Favorite Film Situation

Like many people that go to Ringling, I consider myself a bit of a film buff. I don’t know everything there is to know about films, but I have seen quite a few and it’s hard for me to pick a favorite. After sorting through a large list, I decided to pick Nightmare on Elm Street as one of my all time top picks. Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984 and was directed and written by Wes Craven. It falls under the horror genre and more specifically the slasher genre. The movie is about several high school students who are haunted in their dreams by a villain by the name of Fred Krueger. If they fall asleep, Krueger will kill them in their sleep, which causes their deaths in the real world. In the original version, the villain was a child molester though due to a lot of big cases involving molestation in California during the time of its release. It had a budget of 1.8 million dollars but easily earned it all back within the first week. One of the main reasons I love this movie, other than it being a really creepy slasher, is that it has so many different inspirations. Newspaper articles from the 1970s that documented refugees that escaped Vietnam inspired Craven. The refugees were reported to having reoccurring and disturbing night terrors and refused to sleep after them. Some of them died ended up dying in their sleep soon after. The song Dream Weaver by Gary Wright and childhood experiences also inspired Craven. He even named the main villain after a bully from his childhood. The special effects in the movie were creative for the era and the themes in it were majorly about the loss of innocence. Around that time American families were migrating to the suburbs and the movie is said to be a reaction to said move. When people think of the American suburbs, especially around that time, it was associated with innocence and safety. The movie exhibited the adults of the fictional town as protectors as they tried to rid the town of Freddy, who was a child murderer, and hid the deed from their children to ‘keep them safe’. The film does an amazing job blurring the lines between the imaginary and real realms, not to mention it keeps you on your toes.