“He’s dead because mommy killed him”: Familial threat in Nightmare on ELm Street

A classic of the slasher genre, as well as arguably the high water mark of slasher cinematography—not to mention my own personal first exposure to horror film—Wes Craven’s 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street introduced not only the inimitable Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) but also what became a niche generic delight for grotesque wordplay coupled with villainous sarcasm. There’s a lot going on in Nightmare, and many fruitful lenses through which to consider the film—it’s a rich text that lends itself to psychoanalytic, formalist, phenomenological, feminist, and auteur approaches that all offer productive ways of considering Craven’s work.  Yet it’s the function of the family—or, more accurately, the dysfunction of the family—that largely steers the narrative and underscores the themes. I would argue that perhaps what’s most interesting about Nightmare on Elm Street is that although it’s the parents who are responsible for Krueger’s death, it’s their children whom Krueger targets; in a kind of delayed revenge, the teenagers are the ones who are paying for the actions of their parents. 

Don’t fall alseep.

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Nonetheless, although the who may be clear, the why is less so. Craven doesn’t make the reason behind Krueger’s displacement explicit, but each possible rationalization has its own dark implications. It’s possible that Freddy seeks out the teenagers as a more effective way to punish their parents, taking away their children as “his” children—that is, the victims of his homicidal pedophilia—were taken from him. Perhaps Freddy is deeply invested in disrupting the contemporary family unit in order to get revenge for his own ruined family (an idea that gets complicated as his backstory is developed in the sequels). Or perhaps disruption of the family is itself the greatest punishment, especially in 1984 capitalist midwestern America; alternately, we might read Freddy as the metaphorical “threat from within,” a manifestation of the parents’ sins, for their inhumane act of mob justice. After all, horror has long grappled with either threats to or anxieties about the family unit, and the violence that erupts within the story often does so as a manifestation of the “sickness” or “rot” that exists beneath the familial facade. 

In “‘Death of the Family,’ or, Keeping Human Beings Human,” Roddey Reid looks at the way the concept of family—and threats to it—have been rhetorically described: “it should come as no surprise that since its inception familial discourse has always constructed the humanizing ‘family’ as under threat and in ‘need’ of constant nurturing, surveillance, and public and private intervention” (186). That Marge and Don Thompson (Ronee Blakely and John Saxon, respectively) are divorced lends a certain credence to this possible explanation; the family is already disintegrating, probably under the weight of Marge and Don’s shared act of past violence. Freddy’s arrival and subsequent murder spree hastens the dissolution—when Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) realizes that her parents don’t believe that she is being stalked in her dreams, she recognizes that she cannot rely on them, thus fracturing the familial structure even more. In an era when divorce was on the rise and, as Reid points out, there was a genuine cultural panic about the erosion the domestic mythology that largely shaped American culture, this failure of family maintenance is seen as horrific. Freddy Krueger rips open and exposes the secret violence upon which that domestic myth was based—as Reid argues, “the middle classes’ embodiment of domesticity stood as a sign of their exemplary humanity” (188), but Freddy’s terrorizing of the children of Elm Street forces the middle class reckoning of their own vigilantism. After all, it’s no accident that this film is set in suburban Ohio, a kind of Anytown, USA whose most significant feature is that it is not urban. The threat arises not out of drugs or poverty or claustrophobic spaces or dense population—the threat erupts from the inescapable past. 

As with the slasher genre in general, however, the threat also erupts from cultural anxieties about sex, particularly the sex that teenagers either are or are not having. Carol Clover tidily phrases it in her seminal essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” that “the slasher film, not despite but exactly because of its crudity and compulsive repetitiveness, gives us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes, at least among the segment of the population that forms its erstwhile audience, than do the legitimate products of the better studios” (70). Her shade at the horror genre notwithstanding, Clover makes clear that slashers are deeply invested in the project of making manifest cultural compunctions about both sex and gender. Yet this might also be read as an anxiety based in the anxieties regarding threats to the family; after all, the potential consequences of teen sex—pregnancy, disease, rejection of the family in favor of the lover—are, ultimately, deeply rooted in familial concern. 

Works Cited

Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant,  second edition, Texas UP, 2015, pp. 68-115.

Craven, Wes, director. Nightmare on Elm Street. Performances by Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakely, Robert Englund, Amanda Wyss, and Johnny Depp. New Line Video, 1984.

Reid, Roddey. “‘Death of The Family,’ or, Keeping Human Beings Human.” Posthuman Bodies, edited by Jack (Judith) Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, Indiana UP, 1995, pp. 177-99.