[For The Love Of Franchises] 1, 2, Freddy’s Coming for My Type-A Personality

 If I fell into a pit of snakes, I would do something slick to tie them together to make a rope to climb out of said pit. If a little possessed dolly were to get in my face, I could safely say I would handle the situation with grace (a swift kick to the chest). If a chainsaw wielding maniac were chasing me in the hopes to wear my face skin, I would outwit them by making tiny scratches all over my face- therefore rendering the face skin unusable for mask making. I am deluded enough to think I can stay tough in the face of any danger and figure out how to best my foe. My kryptonite? Someone changing my plans last minute. My flight being cancelled.  Or the worst - being called out in a meeting to give an impromptu presentation. 

That’s right folks, like so many of my fellow millennials there is not much else that really messes with my head like a little unpredictability does. My innate desire for structure and simplicity, coupled with a trauma cultivated pitch black sense of humor, is what draws me in so deeply into the horror fandom. Horror movies have a formula, sprouting from a handful of classics and the ones that break the mold just start a new formula and so on and so forth.

If you have sex, a masked murderer (or his mama) will come and hack you up. Move in to a place where a grisly murder took place, that dumb ghost wont let you get your beauty sleep until justice is served. If you mess around with a puzzle box, bisexual beings will rip off your nips with chained hooks for all eternity. For me, the most terrifying horror formula has to be from the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise – the “no formula” formula.  

I understand that the overarching narrative is a guy that kills you in Dream World, but in Dream World anything goes! The movies get more and more unhinged as Freddy cemented himself into the psyches of moviegoers, mostly due to Wes Craven refusing to be a part of the franchise after the original Nightmare On Elm Street. He came back to work with some of the original cast in 1995 for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but there was a whole decade’s worth of Freddy movies in between that took very… artistic liberties with the dialogue and death scenes.

Similar to the Alien films, the Elm Street movies were mostly helmed by different directors and had very different moods, only getting campier and schlockier as time passed. As a kiddo that was way too young to be watching horror in the first place, my foray into Elm Street started off very scary for my 7-year-old eyes and Freddy was the main subject of my own nightmares for quite some time. I did not watch the sequel until well into high school. 

As an extremely anxious teen, my friend had to do a lot of coaxing and sweet-talking to get me to sit down and watch Freddy’s Revenge while I was sleeping over one rainy Saturday night. Freddy made me feel powerless. This guy can do anything he wants to you in Dream World and we can do close to nothing to stop him from tearing us to shreds if he decides to pay us a visit! I felt just about as powerless as I felt at school at the time, a victim to the whims of the popular crowd’s razor sharp insults at my gawky appearance. I never knew when I would be picked on after class, just like I didn’t know what Mr. Kruger was going to think of next. I reluctantly agreed to watch, but I made it known that I was not happy about it. 

To my surprise, within minutes I was not only calm but laughing. The shower scene towel butt whips and the queer coded overtones were a far cry from Nightmare one, and I was IN. As soon as we finished Freddy’s Revenge I was warming to the idea of Dream Warriors. We watched that next and I was glad to see that this one wasn’t scary either, but I felt empowered by how the “outcast” archetypes took control of their own dreams. Freddy was becoming less scary and more slapstick by the minute. I felt silly for even thinking he was frightening to begin with! Years of torment were erased within a matter of hours, and I was hooked from there on out, Nightmare is, as a whole, one of my favorite franchises to this day. 

As I got older and more deeply entrenched in the horror-verse, I started to look at my reactions and fears under a curious lens. I had to think on as to why torture porn did not bother or shock me much, but that essentially a comedian ghoul had such a chokehold on me for years. 

I am a very “by the book” person in my adulthood and I love rules, regulations, and firm boundaries. My life felt like an uncontrollable whirlwind up and through my twenties, and now I find myself constantly trying to calm that storm years later. I think that is why I was so initially terrified. Freddy represented pure chaos to me. There were no boundaries in his universe, only a world he has curated for you brick by brick. That remained to be true for the remainder of the franchise, however with a caveat – he was getting sillier with it. 

The camp subconsciously offset the unpredictability sore spot in my brain and made it tolerable, and increasingly tolerable over time. It added levity to the chaos and as I matured I credit Freddy for helping me to start to see the humor in situations I can’t control. I continued watching all of the Nightmare movies and while I never knew what would come next, I knew I could hang with it because immediately after a character would meet their untimely demise it would be shortly followed by a hilarious and cringe-inducing quip. Even to this day when I am staring at my laptop, working from home and getting project after project dumped on my plate I will take a breath and jokingly whisper “welcome to prime time, bitch” to have a chuckle then get my head back in the game. 

To me, the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise has been like a case study on micro dosing unpredictability. Bit by bit, I got used to the anything goes plotlines and unpredictable kills. I became comfortable with the “non-plan plan” in the films and honestly in life in general. I have an easier time now seeing the humor in most situations and realize that I in fact have more control that I give myself credit for. At the end of the day, even if Freddy gets into my head and force feeds me my own intestines till I choke to death (a la Greta) at least I got away from my problematic mother – am I right??!!

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