So my wife couldn’t believe that I’d never seen this movie, and we sat down to watch it. Now, I’ll admit upfront that I was biased going into it, because she’s talked about how she never really cared for the franchise’s silly tone, and preferred the straighter horror of Friday the 13th. But also she noted that the first movie didn’t have the silliness of the later movies, so I wasn’t that biased.

To give my conclusion upfront, I wasn’t really a fan. The problem for me is the fundamental conceit of the movie, that Freddy exists in dreams and can do dream stuff. Because the way that Wes Craven uses that is to have scene after scene that you think is real but then… oh no, turns out it was in a dream the whole time, psych!

If you do this once, I will probably forgive you. But if you do it over and over and over, right down to making the whole ending of the movie ambiguous, I am going to be annoyed with it. And he did, so I am.

Beyond that, though, I also didn’t care for Freddy Krueger himself, who felt like he warped in from a different movie. Like, the movie is setting up this terrifying dreamworld thing, with walls that bulge out and mysterious happenings… and then here waltzes in Freddy with his stupid sweater and his stupid hat and his stupid claws. Even though he’s not meant to be a silly figure in this movie, I can completely see why the franchise went in that direction — there’s nothing really scary about him, he just seems kinda silly immediately; trying to do a bunch of scary movies featuring him wouldn’t have worked at all.

(Another weird thing about this movie is that it’s from the heyday of R-rated slashers, and it keeps deliberately setting up scenes where characters might get naked — characters having sex, undressing, and taking baths — and it lingeringly teases that it’s going to show something, and then it never does. And like, if they wanted to make a movie with no nudity, that’s fine, by all means do that. But if you’re going to make that movie, just make that movie, don’t sit here being all PG-rated fake-prurient like you’re the TV edit of an R-rated movie. Pick a lane!)

So yeah, not a big fan, but paradoxically I think this makes me more interested in seeing the later ones, because maybe what my wife hates about them is something that might work better for me. Or maybe not, and it’s just that at my advanced age I have now caught up to my junior high peers, and finally also have a strong preference in re Freddy and Jason.