What Can You Do in Your Dreams? Slasher Cinema as Youth Empowerment

What Can You Do in Your Dreams? Slasher

Cinema as Youth Empowerment

L. J. DE GRAFFENREID

ERHAPS NO CINEMATIC GENRE IS MORE MISUNDERSTOOD THAN THE

classic American slasher. Such ﬁlms are alternately reviled as

random, meaningless spectacle (Crane 147) or revered as cul-

tural products of the exploitation of sexual difference. Psychoanalytic

and feminist readers posit that we watch slashers because they act as

signiﬁers of latent teenage sexual anxiety and desire (Mulvey 756). In

the grand tradition of Halloween (1978), the Nightmare on Elm Street

(1984) franchise is ‘‘characterized by the presence of a psychotic killer

usually involved in a multiplicity of murders’’ (Dika 87). What sets

these ﬁlms apart from such canonical works as Hitchcock’s Psycho

(1960) is the intimate, formulaic relationship between Clover’s chaste,

somewhat androgynous ‘‘Final Girl’’ (Clover 35) and her sexually

aggressive assailant (Tracansky 65). The Final Girl’s ‘‘triumphant’’

survival is read by some critics as reﬂecting the conservative sexual

politics of a nation then in the throes of an HIV/AIDS and teen preg-

nancy crisis (Derry 163). In critical analysis, however, this reactionary

view tends to obfuscate the generally troubled relationship between

parents and their rebellious offspring: in the Nightmare on Elm Street

ﬁlms, authority ﬁgures either dismiss teenage pleas for assistance or

pose direct physical threats. The slasher, then, can be seen as underage

society’s revenge-seeking doppelganger, its desire for rebellion made

manifest in the murderous tendencies of powerful, sadistic Freddy. And

though sexual exploration is a key feature of the slasher, in the Night-

mare ﬁlms, preservation of innocence and peer support constitute the

most pressing crises and needs of the teenage unconscious.

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise offers us a particularly inter-

esting case because its heroes rebel against abusive authority ﬁgures by

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 5, 2011

r 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

954

relying on the dream-induced Krueger as their avenger. The entire

premise is itself redolent of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899);

Craven’s dark dreams are fundamental exercises in wish fulﬁllment

(155), especially when they involve a manifestation of latent fears and

anxieties (168): the murderous Freddy silences abusive adults and en-

gages in wanton sexual display with impunity. In this way, the Night-

mare also acts as unconscious ‘‘compensation’’ for the shortcomings of

real life (161). Invoking Krueger as a protector, however, has a price: an

overactive imagination often produces the phantasy of martyrdom.

One, Two, Fred’s Coming for You: A Dream

of Innocence Denied

The opening scene of the inaugural Nightmare on Elm Street (directed by

Wes Craven) features several strong references to sexual innocence. The

assembly sequence of the infamous, highly phallic glove is followed by

shots of a frightened teenage girl, running through a grimy boiler room

in a white nightgown.

As Tina runs, the sound of ominous male

laughter is replaced by that of bleating and an infant’s cry. She quickly

becomes cornered and looks fearfully toward the camera, which cuts to a

shot of a sheep standing in the girl’s place. Craven’s usage of the sheep

introduces traditional Christian themes of chastity and blood sacriﬁce;

in effect, Tina is the sacriﬁcial lamb. The three obvious signiﬁers of

purity (the white gown, the infant’s cry, the innocent, lamb-like bleat)

are violently juxtaposed against the image of a badly scarred (visceral

and vaginal), knife-wielding Fred, who scrapes his bladed ﬁngers

against the nearest pipe before ripping through the nightgown in an act

of blatant sexual violation. The next morning, Tina’s mother dismisses

her fears with a quick ‘‘you’ve gotta cut your ﬁngernails,’’ as though the

virginal garment was violated by her own frantic somnambular sexu-

ality. As her mother points out, the act is highly autoerotic. Freud,

in fact, believed that masturbation allows for ‘‘sexual developments and

sublimations in phantasy’’ (‘‘Contributions to a Discussion on Mastur-

bation’’ 187): Tina’s dreams, then, represent the surfacing of the

pubescent id. Freud’s view of the subject was largely negative; hence,

Freddy’s violence and the ‘‘direct injuries’’ of her encounters can be

attributed to ‘‘the ego’s resistance and indignation against that sexual

activity’’ (187). For all his grotesquery, Fred is ultimately only an

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955

extension of Tina, offering us ‘‘a titillating glimpse into the contents of

the id, especially the sexual and violent impulses’’ (Derry 163).

This reﬂexive identiﬁcation is epitomized in A Nightmare on Elm Street

Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985; directed by Jack S holder ), in which the

male protagonist, Jesse, sees Freddy appear every time he looks in the

mirror; he even begins ﬁnding the infamous glove on his own hand, often

covered in the blood of those Freddy has recently slashed. The two are

inextricably ‘‘linked: occasionally as opposing sides to a single self. . . .

