so lonely || A Nightmare on Elm Street [Part 1]

the isolation of the final girl

I just asked you to do one thing,

Just stay awake and watch me –

Just wake me up if it looked like I was having a bad dream.

And what did you do, you shit? You fall asleep!

Nancy Thompson, A Nightmare on Elm Street

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In this theatre that I call my soul

I always play the starring role

So lonely

So lonely

So lonely

So lonely

The Police, ‘So Lonely’

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Like many of my contemporaries, my initial exposure to the greats of Western horror was largely through The Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episodes. These were always my favourites. Possibly because you got three stories in one (which is damn good value). Possibly because it gave young Laura a taste of spookiness without plunging her into the full-blown terror she might have experience from the segments’ source material.¹

Before finally building up the courage to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (Nightmare) at the tender age of 28, I had a rough idea of its contents through the parodic ‘Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace’. Having now viewed both, I can say with some certainty:

1. They both slap, and

2. The TV show makes several deviations from the film.

Both Wes Craven’s 1984 horror and The Simpsons’ 1995 comedy involve a nightmare-dwelling child murderer. But the spoof’s got something the original ain’t. Fraternity. In the cartoon, the three Simpson children ultimately confront their foe together.

Nancy Thomas must face Freddy Krueger all on her own.

For those who haven’t yet watched this masterpiece:

Unapologetically 80s slasher Nightmare sees a gang of suburban teenagers stalked through a dreamscape by an iconically-sweatered villain. After experiencing a particularly creepy nightmare, Tina Gray has her friends Nancy and Glen Lantz (who are a couple, by the by) sleep over at her house. Love interest Rod Lane shows up and the he and Tina have sex in her (absent) mother’s bed. We won’t analyse that too much right now. In the midst of their post-coital slumber, Freddy finds Tina and proceeds to torment and then slash her with his horrible finger-blade-glove. Rod, roused perhaps by Tina’s screams, can see what his girlfriend being cut and dragged across the ceiling (?) but crucially cannot save her. He does the next best thing: flee the scene through a first-storey window and get apprehended (within hours) by the cops. But they have the wrong man. And Freddy isn’t done. He’s just waiting for his victims to fall asleep.

Two dead friends and several horrific nightmares with post-sleep consequences later (including a dream burn leading to a real-world burn and, more hilariously, Nancy literally pulling her sleeping antagonist’s hat into waking reality), we hear the truth about Freddy. In life, he was your standard child serial killer, who escaped imprisonment on a technicality. He couldn’t however, escape the wrath of neighbourhood parents. Moms and dads tracked him down to an old boiler room where he was then burnt him alive. “He can’t get you,” Nancy’s mother explains to her fretful daughter, “Mommy killed him.” The action of the movie belies Mrs Thomas’s words. He may be dead in the technical sense but, as the skip-rope songs says, Freddy’s still “coming for you”.

Mommy didn’t save Nancy after all. Instead, she put her life in further danger. Mommy helped engender a being of unimaginable horror hellbent on filial-based vengeance.

Mrs Thomas’s inability to keep her child safe underscores the limits of others, even our beloved others, and the great primal horror of this film: that of being left alone in a terrible place.

Tina’s short-lived narrative is in a way one of isolation: her father abandons the family years before the film’s events take place. Her mother goes on a vacation with a boyfriend and leaves her frightened daughter home alone. Tina’s attempts to seek protection from others ultimately fail: the friends gathered together to be “here for Tina” aren’t there when she is murdered. Her boyfriend is present, but powerless to help her.

Tina, while lonely, isn’t alone in this. Nancy failed by her drowsy boyfriend, who consistently falls asleep after explicitly promising to keep a waking guard over her (teenage boys, eh?) Glen, in turn, is failed by a father who refuses to pass a life-saving wake-up call to his son. Nancy’s dad, the cop, protects neither his community (three dead kids, come on) nor his child. Having hatched a plan to drag Freddy into the waking world, Nancy asks Lt Thomas for a simple favour: to be there when she wakes up so he can arrest her antagonist. “I’ll be there” he says, and poor Nancy trusts him. The way a girls wants to trust her father. But Lt Thomas, having assured his daughter of his imminent presence, immediately passes his paternal responsibility onto his colleague. “Get outside and watch her house,” he tells Parker. “If you see anything funny call me.”

