The following evening, his little brother would be out of town, so we agreed to watch some old horror movies to get him caught up. I gave him a list of horror movies I'd seen but would like to see again to choose from.
He picked "Scream, then Halloween" but I explained that he needed to watch Scream last, as it referenced Halloween a lot.
We ended up watching three: first, A Nightmare On Elm Street, the first one from 1984.
I watch 1970s and 80s movies with nostalgia, but also, watching with my Gen Z son, I notice the generation gap is more like a chasm. I definitely saw this movie back in the 1980s, and saw at least one or two of the sequels, but it's been 25 years or more since I'd watched any of them. NoES is about two high school girls and their boyfriends, and their relationships, plus the relationship between the lead girl Nancy, feels so 1950s. My wife points out that the 1980s were way more like the 50s than we liked to believe at the time, but the way the teens relate to each other and their parents feels decidedly regressive here.
Henry complained that Freddy wasn't that scary, and the movie felt like it squandered its opportunities. I noticed that the franchise built itself around Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger as the dad-joke spouting main character, and the teenagers were disposable. However, when the teens get murdered in their dreams, Krueger and Englund take a secondary role to the special effects:
- Tina (Amanda Wyss from Better Off Dead) when her boyfriend, bad boy Rod, is watching her get sliced to pieces in her bedroom, she is wrestling and flailing about, they do the rotating set gag to send her to the ceiling, and it all works great, and her screams are terrifying. However, Freddy is invisible.
- Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) nearly drowns in a bottomless bathtub, it's a great effect, but Freddy isn't there either.
- Rod is hung up with a bedsheet noose in his jail cell, Freddy isn't there.
- Gentle Glen (Johnny Depp) is swallowed by his bed, then a geyser of blood erupts onto the ceiling? No Freddy.
- Nancy's mom Marge is killed while a completely-engulfed-in-flames Freddy is on top of her (see above), then her body descends into a bottomless pit where her mattress should be? Freddy is barely a character.
- Most of the other clever visual effects don't involve Englund: the claw emerging from the bathwater, the telephone with the tongue, the face stretching out from the wall, and so on.
It's an axiom that the first film in a movie franchise, the movie whose success made the franchise possible, often are not representative of what the franchise becomes. If you want to show a newbie a single NoES movie, number one might not be number one.
Halloween (1978) holds up much better. The movie moves very slow. Some would call it "building tension", and you certainly get many creepy moments of Michael stalking the girls, however...after Judith Myers dies in the first five minutes, it feels like over an hour for the next teenager to die. It's no hot take to complain that Carpenter's score, while legendary, is only two themes that he uses over and over to the point of comedy. He famously made movies on limited money, and "writing" his own music is one line item he can cross off the budget, but I can't help but get distracted by it. On the other hand, that's nearly the only area where I notice his cost savings. My only other gripe is that it's clearly not October 31 in Illinois. It's springtime in California. I think he should have either shot the movie in autumn, or relocated the script to California, or both, but once you know about all the green leaves on the trees, it's impossible not to notice them. Beyond these deficiencies, you'd never know it wasn't a major studio movie. All the location shooting in the neighborhood looks great, and the "teen" cast is great, even if PJ Soles's affected dialog with all the "totally"s, is a little, well, affected.
Scream, the first one, from 1996 - fast-forward to the Nineties, and a script from Dawson's Creek creator Kevin Williamson, is a wholly different beast. This movie starts with Drew Barrymore, the most adorable actress of the moment, getting terrorized and murdered. For a movie that loves horror movies, it's nothing like those classic horror movies - no slow build, no ratcheting tension, no long wordless scenes: it's all violence and fast-talking meta dialog about scary movies from jump street.
(Also, I'm super glad he watched Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street first, because there's lots of references to both of them, heck the teens watch Halloween on VHS at the end!)
At least ten characters get murdered, well three of those ten just look like they died, at first. Wes Craven did a great job keeping the audience, and the victims, off guard with Ghostface's superpower: the ability to move silently, and to disappear from Point A and relocate to Point B almost impossibly fast. I never thought "no one could move that quick". Craven also threw up enough plausible obstacles between Ghostface and his targets to draw out the battles for maximum thrills.
I also appreciated how well they threw suspicion on so many of the characters as possibly being Ghostface. It really wasn't possible to eliminate anyone as a suspect until the third act. At the beginning of Act 3, when the house party is just about to start, I paused the movie and asked him "okay, cards on the table, who do you think the murderer is?" and he got it right! I suspect he might not have guessed it if he didn't love Hot Fuzz as much as I do.
Next Steps: maybe a few more throwback horror movies (The Thing, Poltergeist), but I think it's time to move my teen son into the late 90s and 2000s: Blair Witch Project, Signs, The Village, Unbreakable, Paranormal Activity, and so on...
File Under Horror
- My All-Time Scary Scenes In Scary Movies List
- Three Acclaimed Horror Movies That Didn't Scare Me
- Poltergeist
- The Shining and Room 237
- Paranormal Activity
- Pan's Labyrinth
- Alien
- Sleepy Hollow
- Noseferatu (2024)
- The Horror Of Dracula
- Bram Stoker's Dracula
- Shadow Of The Vampire
- Shaun Of The Dead
- The Lost Boys
- What We Do In The Shadows