I believe that I've seen the entire nostalgic "I Love the 80s" miniseries on VH1. I have not seen the entire "I Love the 80s Strikes Back" miniseries, however. It seems that in the "I Love the 80s Strikes Back" 1984 segment, they discussed A Nightmare on Elm Street, but did not take on the Freddy vs. Jason debate, as the Internet Movie Database credits the miniseries for featuring Nightmare but not any of the Friday films. I don't ask for much, but please can't I get Hal Sparks, Mo Rocca and Michael Ian Black to discuss the comparative qualities of Freddy vs. Jason? Maybe the release of the film where they face off killed any hope for discussion. The problem of course isn't in the difference of years. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which has Jason in a hockey mask doing what he does best, was released the same year as the first Nightmare on Elm Street. The subtitle "The Final Chapter" is easy pickings for the panel of sarcastic comedians, so why not deal with both of the horror icons back to back and be done with it? What bothers me even more than that is the fact that Jason got pushed out of the original "I Love the 80s" as well. VH1 totally ignored him, thus implying that they really like Freddy more and Jason wasn't even worth discussing. Ah, but there is a method behind my geeky "80s-nostalgic" fanboy rant. (I was born in late 1981, I can hear a few of my readers say aloud "What the hell do YOU know about the '80s?" And, of course I know that, like masturbation, "I Love the 80s" is one of those things that everybody does but you never ever talk about. It's enormously entertaining, but utterly impossible to justify.)

Anyway. A Nightmare on Elm Street is not better than Friday the 13th. Both films have their different advantages and disadvantages, and objectively speaking they are about equal. But A Nightmare on Elm Street is certainly more in touch with the whole "'80s" aesthetic than the Friday the 13th films. I have a theory about the "death of the cinema of the '70s." It didn't happen with Jaws and Star Wars. That started it, that planted the seed, but that didn't kill it. It didn't even happen with Heaven's Gate, although that definitely helped as well. It happened in 1984 with Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The PG-13 rating crippled popular American cinema for good. Having worked in a movie theater, I think that I've discovered that the moviegoing audience is divided into four distinct categories: kids, teenagers and recent post-teenagers, middle-aged women, and the masses. (Older men who have families and/or careers never make the filmgoing decisions. Their wives or girlfriends drag them to the movies or their kids drag them to the movies. Or they see a movie for the masses. They don't form their own target market.)

That "masses" category was created by Star Wars and Jaws, but it was really cemented with the PG-13 rating. Everybody can get into a PG-13 movie and everybody is usually satisfied. It's kinky but not too kinky. Perhaps you can say that it revived the mass market movie; usually when you think of a "classic" pre-MPAA American film, you think of a picture that has something for kids, teenagers, Mom and Dad. Not all mass market movies are necessarily bad. The very satisfying Pirates of the Caribbean was terrifically entertaining and had something for everybody. But Pirates of the Caribbean wasn't a great movie, and it's impossible to have any sort of personal attachment to it. The PG-13 rating has flattened out cinematic diversity, and has discouraged any real subversiveness. The mass market category has leaked a bit into the kid and teenager category, exposing harder vulgarity to the former and depriving it to the latter. The forced compromise is the offensive part. That was probably a bit too much of a sidebar, but A Nightmare on Elm Street, quite frankly, is a mass market slasher movie. There's something plastic, colorful and slick about it. There is a considerable craftsmanship to the picture. There are a few technical problems with the filmmaking. Craven carelessly overuses fades to black, and he distrusts his actors to deliver his irony. There is overacting galore in the picture, and you have to wonder if it would have been better served with a more realistic approach and let the rest of the goofiness speak for itself. But generally this is a high-end and very clever slasher movie; a step above the look of the first three Friday the 13ths.

A Nightmare on Elm Street also has a bit of a self-conscious sense of humor to it. There are many more gag murders in the sequels I understand (as of now I have only seen this one, New Nightmare, and Freddy vs. Jason). But there are many invitations to laugh at this movie, like the moment where the heroine Nancy runs out of her classroom and into a hall monitor who demands to see her hall pass. Or when her mother (a thankless role played by Ronee Blakley) melodramatically informs her, "Freddy Krueger's dead. Mommy killed him." It's sort of a middlebrow kind of picture; made comfortable for those who don't really want to be scared and who want a film that they can somewhat respect. If the pre-Nightmare on Elm Street slasher movies were pulp, this is pulp made edible for everybody through irony and humor. Freddy Krueger differs from the other movie monsters in that he talks. This is quite significant, as he cannot be interpreted as an "inevitable force of nature" like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The flavor of the series is accordingly different as well. The silent monsters have a great simplicity to them. They're below irony. Jason X is hated by many, but I give it a pass exclusively because of Jason. He's inhabiting this futuristic, self-consciously winking environment, but he's not at all part of it. He's himself, doing his emotionless, primal, killing machine thing.

The simplicity of the Friday the 13th films, and even the extremely well-crafted Halloween, is honest and easy. The films were strictly "take it or leave it." And similarly, the sex and violence were more or less realistic. In A Nightmare on Elm Street Freddy Krueger isn't a man, he's a ghost, and he kills people in their dreams. It's fantastic violence and it feels glossier and better-suited, in fact, for a mass market. The gore in this movie is way over the top, and the sex is hardly titillating. We get a glimpse of a breast and some off-screen moaning which plays like a gag and has little eroticism to it. Furthermore, there is the problem with the characters' age. The girls in the picture are supposed to be 15 and they are treated like they are 15 by their parents, but they look much older. It's another gag. In the Friday the 13th films and in Halloween the teens more or less played their age, and the sex was treated like sex. There was no self-conscious cinematic wrapping to it.

