She puts the cat back on and puts it on the nightstand, And I felt like that was almost like a penance, Like the reason she can't help and the reason she's useless is because she's drunk and because she's been hiding in a bottle this whole time.

Yeah, so she's never been able to come through for Nancy when she needed her.

So in a way, she's like, well, I can't do it anymore, you know, even if even if it won't help to stop now, I feel like a you know, big pile of shit over it.

So I'm gonna stop.

Yeah.

So one thing she says to Nancy that I always loved though, is she says.

You know, she's like, I have to face him, and she's like, of course you do.

That's what you do.

You face things.

That's your power, that's who you are.

And I thought that was a really interesting little moment where it's like she's not totally asleep at the wheel.

She knows the woman she's raising mm hm, and she admires her to an extent.

You know.

So now it's time to put together a bunch of booby traps and anti personnel devices because Freddy's coming over for dinner right after this.

So she puts together all these fun booby traps, and all of them.

Kevin mckellister proud is what I said last night.

Well he wasn't alive yet, so if anything, he stole a lot from this movie.

And the Hills have Eyes.

There's a lot of booby traps in the first three West Craven horror movies, Last House on the Left, Hills have Eyes, and I'm ren elm Street all have booby traps, huh, but this one has a ton of them.

So she's like rigging a light bulb full of black powder.

She's emptying shotgun shells into things, She's rigging up a ten pound sledgehammer to swing down when a door opened.

Favorite.

She's just got all kinds of plans for Freddy.

So now she has to go to sleep.

She sets a timer on her watch so that it'll wake her up in ten minutes, and when she goes into her dream, she knows she's in a dream and she can look at her watch and see how long she has left.

So she starts looking for Freddy, and of course, now where is he?

Of course, now you can't find him right.

Yeah, when you want him.

But I love it, so she starts running from him.

He's going after chasing her around.

I love it because when the watch gets down to ten seconds, she just turns to Freddy and just tackles.

After all all this time running from him and being scared of him and him killing everybody, she just freaking jumps right on top of him.

They land on the trellis that's been dropped down because when they put the bars up, they cut the trellis down, so there's no way to climb up on the roof.

She wakes up in her bed, and I love the shot because you see the trails and everything on her, and then it pulls away as the camera pulls back, so it's like it was never there.

Yeah, it's a very simple trick, but it's highly effective.

And she's awake, but she's alone.

And I remember the first time I watched it, or I'm guessing the first time I watched it, God only knows.

I just remember being so nervous, like just where is he?

Where is he?

Like where the hell is is now?

He could be literally anywhere?

Or maybe it doesn't work.

That's the scary thing is what if he can't be brought in, what if it's different than a hat.

But sure enough he jumps out and starts chasing her.

And what I love is there's a real element of like you're in the real world now, motherfucker, because she is way less afraid of him.

He's getting hit by sledgehammers, falling downstairs, having light bulbs explode next to him, and she chases him down into her basement.

Yeah, and that's one of my favorites because he comes after her and tries to sneak up on her and like rub his claw to like screech it, and she just goes around the other way while he's doing it, So she literally walks behind him while he's trying to like cat and mouser and just hits him with a jug full of kerosene.

I'm cutting it down short because like it's what am I gonna sit here and describe all these movie traps?

But like she is whooping his ass, beating the hell out of him, and then covers him kerosene, lights him on fire, and then runs away as he tries to chase after her.

While he's on fire, she's breaking the windows yelling for the cops across the street, which is probably the last big laugh of the movie.

There are on a ton of huge laughs, but one of my favorite laughs is where she's like, please help help and this cop sitting on the front lawn and he's like, everything's gonna be okay because they're at Glenn's house across the Street's gonna be okay.

It's gonna be okay.

She just goes dad, my dad, you asshole.

So after he gets her dad, oh, but she yells that, then she's running around a few more things happen.

This might have happened just before he caught on fire, but but I love that after that, after yells that, like get my dad, you asshole, and then she's screaming and yelling some more.

It's like thirty seconds.

Layers like maybe I should get the chief.

Well, yeah, she fucking asked for her dad, dude.

So now they shut up and busted the doors down.

They're like, what the hell's going on here?

There's you know, footprints of fires all over.

They're super cool.

The first thought I have when I saw I see them as I'm always like, rubber cement.

That's how you do that.

You just paint the foot footsteps with rubber cement because then when it dries it it lights, Yeah, and it burns.

That's like the way to set anything on fire for a movie that you don't that doesn't traditionally burn very well.