This battling of interior forces is then formally supported by the viewer’s

shifting identiﬁcation with the two main characters . . . theirs is a strug-

gle for the dominance of restraint over violence’’ (Dika 93).

Jesse is caught between an adult embrace of sexuality and the infant’s

revolted fascination. He is horriﬁed to see traces of the id/Fred appear

on his sister: her cereal-box prize is revealed to be a set of bright-red

‘‘Fu-Man ﬁngers,’’ which she immediately applies and brandishes in a

frightening parody of Freddy’s trademark wave. Having identiﬁed these

illicit vestiges, the id/Fred suddenly becomes interested in her sexually.

While sleepwalking (and therefore acting under the inﬂuence of the

id), Jesse enters his sister’s room and hovers over her. The camera pans to

his right, now-gloved hand, which creeps menacingly over her chest and

towards her head, as though seeking to remove the bedcovers. The hand

completely dominates the screen; it is a force with a mind of its own.

Suddenly it draws back, each ﬁnger jumping erect, as though it were a

person interrupted in the attempt of an illicit act. Its knives rattle

ominously, but do not violate her innocence. According to Freud in

Totem and Taboo, Jesse’s attachment to his sister comes as no surprise;

like all boys his ‘‘ﬁrst object selection . . . is of an incestuous nature’’

(810), in this case the sister. Though Jesse does not act on these

impulses in his waking life, ‘‘the incestuous ﬁxations of the libido still

play . . . the main role in his unconscious psychic life’’ (823).

Three, Four, Better Lock Your Door: In the Boiler Room

of the Unconscious

The Nightmare ﬁlms make literal the adage that puberty and the con-

comitant exploration of sexuality can be painful. In one of the ﬁrst

ﬁlm’s more notorious scenes, Freddy’s glove emerges from the water

between the Final Girl’s legs as she reclines in the bath. Like Tina’s torn

956 L. J. DeGraffenreid

nightgown, the shot has autoerotic implications, serving to indicate the

psychologically painful dangers of such exploration. A similar effect is

achieved by Freddy’s pushing against the wall behind the sleeping Tina,

which yields, hymen-like, but does not break. The same sequence occurs

with Nancy after Tina’s death, marking Freddy as a sexually exploratory

ﬁgure. Interestingly, this effect only becomes possible when the cruciﬁx

is absent from the wall; in a similar way, when Freddy kills Tina he

gestures to his phallic glove, declaring ‘‘This is God,’’ before cutting off

her ﬁngers (symbols of her own sexual autonomy) and thrusting himself

on top of her. The infant attachments to religion and chastity are

thereby overridden by the adolescent id’s drive toward sexual experi-

ence: at the end of the violent sexual pantomime, a stream of blood can

be seen on her inner thighs, signaling the loss of virginity.

Nancy, however, is not relegated to this victimized, feminine po-

sition. Not for her the loose ﬂowing nightgown and bare legs; though

she is most often seen in white, she chooses to wear pants, marking her

as masculine (and thus more difﬁcult to dispatch). Dika explains why

slasher heroines are often sexually ambiguous: though feminine, Final

Girls like Nancy resemble the killer ‘‘in [their] ability to see and to use

violence’’ (91). They are also ‘‘less likely to disrobe to the point of

nudity for the camera or to be involved in extensive on-screen sexual

activity’’ (Doane 760). Such sexual mobility effectively allows slasher

heroines to become ‘‘masculine’’ in the face of an uncanny killer, while

the psychotic killer themself becomes an embodiment of the monstrous

feminine, compensating for the Final Girl’s phallic lack (Dika 91).

Thus, in the slasher ﬁlm, ‘‘womanhood’’ is essentially a mask which

may be removed or displayed on cue, making Nancy ‘‘essentially a

congenial double for the adolescent male’’ (Clover 51).

Nor are the biological males immune from the catastrophic effects of

carnal knowledge. While being held in a cell at the police station, the

leather-clad, hypermasculine, sexually domineering Rod (whose very

name connotes virility) is dispatched by a twisted, roping, phallic bed-

sheet, originating in his crotch and curling into the noose that will hold

him against the bars of his cell and asphyxiate him. Key here is the

notion of phallic imprisonment: the ‘‘studly’’ Rod cannot master his

impulses and is literally imprisoned and choked by his own sex drive.

Conversely, Nancy’s boyfriend Glen will meet a feminized end,

dragged into a hole in a bed from which copious amounts of blood

issue and coat the walls. Freddy’s sexual mobility rivals that of his

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957

‘‘better half’’ ’: if Nancy can assume a masculine identity, so too can Freddy

become an embodiment of male fears of feminine sexuality (N ancy in

particular), becoming a massive vagina dentata. Such gender ﬂexibility is

not implausible: F reddy frequently assumes a fem ale form in order to

dupe his victims. In the ﬁrst ﬁlm, he becomes a pouting hall monitor. By

the third, he is capable of transforming himself into a sexy nurse (who

becomes an object of fatal attraction for one unlucky male patient).