Instinctively, I perhaps criticized the whole Nightmare on Elm Street series when reviewing the Friday the 13th films, but now I do have to admit that there is something to be said about Freddy Krueger. Yeah, the film is dishonest and artificial, but the dishonesty and artificiality have their own creepiness to them. The now-famous ceiling death of Amanda Wyss' Tina has a kinky brutality that easily transcends most of the stuff that we've seen in the Friday the 13th films. Or Halloween for that matter. Craven doesn't score or over-edit this sequence, and we are given no other choice but to watch while this girl scream in terror and pain as her blood splatters around the room. Her boyfriend poignantly watches on frustrated that he doesn't know what's going on or how to save her. There's a very delicate balance at work here, and we realize that Craven has made fun of himself throughout the movie so that we aren't regarding the film in an ironic frame of mind. The irony has been pre-digested for us. And then he gives us this murder that is void of irony and we're sideswiped. In the more minimalist slasher pictures, we could have seen the kill as an occasion to laugh. Done well, like in Halloween, the silent masked killer movie can be draining and sad. I'm thinking in particular of that film's slow surprise suffocation in a car. The deterministic "you're going to die and there is nothing that you can do about it" is the flavor of the silent killer films and is what makes them scary.

As we've established before, Freddy Krueger talks. And as mentioned in the alarming Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy has his razor-glove, where Jason has a huge machete. Jason's knife is bigger than Freddy's knife. The chattiness, widdle knife and relatively small frame suggest that Freddy is not the hypermasculine killer that Jason is. Given that he is a child killer, we think of him more as a level-one pervert than a King Kong ubermonster. Even with the series' ironic stance, I think that this aspect actually makes me find Freddy Krueger to be more frightening than Jason. The sexual violence in this film is more about Freddy's sadism than his victims' masochism, and the film does not have any sympathy for Freddy's compulsions. He kills because he likes it, not because he can't help it. We aren't meant to understand Freddy and we never see him as being misunderstood. (This aspect was explored wonderfully in Freddy vs. Jason.) It's less symbolic and less political. The sexual violence in the picture really goes in for the kill. Because there exists a definite stratification of victim from killer, because we are intended to sympathize with the characters and really hate Freddy, it could be argued that A Nightmare on Elm Street is more moral of a film than the Friday the 13ths. The popularization of Freddy Krueger, the transformation of him into a hero, is a cynical gag. With Jason it's sincere, and the audience really identifies with him. (Again, Freddy vs. Jason shows its considerable brilliance in understanding this.)

Still, the film is really sleazy. Aside from the ceiling death, Craven gives us two other terrific images: Freddy's claw emerging from a tub of water between Nancy's legs as she falls asleep, and Freddy sticking his tongue out from a telephone receiver informing her that he's her boyfriend now, as he has just gruesomely dispatched of her former lover. If the glove is not the enormous phallic symbol of Jason's machete, we can still acknowledge it as a fetish item for Freddy. He designed it and created it to kill children, and that very idea is unusually chilling. As an artist, Craven has a tendency to really penetrate deep and produce some profoundly disturbing effects. And sometimes it really terrifies him. Last House on the Left is considered by some to be his masterpiece, and the humiliation, rape and murder of the two girls in the picture is one of the greatest stretches of cinema that I have ever seen. The rest of the film occasionally tries to lighten the mood, and the premise is of course based on the family of one of the girl's getting revenge. But I keep having a hypothetical situation in my mind of going to see the film in a dumpy theater and seeing a guy in a yellow raincoat leave after the girls have been murdered, getting what he came there for. We don't identify with the killers in Last House on the Left. We identify with the victims. And so you don't find any solace or peace in the picture. It's all effect, moderated slightly by the comparatively moralistic humor and revenge.

In saying that A Nightmare on Elm Street is more moral, I don't mean to say that it's more comfortable or less problematic. Like Last House on the Left there is some profoundly disturbing stuff in here. Understand that a child molester labeled as a child molester is still a child molester. (I'm having a difficult time labeling Craven an opportunist or hypocrite. He's certainly the sort of exploitation filmmaker who shows us depravity in order to tell us how depraved it is.) In a way, I'm sort of bothered by the idea of keeping Freddy as a non-human monster and not letting the audience identify with the bad guy. I'm reminded of a video I saw in my "Media Smarts" class (a class that basically shows us how horrible the media is). They were talking about how Beauty and the Beast tells little girls who view it that if your man is abusive and has all these emotional problems, your love will save him. The people in the video seemed to believe that this is an unrealistic fairy tale. And a dangerous one at that. Okay, but if we cut off the abusive people from contact how are they are going to get better? What's so awful about compassion? The attitude of the film seems to be that the healthy need to stay healthy and be with other healthy people and the sick need to rot in the streets. I think that there is a middle ground that needs to be reached here. Some people are, in fact, just plain evil. And some are, in fact, sick and need help. Liberal compassion probably doesn't apply in all situations, but it applies in quite a few.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is straight up black-and-white, and I suspect that quite a few viewers would be extremely displaced by the picture. If you're not one of these little suburbanite shits and you're not Freddy Krueger then who are you? Thematically, the moralism of the picture doesn't make it as satisfying a film as Friday the 13th or Halloween, where the people who had sex were murdered because we were jealous that we weren't getting any. But the film has an oozing visceral power. It gets a reaction not through agnostic vacancy or ambiguous morality like the Friday the 13th films, but by wallowing in misogyny and gore. This is a shallow film, but it's a smart and effective one. A Nightmare on Elm Street has an ironic crackle-pop that the Friday the 13th films doesn't have, but it also eliminates the effortless minimalist poetry of that series. Effect and wittiness, over philosophy and meaning. As to which is better really, both are mixed bags and it's really a tossup.