I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the A Nightmare on Elm Street Series

Abstract

While past scholarship on A Nightmare on Elm Street focuses on the concept of the Final Girl (Clover 1992; Christensen 2011), the monstrous feminine (Creed 1993), the female as a double for the monster (Williams 1983/1996) and structural analysis of stalker/slasher films (Dika 1990), little has been written on the aesthetics of horror or slasher films. Although the concept that ‘modern film techniques enable the director to practice a kind of ecriture (writing) in film’ (Bordwell 1989, 45) is widely accepted, the concept of a franchise or series acting in a similar way with different screenwriters and directors is not (45). If we apply this concept to a franchise/series in order to look at what narrative is written by the series as a whole, and what elements contribute to this ‘writing’, it is possible to examine the ways in which the narrative is built across a series, expanding Bordwell’s concept that ‘a film’s stylistic texture is pervasive, uninterrupted from first moment to last’ to include a series (Bordwell 2005 a, 36). Christensen states that ‘[t]he original A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984; dir Wes Craven] helped establish Craven as an auteur with a mastery of the macabre and initiated the sadistic Freddy Krueger (then portrayed by Robert Englund) into the annals of popular culture iconography’ (Christensen 2011, 23), allowing for analysis of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series as experimental or auteur film, from its inception all the way up through the ‘end’ of the series with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991; dir Rachel Talalay).