Fred, however, is more than a manifestation of fear; he is also an

intense pubescent sexual yearning passed down from one movie to the

next. Jesse’s move to Elm Street and his occupation of Nancy’s old

house and bedroom symbolize his transition to sexual maturity and the

adoption of the Nightmare legacy, which begins when Jesse and love

interest Lisa discover Nancy’s old diary in the closet. In an entry dated

March 15— a date that calls to mind Caesar’s bleeding wounds and

their inﬂiction by phallic betrayal—Nancy describes her nocturnal as-

sailant. Lisa, picking up on the sexual overtones of the dream, reads the

entry in a sultry, provocative voice:

Sometimes when I’m lying here in bed I can see Glen in his window

across the way getting ready for bed. His body is slim and smooth,

and I know I shouldn’t watch him, but that part of me that wants

him forces me to. That’s when I weaken. That’s when I want to go to

him . . . March ﬁfteenth. He comes to me at night—horrible, ugly,

dirty . . . under the sheets with me . . . tearing at my nightgown

with his steel claws. His name is Fred . . . and he keeps trying to

take me to the boiler room. He wants to kill me.

Nancy’s lust for Glen is directly linked to the appearance of libidinous

Freddy: innocent, level-headed Nancy holds sway in the daytime;

overstimulated, wish-fulﬁlling Freddy rules the night. In Freddy’s Re-

venge, the eponymous character will himself deny any difference be-

tween himself and his ‘‘victim’’: Jesse ‘‘can’t ﬁght me. I’m him!’’;

‘‘There is no Jesse. I’m Jesse now!’’

Like Nancy, Jesse will be visited by overpowering sexual urges. The

morning after his ﬁrst night in Nancy/Freddy’s old haunt, Jesse awak-

ens, drenched in sweat, clad only in a pair of tight, clinging underwear.

The camera shot holds his groin just off center, directing the audience’s

attention to Jesse’s genitalia, then jump-cuts to two eggs sizzling in

a skillet for the morning’s breakfast. The testicular allusion alone

conveys a sense of Jesse’s latent pubescent sexual agony; later that night

958 L. J. DeGraffenreid

he will also perform a dance which culminates in the release of a white-

corked pop-gun from his crotch. These scenes of coital mimesis serve to

underscore the emergence of Jesse’s biological anxieties.

Jesse also falls victim to familiar (and concomitant) Oedipal con-

ﬂicts: his father’s demand that Jesse unpack his room alludes to his

‘‘unpacking’’ the long-dormant desires of the teenage subconscious. In

deﬁance of his father’s demand, he will simply dump the contents of his

moving boxes in drawers, smirking ‘‘How do you like that, Dad?’’ In

another scene, Jesse will uncover the violently shaking cage containing

the family’s pair of lovebirds, at which point one bursts from the cage,

attacks the family, and bursts into ﬂames. Jesse is immediately accused

by his father of having perpetrated a sick prank, blatantly endangering

his mother and sister. Sholder appears to be paying homage to Hitch-

cock; however, the incident conveys a sense of the dangers of sex (the

mating birds attack and are even incendiary) and hints at the slowly

escalating Oedipal conﬂict between father and son.

While experiencing unprecedented urges from the id, Jesse falls

prey to acute attacks of sexual anxiety. His psychological conﬂict is

particularly graphic, manifesting itself at a friend’s pool party. While

making out with his girlfriend Lisa on the ﬂoor of the cabana, Jesse

opens his mouth to kiss her breasts, only to unroll Freddy’s massive,

wart-covered, ‘‘Tex Avery wolf’’ tongue. The hugely phallic symbol

becomes a reference for what we cannot see, namely, Jesse’s ‘‘monstrous’’

sexual arousal. (The scene seems to reference the ﬁrst movie, in which

the same tongue emerges from Nancy’s disconnected telephone to lick

her and declare ‘‘I’m your boyfriend now.’’) Horriﬁed by this external,

waking evidence of his shame, Jesse ﬂees the scene, turning to more

sexually adept Grady for help. He begs his friend to watch him while

he sleeps (in case Freddy should make another appearance), declaring

that ‘‘Something is trying to get inside my body.’’ The bemused Grady

is quick to point out that the statement betrays Jesse’s fear of feminine

sexuality: ‘‘Yeah, she’s female . . . and she’s waiting for you in the

cabana. And you wanna sleep with me.’’ Grady’s homoerotic reference

and Jesse’s (justiﬁed) paranoia are ironically underscored by the sign on

Grady’s door, which cautions ‘‘this machine starts automatically.’’ Like

said machine, the teenage libido never sleeps: Jesse awakes to ﬁnd

Grady fast asleep (of course) and the steel points of Freddy’s glove

emerging through the skin of his own hand—Freddy has literally been

inside of him the whole time. As Jesse writhes in a parody of sexual

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959

rapture, Freddy’s eyes begin to peer out of his throat. Finally he emerges

and promptly impales Grady on the door, suggesting homosexual rape

or revenge for perceived acts of neglect (falling asleep) or ritual castration

(earlier in the ﬁlm Grady pulls down Jesse’s shorts in front of Lisa and

her friends). Regardless of motivation, a horriﬁed Jesse turns to face the

mirror, only to ﬁnd Freddy playfully waggling a ﬁnger at him.

