A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

USA, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Wes Craven
Photography: Jacques Haitkin
Music: Charles Bernstein
Editors: Patrick McMahon, Rick Shaine
Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri

I'm very fond of A Nightmare on Elm Street because it's approximately where I decided to give the horror / creepshow genre one more chance. They just kept scaring me too bad. And Nightmare is truly a full-on scare fest, with cunning shock cuts, gore, and a premise that insidiously gets under your skin. But it's also an '80s movie, complete with cheesy synthesizer soundtrack, and a critical moment (in the wake of The Evil Dead) when horror became self-conscious and started to riff and goof and deconstruct, playing for laughs when it chose. The sing-songy nursery rhyme chanted by anonymous children here (a somewhat tired trope of the genre by then) is turned subtly toward explication and a kind of self-mocking: "One, two, Freddy's coming for you / Three, four, better lock your door / Five, six, grab your crucifix / Seven, eight, stay up late / Nine, ten, never sleep again."

Freddy, of course, is Fred Krueger, the monster figure child molester at the center of this. The backstory is silly and preposterous, evidently only to be related in filthy cellars. Even within this movie, let alone the entire franchise that followed, our boogeyman with the Wolverine blades in the red and green sweater is more super villain than proper monster (and morphing slowly but surely into stand-up comic), which makes him ultimately a bit dull or worse. But here's how it works. Fred Krueger attacks his victims from inside their dreams—hence "stay up late" and "never sleep again" in the nursery rhyme. And for most of its length Nightmare is really pretty good on the insanities of dream world logic. The best dream scenes here, such as one in the high school, feel convincingly weird (and threatening) as only dreams can.

Scream (1996)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Henry Winkler

It's easy enough to knock Scream for attempting to have its cake and eat it too, make a scary movie and at the same time be all smug and ironical about it. Certainly the entire franchise played out that way—is still playing out, with the late-arriving fourth installment from 2011 (which I haven't seen). Many, many such exercises have followed—The Cabin in the Woods, for example, is only one of the better ones. More broadly, the whole decade of the '90s is often dismissed as an especially poor time for horror, and Scream tends to be assigned the face of that, turning horror into little twee comedy skits with occasional shock cuts and gore, until finally Saw, Hostel, the zombie apocalypse, and a lurching army of reboots reintroduced us to the experience of actually being scared by movies again (if rather unpleasantly so, but being scared is always unpleasant after all).

Still, the first 13 minutes of Scream are so good I really think we might need to back up a little here. Wes Craven may be uneven before he is anything else, but the confidence and pure verve are unmistakable. The details are just right: a teen girl alone at home at night in a big comfortable suburban mansion, Jiffy Pop on the stovetop, and someone with a funny voice who keeps calling on the cordless and asking weird questions. "Do you like scary movies?" he says. Drew Barrymore is a perfect choice to play the victim, and even better (shades of Janet Leigh in Psycho) she's gone from the movie practically before it's begun. The strokes of development are swift—from flirtatious joking with the strange caller to outright terror as he suddenly seems to be close by, and seriously malevolent too—and finally you just have to accept the premise. It forces you to, even as the action grows more outlandish and convenient. This opener has some air of the showoff stunt, but no one is about to get up and walk out after that, even as the movie quickly settles into the snide and, yes, very witty nonsense that follows.