How Does A Nightmare On Elm Street Reflect And Complicate Ideas Of Genre In Film Studies? (Essay Sample)

How does A Nightmare on Elm Street reflect and complicate ideas of genre in film Studies?
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a typical slasher film that is characterized by the bizarre, fantasies which breaks the boundaries of the genre's conventional principles. Surreal fantasies and horror have long been intertwined, partially due to the fact that the bizarre scenes of early horror movies were entertaining to surrealists who viewed them as breaking conventions and rules, challenging sexual customs, and otherwise involving in the schemes of unorthodox scenes which they valued so highly. Despite the fact that Pinedo (25) argues, that horror films represent real nightmares whose underlying sense of anxiety both hides and typifies the desire to satisfy and be apprehended for certain universally unacceptable urges, most of these kinds of films, particularly those choreographed in the US, are in fact built on a premise of rationality that somewhat explains the horror, either through the divine as projected by religion or through science gone wrong. Hence, although horror factors in the aspects of the surreal by way of monstrosity and utter dread, few horror films challenge the primary idea of logical explanation and thus the prospect of preventing the evil.
The film ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ does in many ways breaks the conventional genre boundaries by allowing surreal to permeate through the slasher film plotting process, bringing about the elements of surrealism that can only be described through dream logic that is fundamentally changing, and impedingly transient.
This fantastical aspect, in turn, makes it a good example of Pinedo’s emphasis on movies as mixed genres evolving out of conceptual paradoxes, which in the horror scene is revealed unashamedly in the weird urge to be terrified and entertained simultaneously. It is also crucial to acknowledge that A Nightmare on Elm Street was scripted and directed by Craven W., who was already popular in the 70s euphoria of low-cost, liberated horror videos, most remarkably as playwright and producer of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes movies, both of which apply terror scene to downplay assumptions about the element of class and the role violence plays in society. As Pinedo (147) describes them, the two movies have shared notion of barbarism sweeping through bourgeois tenets of American society often celebrated by genre art.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the director of the movie advances the theme of terror and horror in an even more overt manner, and it is for this motive that the succeeding nightmare movies, which primarily discard Craven's intricate treatment of viciousness in favor horror inclinations, has little interest in this examination. Having proved that A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the popular horror movies of the 80s that is both a complex-to-categorize genre and a subset of an auteur with a particular emphasis on the negative contribution of violence to the society, the remaining part of the essay explores the different ways in which the film contravenes or defies ideological aspects of the conventional genre as witnessed through monstrosity, identification and gender.
As explained earlier, A Nightmare on Elm Street film is a unique horror scene that combines aspects of the supernatural, particularly the concept of bodily ownership, into a universal slasher plot. The element of drama involving the possession in the film often leads to the process of bodily transformation: the casting away of disbelief, the celebration of the supernatural or the irrational which is apparent throughout the film as its youthful protagonists, specifically Nancy Thompson and her lover Glen battle to accept the fact that Freddy Krueger the dreadful figure that appears in their nightmares, was actually a spiritual being with the power not just to bully them but to destroy them. It is only after they come to terms with this fact, that they spend much the time in the scene to convince the people around them to believe it as well, especially Nancy's dad, the local sheriff.
From the film it shows that the grownups never recognize Freddy's whimsical existence; hence, like most grownups in slasher movies, they are made impotent in relation to helping the youthful victims to run away from death. Nevertheless, contrary to most supernatural films, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies does not in fact adapt to the general gender term of a woman in the grip of the spiritual as the cover narrative for a male in problems that leads to his ultimate feminization via acknowledging the existence of the higher power. Rather, it fights-back easy gendering by mixing aspect of the bodily ownership and slasher cinemas.
Initially it looks like the young ladies are more easily convinced into believing in Freddy's supernatural existence, specifically because Rod, the bravest of the male actors, remains skeptical until his lover Tina is murdered by Freddy while he was laying in bed with her. Nevertheless, Glen muddles these gender issues in the manner he comes to terms with it. On the other hand, Nancy does not have to persuade him; at some point haphazardly, he persuades himself. Whereas this might be perceived as a "feminization" of his personality, it ought to be noted that Glen is never understood in specific masculine terms anywhere in the movies. That is something that is reserved exclusively for Rod. Thus, A Nightmare on Elm Street is not so explicitly dubbed "female" on its surface since both women and men are embrace Freddy's ownership of their dreams, even though the movies still ends with a Final Girl.
The surreal element in the film A Nightmare on Elm Street gives the power to Freddy Krueger to be existent in the subconscious minds of his victims, implying that he is not so much an outside monster who goes back to a particular place for revenge or even a beast who lives in a marginalized location into which the youthful victims come across like the case of the Sawyer household in the film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Instead, Freddy represent a monster of interiority, which has significant consequences throughout the movies for the purpose of identifying himself.
Freddy's position as a beast of interiority modifies the framework of identification since Freddy is actually ubiquitous within his followers’ subconscious mind. He can be both anywhere and nowhere at the same time, which is something is utterly not possible to capture with normal video camera shots. He is able to be concurrently on both worlds at the same time, which is portrayed in Tina's dream when she is depicted running from the monster on the left part of the cliff, only to find on the right side. The difficulty of using a normal camera to capture Freddy's simultaneous is of great importance for the Nightmare on Elm Street movies because, according to Pinedo (234), the most popular camera scenes in these videos is the view site taken from the murder’s perspective. This view has also been used a lot in the beginning of the Halloween movies.
The genre's application of the killer perspective shot has been the core of much denigration, particularly from feminist antagonists, who claim that it is designed to align the viewers with the murderer, hence giving the audience’s pleasure in indirectly engaging in sadistic manslaughter, especially of young lady. Pinedo (267) has systematically criticized this thesis by interrogating the equation between a perspective shot and bold identification and also by proposing that similarly held central camera still works to stabilize the identity. However, Pinedo (268) still holds that the assassin point-of-view camera shot, as she refers to it, is an outstanding methodic aspect of the genre.
In actual sense, there are only two scene in the whole of A Nightmare on Elm Street that are from the killers view point, both of which are relatively short and applied only in chase series, but never during an assassination. As a matter of fact, the two killer view point shots are unique as they do not conform to the rest of the movie’s overall filmic strategy, which depends more on unbiased, isolated camerawork that stresses the honesty of the fantasy rather than a subjective, biased perspective. The movies in fact appears to be deliberately working against any clear identification with the monster via the camerawork. The director of the movie depends more on portraying the beast’s presence without overtly proving it. Therefore, we end up with several quick scenes of Freddy's shinning eyes peeping in through pipes, or his sharp nails digging through the wall of a building, or a quick flash of movement in one side of the frame that might the figment of the audience's fantasies. The outcome of this tactic is that the identification process is made even more intricate than in most horror movies where burden of proof of identity constantly alternating between the monster and the victims.
In the Nightmare on Elm Street film there is no changing of persona since to affiliate with the beast is, somehow to identify concurrently with the victim and opposite is true as well. Due to the lack of focused camera shots from the killers’ stand point, and his physical disintegration by flash cuts and images of his presence, he is made abject.
Just like conception and uterine scene, Freddy's abject position (in Pinedo’s own version) acts with outside-inside peculiarities. As Pinedo (68) suggests, the idea of outside-inside is suggestive of two exteriors that fold in on one another; the job of differentiating outside from inside looks like an impossible mission since each surface backs to the opposite side. The effect is that it will be impossible to banish the image portrayed.
Even though in the film killers and villains share definite gender qualities and an ability to employ violence, they still...