Hysterical now, Jesse returns to his bewildered girlfriend, telling her

that Freddy is ‘‘inside me—I’m scared’’ that ‘‘he wants to take me again’’

and that ‘‘he owns me.’’ Such language is typical of rape—it is as if being

at the mercy of libidinous anxieties has feminized Jesse. In fact, one of

Jesse’s dream-encounters with his sexualized self ﬁnds him struggling

against Freddy to keep the basement door shut, as though it were a kind

of male hymen barring carnal knowledge. When he fails, Freddy over -

powers him and holds their bodies together in an erotic embrace, a single

erect claw pointed menacingly at Jesse’ s body. Lisa tries to reassure Jesse

that Freddy is only a manifestation of his internal state, stating that

‘‘because you created him, you can destroy him.’’ However, his libidinal

doppelganger soon re-emerges. Predictably, the camera cuts to images of

grilled hot dogs bursting into ﬂame and cans of beer gushing white

foam: images of the sexual climax Jesse/Freddy has again been denied.

‘‘Freddy’’ takes control once more, taking Lisa to the ﬂoor, grabbing her

buttocks and biting into her thigh, releasing a very vaginal stream of

blood in yet another ritualized rape. Lisa only half-heartedly defends

herself after being stabbed with a kitchen knife, returning the blow as

gently as possible. ‘‘Jesse’ ’ emerges for a moment, issuing a tender ‘ ‘ I love

you’’ from Freddy’s lips. The two are now ofﬁcially indistinguishable.

Jesse/Freddy drops the knife, rushes out toward the party, declares that

‘‘you are all my children now,’ ’ and . . . vanishes.

He returns, of course, to the infamous boiler room, the steamy scene of

the crime where many of Krueger’s encounters occur . Most other en-

counters take p lace in a very similar locale—the basement room of the

Elm Street House, which contains the furnace. Freddy’s boiler room—

located ‘‘across the tracks’’ on the outskirts of town—and Nancy’ s furnace

room are all sites tucked away from sight, dangerous to enter because they

are the repository of the teenage heroes’ most illicit fears and dreams.

These are the sites of Freddy’s triumphs and defeats, where he rises and

falls. They are where Freddy, the id, dwells— making them, collectively,

the seamy boiler room of the subconscious. Both T ina and Nancy make

their ﬁrst acquaintance with Freddy in the factory boiler room. Both

960 L. J. DeGraffenreid

Nancy and Jesse discover phallic and sexual power—Freddy’s glove—in

the basement of the Elm Street house; it is hidden, appropriately enough,

inside the furnace. And, regardless of phallic implication, both Final Girl

and Final Boy will eventually try on the glove, literally or symbolically.

The inability of the Elm Street teenagers to control their libidinal

urges also manifests itself in self-inﬂicted violence. This ‘‘betrayal of

the self’’ comes to the fore in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream

Warriors (1987; directed by Chuck Russel). Early in the ﬁlm, Kristen is

attacked by Freddy in the bathroom, who holds her immobile as he

draws one ﬁnger delicately across her arm. When she wakes up, how-

ever, she appears to have slit her own wrists (she is holding a razor

blade). Freddy reaches new levels of grotesque in the dreams of the

other young inhabitants of the psychiatric ward to which Kristen is

then committed: he slices the arteries from one boy’s limbs and uses

them as puppet strings, forcing the boy to climb to the top of a tower.

With a ﬂick of his glove, he cuts the ties, and the boy plunges to his

death, ostensibly committing suicide (the action is particularly inter-

esting given that the victim is himself a maker and manipulator of

puppets). In the same vein, Freddy attacks the paraplegic boy with a

spiked wheelchair (his paraplegia is the result of a suicide attempt). A

former junkie is dispatched with hypodermic ﬁngernails (her ‘‘old

friends’’), which plunge into suddenly gaping, mouth-like track marks.

The Freddy/self utilizes the repressed id of each of the victims and

destroys them with their own negative libidinal energy, further un-

derlying the concept of struggle of the divided self.

