Never Sleep Again

Hey, remember me??

I know, I know, I am failing at this whole blog thing, but give me a break, it’s summer, after all!

Well, it was. But now I hear the incessant honking of geese flying over our house and waddling about the fields nearby. Our house is overrun with apples, and thus homemade cider and juice and sauce and pies (ok, ok, that’s for the OTHER blog). School is back in session.

It’s fall.

And as per the usual routine, the crisp in the air every evening, and the early settling dark have me yearning for darker realms; for Halloween, for horror, for a good jump scare, for ominous booming music, for corn syrup.

I’ve perused few horror films this summer (we got Netflix, so much of my time was spent on Mad Men….and…ahem, Downton Abbey. Don’t judge me!).

I did watch Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are (check out my earlier review of this film’s Mexican inspiration). A slow burn of a film, with glorious cinematography, utterly beautiful design and structure, and a surprising amount of emotion, the 2013 film is maybe more for indie film fans with a horror tolerance, as there’s little in the way of scare and gore until the very end. As I rooted about for reviews of the film, I read Salon’s review, and found it summed the film up perfectly. If all that needs to be said has been said on the first page of a Google search, what have I to add?

I had hoped to revisit A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as an homage to the late, great Wes Craven, newly departed horror icon who will be surely and sorely missed, but my copy has a glitch and won’t play. Tragic, though, Nightmare is a yearly tradition for me, I have watched it every October for years and years. I know it through and through, hardly needing to see it again to recount it’s glorious, whimsical terror.

I watched this film in my teens, and was immediately struck by the foggy, gloomy 80’s horror landscape. That look that only horror’s of the 80’s have, as though the lenses are just a little dirty, and everyone had amazing volume in their hair. I was immediately terrified by Nancy’s dream, early on, as she dozes off in school. You know the one;

‘……were it not that I have bad dreams……’

The shots of Tina slithering down the hall in her blood soaked body bag still grate on me, but trigger that sense of excitement that you horror lovers know. We get that goosflesh, that prickle of the hairs on the backs of our necks, and we know something horrible, but great is about to happen.

The 2010 remake of this film is an atrocity, barely worth mentioning . It could never live up to the standards of the original.

The world will forever be haunted by Freddy Krueger, his slice and dice tactics, his unsettling wardrobe choices (I’m told the brain has trouble recognizing those two particular shades of red and green when they are next to one another) and his inexplicable ability to, you know, wander into your dreams and kill you. The thick, heavy tones of music in this film still ring in my head, months and months since I’ve last seen it, and the dreamy, whimsical jump rope chant is conjured up instantly in my mind. Who could forget dreamy Johnny Depp and the geyser of bed blood? Nightmare stands out beyond it’s time, as more than just just a cult classic on the shelves of your childhood video store (don’t get me wrong, I remember poring over the cases of this and it’s sequels as a kid, while my sister searched for She’s All That, or some such tripe).

Wes Craven gave us some many classic films, and so many scares. Nightmare, to me, is more than just notable, it is THE Wes Craven film. Last House on the Left, certainly chilling and iconic. The Serpent and the Rainbow, under appreciated and highly unsettling. Scream? The film that brought horror back from the dead in the mid nineties. But A Nightmare on Elm Street?

There’s just no touching it.

This is really, half a review. I’ll be back on my A game, soon, hopefully, and delving deeper into the films we know and love, and maybe some we don’t even know just yet. For now, kudos to you, Wes Craven, and thank you for all the nightmares.