The ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ Series Is Deeper Than You Know

The movie is full of this. Tina, Nancy's best friend and the movie's obligatory "You ain't cool unless you're MAKING OUT!" character, wakes up with a tattered night gown after dreaming about Freddy Krueger chasing her. Soon, all of the teens realize they've all been dreaming about Freddy Krueger, our little puberty Sandman. And as with puberty, no one is initially equipped to deal with him in the slightest.

As the movie progresses, the looming presence of sex starts to dominate how Freddy menaces the teens. While Nancy is sleeping, we see Freddy appear over her bed, the wall resembling a rubbery condom that a nasty little demon head is trying to poke through.

New Line Cinema

The viewer is even present for a scene representative of Nancy's first period. As Nancy lays in the bathtub asleep, Freddy's clawed glove breaks through the surface of the water between her open legs. This isn't just one of the most intense scenes in horror history. It's clear foreshadowing of all the trouble that's about to happen between your legs. From periods to wet dreams, they're the first milestones that will take the allegorical teenager down a snowballing Domino Rally of confusion and destruction that'll last anywhere from 10-70 years.

Jesse has something inside of him that prevents him from doing the condom-collide with his strikingly hot girlfriend, Lisa. Right off the bat, Jesse gets whacked in the head with a baseball bat while watching a guy shake his ass. Seconds later, he and his new friend Grady are trying to tear each other's clothes off. And the gym coach who seems to be paid a salary to watch boys' hips during push-ups? He is stripped naked in a locker room shower before he's murdered, which must have been quite odd for the people who were used to Freddy just pulling teens through beds and turning them into blood geysers.

New Line Cinema

We start seeing Jesse's nightmares where Freddy tells him that he needs his body. With a touch of the glove, Freddy is officially inside of Jesse and that closet door opens right up. Jesse's parents have numerous conversation about how there's something wrong with him, and they're all too eager to leave him alone in his bedroom with his girlfriend. Note to parents who think their kids might be gay: Not a great thing to do. Be a little more chill about it, dudes.

After a full movie of conflicting feelings, Jesse takes the plunge and tries hooking up with his girlfriend in the cabana during her pool party. But the "thing inside him" comes out and he can't go through with it. He runs away to Grady's house, who is topless in bed and accuses Jesse of wanting to sleep with him. Jesse can't get past the confusion. The only thing left to do is for the movie to break its own rules by allowing Freddy to come into the real world in a burst of fire. A lot of people have tried to explain how this fits in with the series' internal logic, but the best reason for it still remains "It was 1985, man."

New Line Cinema

The film ends with Jesse finding himself on the back of Freddy's dream bus, being taken on a ride to his inescapable destiny. It's a pleasant note to end on as the series transitions away from dealing with sexuality and moves onto self-discovery. And by "self-discovery," we mean lots and lots of drugs.

In a world of drug addicts and delusion, Nancy is a drug dealer. She feeds into these teenagers' fears and continuously draws them back into the dream world, where Freddy is waiting to off them in an endless array of ironic ways. Addicted to TV? "Welcome to prime time, bitch." Hooked on Dungeons & Dragons? Freddy literally tries run you over with a magic wheelchair. And whereas Nancy in the first movie was symbolic of puberty and hormonal awakening, here she is murdered by Freddy, swiftly and with hardly a moment of recognition. Don't do drugs, kids.

New Line Cinema

As characters are killed off one by one, the protagonist Alice manages to absorb some kind of personality trait or physical ability from each of them, such as Kristen's ability to pull people into dreams, Rick's mean karate skills, and Sheila's ability to rock a killer sweatband. That is a huge part of college: finding yourself ... your style, personality, friends. Most of who you will become as an adult is built around college experimentation, allowing yourself to try on new personalities like hats until you find the one that makes you ... well, you.