Five, Six, Grab Your Cruciﬁx: Full Fatal Parental

Deniability

According to Sarah Tracansky, rebellion against heavily authoritarian

society is a subject constantly broached in the slasher: parents, step-

parents, and teachers are always portrayed as psychologically oppressive

or physically abusive, suggesting that slasher villains are symbolic

representations of the youthful rebellious drive (Tracansky 65). Charles

Derry believes that in the slasher, ‘‘the most horrifyingly violent acts

are not committed by the monsters, but by members of the American

family’’ (Derry 168). It is not surprising to ﬁnd, then, that the night-

mares spawned by the id in these ﬁlms have a close connection to the

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961

home; the concept of the Freudian Unheimliche is blatantly exploited

throughout the Nightmare on Elm Street saga. According to the Freudian

theory, that which reminds us of the home becomes the source of our

most uncanny terrors and phobias (The Uncanny 134). Hence, Craven’s

villain becomes not only a representation of the repressed id, but a

physical manifestation of the teen’s reaction to family politics as well.

As Robin Wood points out, this ‘‘creature from the id’’ may actually be

a throwback to traditional horror, ‘‘not merely a product of repression

but a protest against it’’ (80).

In all three ﬁlms, teenagers are denied access to ‘‘the truth about

Freddy’’; their unconscious struggles are variously dismissed as the

result of insomnia, raging hormones, narcissistic bids for attention, and

even guilt with uniformly disastrous consequences. Quite often these

adult ﬁgures act as castrating inﬂuences and/or direct threats to the

teens’ survival, and they are often punished for it: it is not a super-

natural presence but the teenagers themselves that desire to bring

about the demise of the wayward, negligent parent or authority ﬁgure.

Throughout the original ﬁlm, Nancy’s mother attempts (unsuccess-

fully) to hide half-empty liquor bottles from her daughter’s sight,

eventually forcing the confrontation that leads the pair to the boiler

room for the revelation of ‘‘the truth about Freddy.’’

She takes her to the cellar; the scene of disclosure will take place

within the realm of the unconscious id. After repeated badgering, Mrs.

Parker admits that she ‘‘didn’t see how much you needed to know’’ and

that she had been ‘‘trying to protect you’’ by withholding information.

According to the mother, Freddy cannot return: ‘‘He’s dead, honey,

because mommy killed him.’’ She pulls Fred’s glove from its hiding

place in the furnace, an act which suggests the castrating maternal

vagina dentata: Mrs. Parker has literally usurped Freddy’s symbol of

potency and imprisoned it in a very vaginal red metal box. She has

become the dreaded pre-Oedipal castrating mother, an ‘‘object of sexual

jealousy and desire,’’ threatening ‘‘symbolically to engulf the infant,

thus posing a threat of psychic obliteration’’ (Creed 109); she has

rendered both Nancy and Freddy impotent via the withholding of

knowledge, but only until her daughter’s teenage libidinal energies

emerge. In effect, Nancy will actually use that libidinal energy (in the

form of Freddy) to destroy her mother, who attempts to prevent Nancy

from leaving the house in which she is being assaulted by locking the

doors from the inside.

962 L. J. DeGraffenreid

The conﬂict between mother and daughter begins to appear around

the time of Nancy’s sexually exploratory bath, before which she rejects

the maternal offering of a glass of warm milk (‘‘gross!’’), which sym-

bolizes Nancy’s rejection of mother – infant relationship. Maternal in-

ﬂuence affects Nancy’s id in other frightening ways; after imprisoning

her daughter within Freddy’s domain, she begins to drink and the

camera immediately pans to a now-bleeding wound in Nancy’s thigh.

Hence, her mother’s self-destructive behavior is a trigger which un-

leashes the violence of the id. Freddy, however, certainly gets his re-

venge: her mother is forced to die twice in the course of the ﬁlm’s

conclusion. On the ﬁrst occasion her bed literally sinks down into an

abyss, the red glow emanating from the bedframe serving to indicate

either hell or the ﬁery id; either way, Nancy’s suffering is avenged. On

the second occasion (one of Craven’s trademark false-utopian endings)

the outwardly friendly mother is dragged backwards through a hole in

the door with Freddy’s knives at her throat, a ﬁtting reversal of her

attempted castration of both Nancy and Freddy.

As might be expected, Nancy is much closer to her father. Clover

points out the presence of the ‘‘patently erotic threat’’ in horror ﬁlm,

noting that it is ‘‘easily seen as the materialized projection of the

viewer’s own incestuous fears and desires.’’ Thus, as with the aberrant

mothers, ‘‘this disabling cathexis to one’s parents [here the father] . . .

