One, two, Freddy's coming for you with nightmares no one will soon forget.
A Nightmare on Elm Street took our fears, literally. The supernatural horror introduced us to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a metaphysical figure of perdition who infiltrates our minds with twisted hellscapes and sucker punches our dreams. They were shadowed in fears, turning them into nightmares. We brought on our own demise; Freddy scratched our itch and jabbed us over the edge.
A fine line exists between business and pleasure: Freddy is sadistic and silly while teenagers are horny until horrified and become their own heroes. Teenagers experience young love at some point, but when it escalates to sexual freedom (fantasy and desire) it receives punishment or other consequences (reality and censorship) through the most menacing and malicious metaphor possible. Freddy does look like a billowing, brutish STD after all.
The inner and outer conflicts of living our dreams and overcoming our fears to do it are seen in the franchise. Injustice, for example, can make us respond out of fear or propel us to do the right thing. Freddy being a child murderer who was burned alive after being acquitted for the killing of twenty children, is wrong and right. Moral ambiguity makes psychological horror both a precarious precipice and a deep dive into how our thoughts and actions cross paths. A Nightmare on Elm Street manages to skirt the line between the real world and the world we fashion out of fear for ourselves. Leave it to Freddy to work while we sleep.
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