New Line Cinema

College is also a time of increased and liberated sexuality for many people. When Sheila succumbs to Freddy in her nightmare, she dies when he sucks face with her, which really pushes the "You should date around!" advice that most young people get. But sexy Freddy doesn't stop there. From climbing into bed with Alice to whispering "I believe in you" in Debbie's ears while she's jerking off some free weights, liberated pleasure rolls off Freddy's face right up until the final battle where Alice is kicking his ass and he seems pretty excited about it. But don't stand too close to Freddy when he's that excited. You just might roll over in his wet dream and find yourself stuck with a baby.

New Line Cinema

Freddy's baby obsession reaches its peak when he kills a girl named Greta by stuffing her with food while she's seated in a highchair. He then drapes her over his shoulder and burps her TO DEATH.

New Line Cinema

Alice physically forces Freddy out of her and Freddy is torn apart by his infinity-trillion crazy daddies, and his evil spirit goes inside the ghost of his mommy, Amanda. In a final act of baby defiance, Freddy gives his mom an automatic C-section by tearing his glove through her stomach. Childbirth. Truly a miracle.

By now, Freddy is a caricature of himself, as seen when the trademark '90s teen stoner falls asleep and dreams he's in a video game. There he's controlled and killed by Freddy who is using a Nintendo Power Glove. This movie is a nostalgic 30-year-old trying to prove to 15-year-olds that, yeah, he's still hip. He knows the video games. "Nintendo" is the name of that little plumber, right?

New Line Cinema

The female lead, Maggie, is Freddy's long-lost daughter. And she hates him, probably as she should. In time, your kids will resent you, too. Your life's a mess and you're driving in circles, just like in the character Carlos' dream about the never-ending nightmare map. There's seemingly no escape.

The actress that played Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) plays herself, and she's pretty sick of the Freddy character, too. She gets even sicker of him when she finds out that Freddy has leaked out into the "real world" and is now an actual detriment to the life of her and her son. You do your job for years, it provides for you, and it's seemingly only beneficial. And then you arrive at middle age and realize that it's made you a nervous wreck of a person. Also, it's unleashed a burn-faced dream goblin that's out to off your child. The 401k is pretty handy, though.

At the last second, Heather ends up finally slaying Krueger and returning him to his fictitious world. She refuses to let a piece-of-shit job/dream goblin define her and overtake her life and ruin her relationship with her son. Unlike the earlier films which ended with the theme of "Freddy's still around, life is hopeless, and enjoy the suck!," New Nightmare ends with the message that even when you're deep in the butthole of adulthood, you can still swim out of the shit.

New Line Cinema

The protagonist, Lori, is the first one smart enough to remember Freddy's name. At first, Freddy tries to use Jason's lumbering death corpse to give him power to come back, but when Jason starts stealing Freddy's targets, it gets him real pissed. Jason wasn't supposed to be the guy that could still break dance at the reunion! Freddy was supposed to bust a move.

New Line Cinema

But the proof that this movie knows you're old and lame is in its need to spell everything out for you. Like the scene at the table where they're talking about how Freddy brought Jason back, how Freddy is afraid of fire and Jason fears water, so how can we use that? They might as well have been shouting into your hearing aid. "Back in my day, the Nightmare films were 'The Dream Something' and Reagan was Jesus!"

The final battle really feels like closure on our pasts, even if we can all see it for what it really is: two old men fighting. It makes you remember how you got here. You feel at peace.

New Line Cinema

The adults are too nice, and the teens in this movie are all bored drug addicts, which is the general world view of anyone who's retired to watch a constant stream of TV Land and Fox News. In the final battle, when Nancy screams to Freddy, "You're in my world now, bitch," we realize that we're probably already dead. And in Hell. Because never has there been a more flat and apathetic delivery in a Nightmare On Elm Street movie.

Warner Bros. Pictures

With that line, the series dies, and we're ready to leave it and its allegory for life behind. We've been through nine movies that have guided us from puberty through death, and we've killed a lot of teenagers in between. Thanks, Freddy, for showing us the way.

You can find Loryn haunting Twitter.

The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we're living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house's lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the US Constitution and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.

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