must be killed and rekilled in the service of sexual autonomy’’ (Clover

49). In fact, her dialogue seems to come dangerously close to violating

the incest taboo: when her father follows her in order to track down

Rod (whom he suspects of having murdered Tina), she accuses him of

having ‘‘used’’ her. When her mother refuses to believe her nightmares,

she runs to the police station and to her father’s protection. She will

seek this protection again, offering her father ‘‘a proposition’’—will he

mind ‘‘cold-cocking this guy’’ (meaning Freddy) when he ‘‘comes to

break down my door in exactly twenty minutes?’’ Her father assumes

the role of sexual guardian, with Freddy as violator of her chastity. In

Dream Warriors, by contrast, Nancy and her father have drifted apart:

after the loss of his wife, he has become an alcoholic. Nevertheless she

appeals to him again for help, stating that he somehow ‘‘owes’’ her for a

past transgression. But only by assuming the image of her father (as he

does in the penultimate scene of Dream Warriors, after killing the real

father) can Freddy trick Nancy into yielding to him; when this hap-

pens, she dies. The false father declares that he has ‘‘crossed over,’’

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963

before violating her, stabbing her through the chest with his phallic

glove. However, Nancy’s parricidal id has already made short work of

him.

Dream Warriors takes these parent – child conﬂicts one step further:

Kristen’s mother abuses alcohol, brings home men at late hours, and, in

Kristen’s fantasy, perceives her daughter as the sexual rival Nancy

seems in danger of becoming. Kristen’s ﬁnal dream replays the opening

sequence of the ﬁlm, in which the mother enters the room, castigates

her daughter for playing loud music so late, and angrily bids her good

night. Her demeanor betrays her eagerness to return to the living

room, in which an unknown man is requesting the location of the

liquor cabinet. When the dream is ‘‘replayed’’ in Kristen’s fantasy at the

end of the ﬁlm, mother and daughter are completely reconciled, bid-

ding each other a fond, psychosociologically fulﬁlling goodnight. The

man downstairs is still insistent on the gin; now, however, the mother

is willing to linger to tuck Kristen in. All appears well—until Fred

shows up, brandishing the maternal head, which is furious and still

capable of speech. It promptly accuses Kristen of sabotaging her love

life: ‘‘Every time I try to bring a man home you ruin it!’’ the still-made-

up face screams.

Unfortunately for Kristen, such accusation comes closer to the re-

ality of their relationship. When questioned by Nancy (who is now

studying psychology in graduate school), the mother insists that Kris-

ten’s neuroses have ‘‘gotten worse since I took away her credit cards,’’

suggesting that her daughter’s actions constitute a selﬁsh bid for at-

tention. Because the head is controlled by Freddy (this all takes place in

Kristen’s dreamscape), her dialogue serves to indicate Kirsten’s own

perception of their sexual rivalry. In this case, the blood on her wrists at

the beginning of the movie may also be seen as menarche, the bloody

act that triggers maternal rejection of the female infant.

Rivalry, however, is not the only sexual attention the teens receive

from adults. In Freddy’s Revenge Jesse and Grady are tormented daily by

the sadistic male gym teacher, Coach Schneider. But the hint of sexual

abuse does not end at push-ups and laps; during one of his nocturnal

strolls Jesse is drawn to a gay bar, in which he encounters the teacher in

full leather bondage gear. When he is discovered, the teacher drags him

back to the school gym, tells him to shower, and retreats to his ofﬁce.

Jesse is now naked and vulnerable to the threat of castration or rape (or

both) at the hands of the gym teacher; his id, however, is not. Freddy

964 L. J. DeGraffenreid

manifests himself and goes to work on the sadistic teacher with a

vengeance. In a reversal of the coach’s own brutal designs, the invisible

Freddy binds Schneider with his own jump ropes, launches every single

ball (the phallic implications are clear) at his head, rips off his clothes,

drags him under the showers, and savagely slaps him in the rear with a

wet towel. The camera work, however, keeps Jesse separate from Fred-

dy’s action; as the still-invisible Freddy intimidates the gym teacher

with jump ropes and balls, the camera cuts back several times to a

frightened, harmlessly showering Jesse. Before Schneider is killed, the

shot cuts back to Jesse, who appears to be surprised to ﬁnd his naked

coach in the showers. A blanket of mist temporarily obscures him, and

then Freddy is observed to occupy his place. It appears that only after

Freddy is realigned with Jesse can he kill Schneider, which he does

with customary relish, causing the phallic showerheads to squirt blood

in mock-castration. The camera then cuts back to Jesse, who is stand-

ing in the same spot, now covered with blood and brandishing Freddy’s

glove. What is most interesting about this sequence is that it sheds

new light on Freddy’s nature—now, he can be both tormentor and self-

defense mechanism. Given that he is a manifestation of the teenage id,

this comes as little surprise; his victims always include those who pose

a risk of castration, including sexual rivals (mothers, Grady). This new

‘‘protective’’ side seems to support theories of conservative family pol-

itics in horror; ‘‘bad’’ or ‘‘unnatural’’ parents and sexual deviants posing

a threat to teenage innocence are always destroyed.

