Editorials
[Special Feature] What A Nightmare! Ranking The 9 ‘Elm Street’ Movies!
After last week’s Dream Warriors Script To Scream I found that I had a lot of leftover thoughts racing in my head regarding the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise in general. Was Part 3 better than Part 1? How did they fail so badly with the remake? Is scary Freddy better than funny Freddy? Why does Freddy’s Dead even exist?
Of course, some of these answers are self evident. Nevertheless, with all of these thoughts about the series cluttering my brain, I decided to embark on my own personal ranking of the films in the franchise (including Freddy Vs. Jason). So here they are, ranked in the simple order of which ones I’d prefer to watch over the others.
Hit the jump to check it out. I expect plenty of you guys to disagree, so feel free to include your own ranking in the comments!
It pretty much goes without saying that the first entry is the obvious winner. Despite some slight hiccups (Freddy visibly landing on a mattress on the staircase, Heather Langenkamp’s performance in general), it’s legitimately a landmark film. For one, it’s actually scary. And I suspect it would be even scarier if the sequels hadn’t taken such a protracted detour into one-liners and camp comedy. In effect, Freddy was spoiled for us – and I wonder if the film would be held in higher regard if the entire franchise ended here.
Putting my wishful pontificating aside, A Nightmare On Elm Street has a genius conceit and a near-perfect villain. Good performances by Amanda Wyss and Johnny Depp (along with great 70‘s-esque whitesploitation performances from Ronee Blakley and John Saxon) seal the deal. It’s a great idea, fully developed and played completely developed.
A lot of people have this as their #1 and I completely understand why. Chuck Russell made a really fun horror-fantasy film that fully realizes (at least as far as its small budget will allow) the potential of the dream world both as a setting and as an extension of its characters (many of whom are actually charismatic). But there are elements that haven’t dated well, such as the needless elaboration on Krueger’s backstory and the idea that his remains needed to be buried. Freddy was explained every bit as much as he needed to be in the first film. That plotline and the trend of one-liners that were kickstarted by Dream Warriors would forever haunt the rest of the series.
Also, many people exult this film as somehow being more imaginative than the first. As I said earlier, I think it fully realizes the concepts outlined in A Nightmare On Elm Street – but I think we’re forgetting how imaginative the construct of that film is. Part 1 truly built the world, Part 3 merely expanded it.
Freddy’s Revenge is incredibly flawed, but Jack Sholder crafted one of the more fun entries in the series. It has some outlandish elements, and it makes the mistake of pulling Freddy into the real world at the pool party – but at least it’s still trying to be scary. And the oft-discussed gay subtext (or more accurately, text) is actually a pretty good theme to go hand in hand with the idea that Mark Patton’s Jesse is scared of becoming Krueger himself.
Freddy’s Revenge is often thought of as being some kind of fiasco – but what that means to me is that it’s just one of the more interesting entries in the series. Exploding parakeets, Clu Gulager, Jesse’s bedroom dance, Bob Shaye in leather – it’s all so d*mn entertaining. And again, Freddy is still a monster here, he’s not quite in “take my wife, please” territory yet.
Here’s where we really start heading downhill. The Dream Master was actually my favorite Elm Street movie when I was growing up, but that’s probably because it was the most successful one. Renny Harlin’s film was utterly embraced my the mainstream – if Freddy ever had a pop culture “moment”, this was most certainly it – which at the time I felt kind of legitimized my fandom.
It’s too bad that a more recent revisiting of the film found it to be utterly lacking in logic, suspense or scares. A lot of it still works, it’s not like the movie is boring, it’s a fast-moving adventure film that colorfully sums up the year 1988. But anytime Freddy impersonates Jaws with his glove, pops out onto the beach and puts on his shades – you know you’ve jumped the shark.
A lot of you might be bothered that this is ranked so low on the list, but this entry is hugely overrated. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare feels antiquated – its attempts at meta commentary now feel more smug and grating than clever. It’s thematic territory that he would cover to far greater effect in Scream just a few years later.
Technically I suppose it’s a better film than The Dream Master, but what does that even mean when it’s such a boring slog? Plus, the Freddy redesign isn’t remotely scary. He’s too brightly lit and looks almost like an WWF Wrestling interpretation of the concept.
Stephen Hopkins’ Dream Child is an utterly confounding film. Why would New Line so drastically slash the budget of this when they were coming off the uber-successful Dream Master? I don’t know, but the result is a cheapo movie that feels completely neutered. I could understand a mandate to spend less if they were aiming to make something more in the vein of Part One, but as the third film in the makeshift trilogy started by Dream Warriors you need to go big or go home. This film did neither. If memory serves it also has the lowest body count of the series – even if Greta’s force-feeding kill is pretty cool. Super Freddy? Motorcycle Freddy? No thanks!
The only reason this movie is placed as high as it is is because it functions fairly well as a Friday The 13th film. The rave scene is fun, the opening kills are cool and brutal and the narrative kind of barely holds together up until act 3. But then Ronny Yu lets the whole thing devolve into a protracted wrestling match between Jason and Freddy. To be honest, who the f*ck cares?
Freddy Vs. Jason is one of those ideas we thought we all wanted, but boy were we wrong. After this and Alien Vs. Predator, hopefully we’ve learned to stop mixing our killers.
A dead, soulless remake that makes no sense and cowardly backs away from the one cool new idea it had – what if Freddy were innocent? If they’d actually gone all the way with that one I would have been a little more impressed, but by no means would it have saved the movie. NOES 2010 benefits from having the resources to render its dream worlds slightly more absorbing than prior entries, but how many points can you award a film for simply having more money to spend? Decent actors and performances are utterly wasted and, worst of all, we lost our shot at returning the franchise to the dark roots of the original. Or continuing the franchise at all. The film was a financial success but there are no plans for a sequel – which speaks volumes about how much fun everyone must have had making this one.
Dear God. I remember seeing an interview with Rachel Talalay where she bemoaned Platinum Dunes for not staying true to the original vision or consulting with the original New Line team for their remake. I’m not sure if she should be throwing stones because her Freddy’s Dead is easily the worst film in the entire franchise.
Awful makeup, horrible one-liners, the completion of Freddy’s journey towards becoming a burn-victim Jay Leno, the rogues gallery of stupid cameos, Wicked Witch Freddy, Bus Driver Freddy, Freddy pushing traps into the road like Wile E. Coyote, and the Nintendo Power Glove.
Am I missing anything? Oh yeah – horrible 3D, a stupid Alice Cooper cameo and yet even more unnecessary clouding of the Krueger backstory by making Lisa Zane’s Maggie his long lost daughter.
Your turn! How would you rank the franchise?
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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