Having delegated parenthood, the viewer is forced to watch Nancy – who has succeeded in her efforts to drag Freddy into the world of the waking – call out to her repeatedly absent father. It’s painful, frankly, to hear her repeated cries go unheeded.

1. Hey - - Daddy - - I’ve got him trapped! Help! Where are you?

2. Come on - - he’s in here! Don’t let him kill me too!

3. Daddy help me please!

At this point, the surrogate father decides what he’s witnessing is funny enough, and summon the real one. But still Lt Thomas takes his time. We hear Nancy scream again:

Daddy, I did it, please hurry.

Daddy, where are you?

When he finally shows up, she is still crying out for him. But even when he does finally break down the door and come into the house he proves himself to be, ultimately, useless, as he neither apprehends the villain nor prevents him from taking (killing?) his ex-wife. Nancy literally sends her father away realising, finally, that daddy is not what she wanted him to be.

In comparison to his delay and inaction, Mrs Thomas takes definitive steps in an attempt help her daughter. Ironically, though, they put her in further danger. She installs bars on the windows and locks Nancy in the house, ostensibly to help the girl, and in doing so prevents her daughter both from saving Glen and locks her in with an undead madman. Mrs Thomas’s insistence on the healing power of a sleep which Nancy knows to be life-threatening demonstrates an inability to engage with the reality of Nancy’s world. Accordingly her love becomes dangerous. Nancy needs to reject her mother’s advice for her own survival.

Ultimately Nancy cannot rely on any authority outside of herself – neither the law and order that her deadbeat dad represents², or the doctors in the hospital who would literally sedate her into danger. These forces come to represent The Establishment, an entity generally distrusted in horror films. The adults (or shall I say, the man) refuse to believe in the threat of Freddy, and therefore don’t act on it. The warning that “Freddy is coming for you…better stay up late” instead comes from kids, in the unlikely format of a skip-rope song – something which almost exclusively is sung by children. While critics rightly focus on the role of parenthood within the film, it is important to note that unlike Halloween, no grown-up comes to save our protagonist. There’s no good guy with a gun. Nancy needs to rely on setting her own booby traps (she walked so Kevin McCallister could run) and her own imagination.

Nightmare was released in 1984. Wes Craven’s movie was born under a Reagan star, under a president committed to shrinking the state. Ronald believed, ruggedly, in the individual and individual responsibility. He is remembered for his racist dismissal of welfare recipients and his refusal to acknowledge an epidemic that tore through his country’s gay community. 1984 is also the year First Lady Nancy Reagan first uttered the immortal words “Just Say No”, a slogan that neatly reduced the societal issue of substance addiction into a simple choice.³ Nightmare knows the powers-that-be aren’t necessarily all-knowing or all-loving or, even, all-powerful. 80s baddie Margaret Thatcher famously declared “there is no such thing as society”.

Gosh, you might think. How lonely.

I’ve previously written about the horror of the adolescent state – that is, a position where you can neither believe in authority figures’ power to protect you - and this teenage terror is very much at play in Nightmare. But while limited autonomy (one of the characters is literally imprisoned shortly before he is murdered) is clearly an issue at play, it was the pervasive loneliness that really got to me as I rewatched this film.

Freddy Krueger works as a pretty unsubtle representation of your inner demon, a self-destructive force. He literally stalks the subconscious and ruins (or ends) the lives of those who struggle with him. He can quickly become a metaphor for depression, or anxiety, or grief, any emotional affliction that alienates you from your world. Tina screams in pain, and Rod can’t reach her. She’s trapped in her dream. Even if you’ve never been diagnosed with a mental health condition, there will have been moments where you, too, have been overwhelmed with a pain and felt, too, that no-one could rescue you. Or else, you have listened to someone describe their desperate state, and been unable to offer them solace or relief.