In fact, all adults operating on Elm Street are negligent to some

degree, dismissing the nocturnal struggles of their teens as arising from

hormonal imbalance or sleep deprivation. Throughout Nightmare on

Elm Street, Nancy’s mother informs her daughter that the nightmares

will vanish when she ﬁnally gets some sleep (completely overlooking

the fact that several of Nancy’s friends have been brutally murdered

during the past few nights). Jesse believes his family thinks he is on

drugs. But the most blatant denial comes from Dream Warriors,in

which Dr. Sims (an eerie fusion of Nurse Ratchet and Dr. Leonard

McCoy) declares that the teens ‘‘won’t make any progress until [they]

recognize [their] dreams for what they are . . . the byproducts of guilt

[from] moral conﬂicts and overt sexuality.’’ Like the rest of the Elm

Street parents, she believes the ‘‘cure’’ lies in ‘‘uninterrupted REM

sleep’’ and a refusal to ‘‘blame your dreams for your weakness.’’ She also

insists on sedating her patients; an act which, as the viewer knows by

What Can You Do in Your Dreams?

965

now, is essentially a death warrant (as one teen declares toward the end

of the ﬁlm ‘‘you stupid bitch, you’re killing us!’’).

Seven, Eight, Before It’s Too Late: Only Straight Talk

in Here

Teenagers like Jesse and Kristen only manage to survive because of a

peer support network. In Freddy’s Revenge Lisa is capable of ‘‘exorcizing’’

Freddy by offering Jesse love and unconditional understanding. In a

similar way, Nancy’s return in Dream Warriors heralds the ﬁrst group

discussion of Freddy’s hauntings; this ‘‘straight talk’’ allows the group

to band together against their assailant, resulting in an unprecedented

number of survivors.

Lisa achieves this by forcing Jesse to accept that Freddy is a fun-

damental part of his own identity; ‘‘you created him, you can destroy

him!’’ She offers to ‘‘ﬁgure it out together,’’ and though Freddy fre-

quently threatens to kill her, he is unable to make good on his promise.

The penultimate ‘‘showdown’’ between Lisa and Freddy occurs in

Freddy’s original boiler room; with its dark red lighting, pipes, and

narrow walkways it too resembles a monstrous vagina (Creed 53). The

scene can therefore be analyzed as Jesse’s ﬁrst sexual encounter. Par-

adoxically, it is Lisa who must penetrate the dangerous area in search of

her boyfriend. Before entering the labyrinth in which Freddy/Jesse

lurks, she passes two monstrous bulldogs with grotesque baby faces, a

reﬂection, perhaps, of the infant status she must leave behind to ‘‘save’’

Jesse. The experience is not at ﬁrst pleasurable; she burns her hand on a

phallic pipe and experiences a fantasy of red ants on lacerated skin; a

clear metonymy for the rupture of the hymen. ‘‘Come to me, Lisa’’

Freddy beckons from within the cavernous boiler room. She acquiesces,

kneeling before him in clear surrender. He touches her hair, declares

that ‘‘Jesse is dead,’’ and raises his glove. Before he can penetrate her,

however, she tells him that she loves him. This marks a bizarre turning

point in the sequence: in yet another reversal of gender function,

Freddy begins to bleed, allowing Lisa to both embrace and kiss him. A

steam valve releases in the background and a ﬁre is lit below them,

signaling climax. At this point Freddy begins to melt, revealing Jesse

inside him. Triumphant music plays; the tension has ﬁnally been re-

lieved. Lisa has safely guided him through his ﬁrst coital act, removing

966 L. J. DeGraffenreid

the ‘‘monstrous’’ anxiety Jesse’s psyche had attached to his perceptions

of it.

In a similar way, Nancy guides her younger peers at the psychiatric

ward through their id-based torments. Now a graduate student in psy-

chology with a budding romantic attachment to Neil (the head clinician),

she represents a half-way point between teenager and adult, able to bridge

the gap because she ‘‘used to be like them.’’ Unlike Neil or Dr. Sims, she

freely offers the teens the information about Freddy she herself was denied;

she can see they are ‘‘ready’’ to hear it. More importantly, she understands

from personal experience that it may s ave their lives. ‘ ‘It’s not you,’’ she

counsels, ‘‘your parents . . . they burned him alive. And now we’re paying

for their sins.’ ’ She then advises the teens that each of them possesses the

potential to destroy Freddy; each of them ‘ ‘ [has] this inner strength. Some

special power that you’ve had in your most wonderful dreams.’’ She be-

lieves that ‘‘together we can use that power if we try,’’ and both she and

Neil preach ‘‘straight-talk only’’ group strategy methods to combat the

rampantly rebellious id; each of them will enter the same dream and ﬁght

Freddy together in the ﬁnal conﬂict.

