Despite (or because of) its outsized critical and commercial success, director Wes Craven’s Nightmare On Elm Street was the slasher movie that essentially doomed the sub-genre for a decade after its release. When the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise began in 1984, few viewers could have guessed how big an impact Robert Englund’s irreplaceable Freddy Krueger would have on the history of horror cinema. Unfortunately, while the original movie remains a classic, A Nightmare On Elm Street also ended up being unintentionally responsible for a string of cringe-worthy slashers that almost doomed the entire sub-genre.
In the early ‘80s, most of the slasher sub-genre’s movies kept the paranormal elements of their stories in the background and left explicitly supernatural horror to Stephen King. There were slasher villains with supernatural abilities before Freddy Krueger, but more often than not, their paranormal powers were limited to being utterly un-killable. This was convenient for producers who wanted the same knife-wielding villain to be cathartically killed off at the end of every franchise installment but still re-appear in the sequel without any real explanation.
However, Freddy Krueger mixed Pennywise’s reality-contorting fantasy powers with the brutal, bloody efficiency of a standard slasher killer, and soon the sub-genre was never the same again. The simple machete-wielding villains were out as slashers starter to churn out more and more absurd and inventive monsters with magical origins and all manner of powers. However, while A Nightmare On Elm Street’s influence contributed to beloved genre villains like Candyman and Chucky of Child’s Play fame, it was also the conduit that led to some seriously silly additions to the sub-genre. From Ice Cream Man to 1997’s Jack Frost (the killer snowman horror) to Rumpelstiltskin, the combination of fantasy elements and slasher horror made Craven’s movie such a huge hit also birthed some of the least scary entries into the sub-genre over the ensuing decade.
The Pre-Nightmare On Elm Street Slasher Formula Was Simpler
From director John Carpenter’s classic Halloween to 1980’s knock-off Friday the 13th to even early proto-slashers like Bob Clark’s Black Christmas and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all of the earliest movies in the sub-genre followed the same simple Giallo-influenced formula. The killer was unseen and barely spoke (if at all), making them more of a ghostly presence than a personality. They were plenty corporeal when it came to tearing apart and hacking off heads, but the mute, masked status of the villains meant their personality and origin story were largely left a mystery. With the arrival of Freddy Krueger, the Nightmare On Elm Street series changed this — though not necessarily for the better.
Nightmare On Elm Street Introduced The “Fantasy Slasher”
A Nightmare On Elm Street was the huge hit that proved fantasy could combine with the slasher horror sub-genre effectively. However, few of the many Nightmare On Elm Street ripoffs that soon followed the success of the original and its sequels were able to capture the balance between silliness and scares that Craven nailed. A killer who could invade dreams required much more suspension of disbelief than the standard hulking, knife-wielding slasher and, while some slashers had featured supernatural elements, almost none of them were as explicitly paranormal as Krueger. This was because Englund’s villain needed to be truly vile to make his powers seem more scary than silly — something few of his imitators achieved.
Nightmare On Elm Street Put Its Killer Front and Center
Freddy was the focus of the original Nightmare On Elm Street as much as Final Girl Nancy (although this was even more true in the sequels) and, although this approach worked wonders for Craven’s movie, it was not so successful for the many other fantasy slasher movies that followed the franchise’s lead. While Robert Englund’s upcoming Stranger Things season 4 role proves that his performance earned its central place and the actor remains an icon of horror even decades later, the movie’s focus on Krueger did give rise to an unfortunate slasher trend. Soon, movies attempting to ape A Nightmare On Elm Street’s success tried to replicate its memorable paranormal killer and not its pacing, set-pieces, or scares.
What Later Fantasy Slashers Got Wrong
Ice Cream Man, Leprechaun, Dr. Giggles, Jack Frost, and Rumpelstiltskin (as well as many other lesser slashers released between the late ‘80s and late ‘90s) all underlined the biggest problem with most fantasy slashers. Unlike Freddy Krueger, their killers were more silly than scary. Even Freddy became laughable in the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels and he was introduced as a sadistic child-murderer, so killers who started as sentient snow or fairytale villains from childhood had no chance of frightening audiences who were used to the antics of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. Robert Englund’s Goldbergs cameo proves that even a character introduced as an irredeemable monster could become a pop-culture punchline, meaning that characters introduced as snowmen had nowhere to go but down a comedic route.
This led to movies like Rumpelstiltskin and the Jack Frost franchise attempting to replicate the corny comedy of later Nightmare On Elm Street movies without ever earning this humor via potent scares. The more absurd moments in Freddy’s lesser outings are easily forgiven (for some fans) thanks to the terrifying gory set-pieces of the original movie, New Nightmare, and Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. However, new series in the sub-genre that started with goofy fantasy elements and tried to work back to scares were doomed.
The (Rare) Fantasy Slashers That Worked
One of the slasher villains who earned as much critical acclaim as Freddy Krueger, Candyman, further proved this hypothesis. Unlike a killer ice-cream salesman and the Medieval monster of Rumpelstiltskin, the character of Candyman had a tragic backstory and committed some monstrous acts of cruelty (like maiming a child) in his first movie appearance. As such, he hit the right balance between incorporating fantasy elements and still being a vicious, terrifying horror villain. In contrast, most of the Nightmare On Elm Street-inspired fantasy slashers of the ‘80s and ‘90s prioritized inventing a villain with novelty value and failed to find anything scary about their absurd antagonists as a result.
