Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street fits very neatly into the slasher mold of Halloween, but there is something very different going on underneath the surface. There is the group of teenagers, each acting in someway promiscuously, except of course the final girl. We got the clear black and white evil monster, a male with a mysterious past, and unique murder weapon. The deaths follow a pattern, the authority figures are quite useless, music ominously plays throughout, and the ending explicitly displays the fact that the evil is not truly defeated. 

However, while Michael Myer’s quite obviously represented the evil in Halloween, it’s unclear where the evil comes from in this film. Freddie is certainly evil, but it’s all happening in the charterer’s personal dreams, they are creating the evil. In that way, the film is almost pointing the finger at the audience. Our desire to watch this film comes from the desire to be scared. So we are creating this evil by our desire to believe in the evil. We create the evil, and we can stop it, but we simply don’t want to. 

The ending scene at first can seem inconsistent with what I previously stated. Nancy supposedly stopped believing the evil and defeated it, expect it didn’t work, Freddie lives. However, we, not Nancy are the main subjects of the movie, and we haven’t stopped believing in the evil. Craven is established as a director that loves to make self-referential movies. He not only understands the horror genre, but he understands that we the audience play a bigger part in the creation of this genre then perhaps any other. The horror film is trying to scare us; the director must tap into our fear in order to make the film. Therefore, when we don’t want to be scared anymore, the horror genre will cease to exist. There is a reasonable explanation for the existence of comedies, laughter is enjoyable. The same argument for horror films does not make much sense.  

The question is why do we crave being reminded of our fear?  For one it can provide insight into potentially harmful activities that we preform subconsciously. Drinking is not a healthy habit that is often a result of the suppression of an event that causes continual grief. In this film and other horror films the characters that drink are murdered. Specifically, Nancy’s Mom suppresses the horror of her previous action through drinking, and this suppression is partially responsible for Freddie’s continual reign of terror. Furthermore, it can be claimed that we need fear as a check and balance for our ego, without fear ethics would seem unimportant. In this way the horror movie survives and hopefully continues to survive, because we need it.