Ultimately, though the horror ﬁlm has been reviled as mindless

slaughter, the Nightmare ﬁlms appear to preach a positive message of

group sexual awareness and understanding. Contrary to popular opinion,

these ﬁlms are not reactionary. They do not channel teens toward con-

forming to any hegemonic order: when conservative politics come to the

fore, the transgressors are not teens, but are instead their parents and

teachers. It is no mistake that the slasher lies ‘ ‘beyond the purview of the

respectable (middle-aged, middle-class) audience’’; what appears to be

‘‘degenerate aberration’’ to adults makes psychosocial sense to teens, pro-

viding us with ‘ ‘ a clearer picture of current sexual [and familial] attitudes’’

(Clover 21). Freddy forces the reader toward greater awareness of their own

psychological reality, pushing them to react to authority’s manifest abuses.

The association of these ﬁlms with a predominately teen audience renders

them an ideal forum for the venting of teenage dilemmas. Ultimately,

therefore, the Elm Street teens represent what can effectively be considered

the beginning of a cinematic youth movement.

Notes

1. One of the more interesting aspects of the ﬁlms is that ﬁrst appearance of the killer is almost

always preceded by one or more prepubertal girls in white nightgowns or party dresses, who

What Can You Do in Your Dreams? 967

sing the infamous ‘‘Freddy chant.’’ In the original Nightmare on Elm Street Nancy must pass

through their ranks to access the house; they can thus be perceived as the protective, psychic

barriers of childhood. Interestingly, while she is dreaming, Lisa will follow one such child into

the popsicle-stick house after warning her not to enter it. In the basement she ﬁnds a room full

of childrens’ corpses (Freddy was a child murderer). The little girl (whom she had been

cradling in her arms) immediately becomes a skeleton, underscoring the metaphorical decline

of childhood innocence.

2. Though young, the nurse is nevertheless an authority ﬁgure; her successful seduction of the boy

results in the most graphic sexual consequences of any of the ﬁrst three movies. The nurse/

Freddy binds him to the bed with four phallic tongues (from her own mouth). The mattress

then vanishes, revealing the ﬂaming abyssal pit over which he is suspended. This falls in

accordance with conservative theories of horror: the pairing of an adolescent and an adult

violates taboo and must be punished.

3. Freddy is particularly dedicated in his dispatch of abusive alcoholics. ‘‘The bastard son of a

hundred maniacs,’’ he is raised by an abusive alcoholic (portrayed by shock-rocker Alice Cooper

in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare), and is ultimately immolated by a group of alcoholic

Elm Street parents, whom he is particularly enamored of killing. In the ﬁrst and third ﬁlms

Freddy dispatches two alcohol abusing mothers (Nancy’s and Kristen’s) and one father (also

Nancy’s). Tina’s mother is also alcoholic; however, he does not get access to her.

4. 1428 Elm Street (the historical home of Freddy as well as all the Elm Street teens) is, with its

very vaginal red door, ﬁgured as female. As Barbara Creed points out, Freud argued that houses

in dreams often symbolize bodies, the rooms and passageways within it are particularly

vaginal. Interestingly, the father’s initial response to his daughter’s nocturnal violation is to bar

the windows in a vain attempt to prevent external (penile) penetration, which stands in contrast

to his wife’s attempt to ‘‘seal’’ Nancy from the inside. With a nod toward the Heimliche, the

house will reappear in the sequel and also the third installment—this time as a popsicle-stick

mock-up created by Kristen, modeled on the place she encounters Freddy in her nocturnal

struggles. Both Nancy and Kristen will return there to ‘‘ﬁnish’’ the ﬁght.

5. One obvious message: there are no teenage utopias.

Works Cited

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror

Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.

Crane, Jonathan. Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History

of the Horror Film. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. Print.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.

New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Derry, Charles. ‘‘More Dark Dreams: Some Notes on the Recent Horror

Film.’’ American Horrors. Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Chicago: U of

Illinois P, 1987. 162 – 74. Print.

Dika, Vera. ‘‘The Stalker Film, 1971 – 81.’’ American Horrors. Ed. Greg-

ory A. Waller. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987. 86 – 101. Print.

Doane, Mary Ann. ‘‘Film and the Masquerade.’’ Feminist Film Theory:

A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP, 1999.

759 – 68. Print.

968 L. J. DeGraffenreid

Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘Totem and Taboo.’’ Basic Writings. Trans. and ed. by

A.A. Brill. New York: Random House, 1938. 807 – 930. Print.

———. ‘‘Contributions to a Discussion on Masturbation (abridged).’’

Freud on Women. Ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New York: Norton,

1990. 182 – 89. Print.

——— . The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York:

Avon, 1998. Print.

——— . The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ Feminist Film

Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP,

1999. 756 – 59. Print.

Tracansky, Sarah. ‘‘Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in

1980s Slasher Horror.’’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.2

(2001): 63 – 73. Print.

Wood, Robin. ‘‘Returning the Look: Eyes of a Stranger.’’ American

Horrors. Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987.

79 – 85.

L. J. DeGraffenreid earned a BA in English at Tulane University, an MA in

English from Montana State University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in

Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Nevada, Reno.

What Can You Do in Your Dreams? 969

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