Rubber cement, Yeah, it is highly flammable, it is, and it sticks to things so you can rub it onto stuff.

But but no, So now is where the movie gets really weird.

And I still don't like I've started to figure out I think what I think is going on.

But I've been struggling with this for a while.

I mean for a long time I've wondered, like the endings always kind of like perturbed me a little bit.

She gets so the dad and her end up running upstairs following the footprints, and Freddy is on top of her mother in the bed, just like thrashing her.

They throw a sheet over to put the flames out, pull it away.

Freddy's gone, and now her body, which is like horribly burned, almost a skeleton, is laying there and it starts ascending or descending down through the bed through like some kind of warp.

And I used to always think that was just some wild shit, but I think I figured it out.

I mean, I think it's obvious, and maybe I'm just a little slow, but that moment is that it's still a dream.

Ohkay, that's what I think.

And I think that's probably obvious.

But because I've been watching the movie so long, it's hard for me to get perspective.

Yeah.

Sometimes, yeah, because after that and her dad says, you know, like whatever, she says, like you go ahead.

The moment she says like you go ahead, I'll be right down while she's sitting in this room, because the body goes through the bed and then the bed just looks normal again.

Like yeah, no trace of the mortal or anything.

But when she says like I'll be down in a second, I feel like that's the moment She's like, only I can stop Freddy, Like there's nobody else who can help me, period, And sure enough the door closes behind her and Freddie is you know, lifts up out of the bed rips the sheet open.

It's a really cool reveal, and he is just as evil as he's ever been in any of the movies.

And as he stands there just puffing and puffing and sincerely just being the most evil, slimy look that Freddie has ever had, she seems to know exactly what to do.

And we'll talk about that right after this.

As Freddie's standing there glaring at her, all happy and glee to Killer, she says, I don't I take all the energy I ever gave you away?

And his response is you know you what?

And she's like, I take it all away.

You're nothing, your shit.

I want my friends back, and he's just like, what do you do it?

What are you demanding?

And she's like, I want my friends back, and I want all this because you're nothing, basically, And now that I've realized like that that her mom going into the bed was just the symbol that she never woke up like that, it was still a dream that made me realize.

That's why she leaned into like, well, then I have to beat him in the dream world, which is what Glenn had talked about.

Yeah.

Yeah, because she's used to fighting on her terms, which is why she was so brave against Freddie when he was or at least when she believed he was in the real world.

So after that, he jumps to attack her, and he fades away.

Then she opens the door, the bedroom door, and walks out.

And now it's morning and it's the daytime.

She walked out the front door of the house and she's dressed for school.

It's foggy as hell, and her mom is saying, you know, how are you?

Oh, I slept pretty well, And then she says, like, I guess you bought him out when you can't remember the night before.

You know, I just don't feel like drinking anymore.

It's like a really bizarre but in a right like it doesn't feel like bad riding.

It just feels like it's meant to be odd.

Yeah.

A car pulls up and Glenn's driving and Rod and Tina are in the car, so she says, you know, love you, mom and gets in the car, and then the fucking it's a convertible and the top comes down and it's got Freddy's stripes on it.

The windows roll up and the kids are all freaking out because they're not doing that.

The car drives away as we see little kids off in the distance playing a jump rope and singing the Freddy Krueger nursery rhyme yep, come in for I used to sing that all the time and write it on things all the time.

So as it drives away and the little girls are playing jump rope, and the little girl imagery that started in this movie and then went through all the other ones was eventually became signifying the ghosts of the children he killed.

Oh that they're just kind of around where he is.

I don't know.

That's in the later movies, not this one.

And then Freddy's hand punches through the door and grabs the mom and pulls her through this little door hole.

It looks a little silly, but it is very shocking and sudden, and then the film is over or is it, because then there's eight more sequels.

But I like this ending.

I know Wes Craven didn't want the ending where she got pulled through the door and I get why it's a little cheesy, but it is a hell of a sting.

It really is like the end of Carrie where the hand jumps out and everybody screams.

I mean, it has to be there, right, But the idea that it's still that she's still in the nightmare.

I feel like maybe the reason she believed she could beat fred like that was that all of it was a nightmare, everything the whole movie, Yeah, or or at least most of it, Like at some point she fell asleep and just didn't wake back up.

It's all been a nightmare.

And that's why she was like, I want my friends back because this is just a nightmare.

Ooh.

So that's why I think she was so cocky and so positive she could beat Freddie.

And and she did beat Freddie.

I mean, if we follow, if we include the sequels, she did somewhat beat Freddie.

