Editor's Note: The following guest post was written by Mackenzie Morehouse, a local high school student completing an internship with Archives & Special Collections focusing on working with the Horror Studies Collections.  We are very proud to showcase her fantastic essay here examining a draft script of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). – Ben Rubin

In a widely-circulated review of the recent Saw film Spiral (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) earlier this year, New York Post reviewer Johnny Oleksinski directly compared the decades-long Saw franchise to older works in the genre. “Where George A. Romero was trying to reflect social ills in ‘Night of the Living Dead,’” Oleksinski wrote, “‘Saw’ was putting Porky in a blender.”[i] In 2019, Dennis Widmyer described his remake of Pet Sematary as “elevated horror” in a South by Southwest festival panel. Despite Jordan Peele’s assertion that his recent film Us was a horror film, reviewers made sure to clarify that it was not like other horror films; Richard Brody’s glowing New Yorker review explained that calling it horror was “like offering a reminder that ‘The Godfather’ is a gangster film or that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is science fiction.”[ii] Nevermind that they are, despite cinematic achievement, just as a good horror movie cannot be separated from horror, regardless of what merit is perceived.

It is with this recent societal shift in the perception of horror movies as films which used to be schlocky and meaningless, and are now sharp and intellectual, that I first came to the original screenplay of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street[iii]. Elm Street is a pop culture fixture which has been parodied uncountable times---the infamous image of Freddy’s gloved hand leering up at us from between Nancy’s legs continues to stick in our collective cultural consciousness like the memory of a dream. There are certain scenes which even now are surprisingly brutal, especially from a franchise that would eventually give in to a very trademark kind of camp silliness. I knew going in that Elm Street holds up as a horror movie, but does it hold up under the new-age scrutiny of “elevated horror”?

Notable moments from my first reading of the screenplay:

1. After Nancy is attacked at the sleep clinic, her hair turns completely white from shock, instead of just the streak of white she is given in the film.  This was written to happen right before our eyes, so it makes sense that it couldn’t make it to the final draft, though it would have been a cool visual effect.
2. Excerpt from page 41: “[A]nd this giant shadow of a man passes through the bars of the cell, like so much evil Jello.”
3. Freddy Krueger is a pedophile, something made extremely clear by both the original film and the subsequent sequels, and it’s not unusual for his attacks to take on the appearance of coded sexuality (see the bathtub scene, which I referred to earlier), but it reads as much more glaringly obvious in the screenplay. All this writhing around with young girls in or near beds, the physical closeness required for Freddy’s preferred method of killing, the tearing of the clothing---hell, Tina was killed by him while they were both under the sheets. Elm Street is far from the only slasher of its era to code its attacks on female victims as sexual in nature, but I find the method used in this movie more interesting and self-aware than some of its peers; it shows more than anything the overwhelming silence which surrounds sexual victimization. No one helps or listens to Nancy even as she repeatedly warns the adults in the community about what happened to her friend, what is happening to her, what she fears will happen to more children of Elm Street. By targeting teenagers specifically, Freddy keeps them isolated from the society that surrounds them, and in this way A Nightmare on Elm Street in any other genre would become a story about the need for open dialogue on sexual assault and the importance of forming survivor communities. In horror, it becomes a story about reconciling who you are with the actions and trauma of the most widespread villains of all: your parents.

The oldest horror story of all time is the one between mother and daughter. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a mother is haunted by the infant daughter that she drowned in order to protect her from the horror of slavery. We can go back further. In the screenplay, Nancy is compared to the Greek Cassandra, blind prophetess who was never believed; child killed by her rapist’s wife, Clytemnestra, a twisted reflection of the maternal figure, who believed her just fine. When I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, the mother-daughter tension lingered for the most part in the background, out of sight of the cameras. There was so much else going on---dream demons and teenage slaughter and pills being used way above their recommended dosage. But behind the man-eating beds is another fear, just as potent: where is the line between protecting and harming our children?

MARGE smiles, relieved. The girl pulls the blanket around her shoulders. Her eyes flutter closed, her breathing becomes regular and deep. Once again she’s the little girl MARGE fantasizes she is.

Page 79, white edition (1984)

Marge wants to protect her child, who is facing a threat she understands to be real; in one draft of the screenplay, Marge herself is the one who doles out Freddy’s fatal blow when he attempts to escape the burning house; but it isn’t really Nancy she’s thinking about, it’s a version of Nancy which no longer exists. In doing so, she leads the current version of her daughter straight into the belly of the beast. Marge’s protection of Nancy is just as much maternal instinct as it is a retroactive protection of herself from having to see who she has become: an alcoholic who inprisons her daughter in her own room. She tries to unlive an act she knows was unforgivable by inadvertently giving it to Nancy, and in this way the guilt of the parents of Elm Street acts as a parasitic force throughout the film.

MARGE (CONTD)

(drunk satisfaction)

Paid the guy damn good to make sure you stayed put. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, kid. You’re gonna sleep tonight if it kills me.

Page 85, white edition

A Nightmare on Elm Street is, first and foremost, a slasher. But does that make it devoid of meaning? Horror has, historically, been viewed as a low-brow genre, often on par with pornography, but there has always been an emotional core to latch onto, no matter how bloody the picture. When Marge and Nancy’s relationship is what propels much of the plot, I don’t think it is something that can or should be ignored as part of the greatness that is Elm Street. Does that make Elm Street elevated horror? No. I don’t think anything is, really. Horror is interesting enough without needing pretentious labels, and that includes all kinds of horror. If any of this means anything at all, it’s that Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is a damn good watch, and possibly an even better read.

[i] Oleksinski, Johnny. “ ‘SPIRAL’ Signals the Death of ‘Torture Porn’ – Good Riddance!”. New York Post, May 13, 2021.

[ii] Brody, Richard. “Review: Jordan Peele’s “US” is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement”. New Yorker, March 23, 2019.

[iii] Craven, Wes “A Nightmare on Elm Street” draft script, April 10, 1984.  University of Pittsburgh Library System Archives & Special Collections.