This is not to say you shouldn't seek help when you are suffering – you should and, with help, try to seek a route through the pain. But, like Nancy, we can’t delegate, and instead must play an active, personal role when it comes to fighting our Kruegers. But there are those who struggle to be alone with their thoughts.

Mental health reading aside, at a more literal level Freddy acts as a danger that must be faced. Dangers need to be faced from time to time – and not just serial killers, but other things like illness or toxic relationships or recessions – and it is so much easier to do so when you feel someone has your back. It is much easier to be brave when you know the cavalry is coming.

But what if they don’t?

In addition concrete threats, there is the danger of loneliness itself – the horror of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, buried alone with her name. We grow up being told that so much of our value, what gives life meaning, is our relationships. To quote Muppets Christmas Carol, the view that “if you need to know the measure of a man/you simply count his friends”. So what are you, and what are you left with, when their is a failure to connect?

I got a little teary after my Nightmare rewatch. When (friend of the newsletter) Neil asked what the matter was, I think I garbled something like “she’s…so…alone”. But I don’t think my empathy for strictly limited to Nancy; rather, I was feeling something for all the lonely people.

We’re born alone, we dream alone (even when we dream the same baddy), we die alone. Along the way, we will feel loneliness. It could be the isolation of a troubled teenager, the pain of a rejected lover, or the unique horror of job application as an English graduate in the aftermath of a global financial crisis (I mean, I imagine). Loneliness can be a frightening place. When you’re in that Terrible Place (to wilfully misuse a Carol Clover’s critical term), it can seem like you’ll never leave it again.

How are we going to get out of this hole? Well, I’ll do what I often do when in a tricky spot: I’ll invoke Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Into the Woods is a musical of two parts – the first follows fairy tales until their “happily after after” ending; the second explores what comes next. The second half of the musical is full of loss – mothers keep dying, and Prince Charming is a philanderer. Despite this, however, close to the show’s climax we get the song ‘no-one is alone’. “Sometimes people leave you,” we’re told, “Halfway through the wood./Others may deceive you./You decide what’s good./You decide alone./But no-one is alone.”

Cinderella is singing to Little Red Riding Hood and the staging shows she is, literally, not alone. Those few lines battle with loss, and rejection, and the weight of personal responsibility. But still, they insist on the power of community. You figure things out alone, but also, no-one is alone. There is hope as long as we can keep reaching out, and trying to make connections. We can’t ever truly become one, no matter what the Spice Girls or Cathy from Wuthering Heights might say. But we can still make bonds, despite the limits that literally separate you and I. The desire for imperfect communion is, according to Hedwig (or maybe Plato) The Origin of Love.

We can be the Simpson’s children, not Nancy. Or two quote Matt Groening’s other seminal work, Futurama: “You’re lonely. And I’m lonely. But together, we’re lonely together.”

NEXT TIME

Because Nightmare is such a deep vein of green-coloured liquid, and I’ve already spent way too many words/cultural references in this edition, we will be returning for a part two where we will talk about bad (American) dreams, janky endings, and the fear of failure.

Thanks for making it to the end of this essay. If it made you think or feel anything, please let me know in the comments. If you gleaned any pleasure from it, please considering sharing this and/or subscribing to the newsletter. If there’s a spooky movie you’d like me to watch/talk about in the future, let me know. Until next time – sleep tight!

1. That being said, ‘Terror at 5+1/2 Feet’ - or the Gremlin on the Bus story - did get me as a kid. But I shan’t explore its primal horror today.

2. Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed a ‘The Police’ band poster in Nancy’s room. Is this a bid for 80s adolescent realism, or a nod towards The Force? Neither your cop dad nor Sting will save you.

3. Yes, she did argue there was a need for a need to educate the youth about drugs and drug addiction but let’s be real, if that was enough to really tackle the issue, D.A.R.E. would have been a good sight more effective than it ultimately was.