Yeah as much as one kid.

Yeah.

Now, if we're just whole looking at the movie as a standalone, it appears she did not succeed in defeating Freddie.

That in reality, she's still in a nightmare and Freddie is still in charge, and they never really even in the sequel, say exactly what happened to Nancy other than she moved away.

They never say what happened to her mother.

We find out what happened to her father in part three, that he just became a drunk, much like her mother was, probably because he didn't believe his daughter when she needed him.

You know.

She goes to college and becomes a sleep expert.

So there's all kinds of stuff in the sequels.

But if we look at the movie just as a standalone, which is where it is the scariest, it's just that you can't beat him.

You know, you can't beat Freddie.

You know he's here, He's here, He's gonna this is your nightmare forever.

And honestly, I think that one of the reasons I never made those connections is it is hard for me to think of the film by itself and not the whole lore of Freddie that I've been, you know, consuming my whole life, because if I look at it as there's no more story after that, then they clearly lost.

So yeah, so that's my thought.

But what about you, what do you think?

I No, I am always I'm always a little surprised with the end, just because it is a very downer ending to a movie without using like totally downer imagery.

I think that's kind of genius, and I do like the way that they set it up for the sequels.

I think that's, you know, a clever way of showing that Freddy's still out there, just waiting to come to your dreams.

It's I don't know, I definitely think that this one definitely is scariest as a standalone movie.

Freddy gets to be pretty goofy pretty fast in the series, in the in the whole series of movies, and that doesn't negate how scary the concept is, but it does, like after a while, it's just like, oh, yeah, goofy, goofy can't be Freddy.

Like I mean, by eighty seven, he was hosting music videos on MTV.

Yeah, that's a cultural icon.

He just yeah, he was a child murderer any young men making jokes and playing a fool.

But in this one, Freddy is just straight up evil and that's what they tried to recapture a new nightmare, Yeah, which they did a decent amount.

I think, so he's definitely scarier.

Yeah, I would have to agree, but yeah, I think that there is a primal sort of fear that goes with nightmares.

And I think they really did a great job of capturing that primal fear of getting the dream imagery of having, you know, having a pursuer who is always behind you, no matter where you go, no matter what corner you duck behind, He's always going to show up.

And I don't know, I think that's a I think that's a great premise for a villain.

And I think that this job.

I think that this movie really pulled it off.

And I think that the ending makes that kind of makes that terror real because there is no escaping it.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree.

And I think that just the idea that the one place in the world you're supposed to be the most safest and at ease is in your own bed.

So and in your dreams.

I mean, because even if where you are isn't safe, your dreams can be somewhere else.

Yeah, but not a Freddy's around.

No, not Freddie's around.

So I hope, I hope you guys have enjoyed me.

He's mostly me spurging out about night ren ELM Street.

But Rachel, Rachel said stuff too that was valuable.

I just can't help myself.

I really have loved this movie for as long as I can think, and when I watched any of the movies, I just immediately get the biggest smile on my face.

I mean Michelle, my co host on Monthly Spooky, when she had shoulder surgery.

I went to take care of her for a few for about a week when she was recovering, and I had brought my nightmarre elm Street box set specifically to watch Part four because it's a comfort movie for me.

And then I found out she had never seen any of them, so we proceeded to watch all of them back to back, all seven of the original films, not including Freddy Versus Jason, like to a day.

So that's a really good way to recover from surgery.

It was.

And then I made her on our old podcast.

I made her recite from memory the plot of each one, like a year after we'd done it.

It was really funny.

It was really really funny.

So anyway, on that note, thank you guys for hanging out with us on cutting deep into horror.

I do love sitting and picking apart some of this the mentality of horror, it really what scares us is so interesting.

So I would have to agree.

I think that's why we're.

Here on earth as people.

Yes, in that's just in general.

Yeah, we're here to be scared.

Okay, yeah, jeez, it feels a little dark, but fair enough.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about Nyburn elm Street before we wrap our wrap our time up?

I just it's a great way to kick off Spooky season.

So and whatever you do, don't fall asleep.

So what's our next film?

Do you happen to have that ready?

Yeah, it's going to be Candyman?

Oh Man, Tony Todd rest in peace?

We lost him this year.

Yeah, Tony Todd's Candyman.

That is a damn fine film.

So thank you guys so much for joining us.

I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did talking about films after watching them.

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For myself, for my executive producers Rob Fields and Bubbletobia dot com our producer Dan.

While they're in our composery, mattis Let's cut deep