One Good Scare - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

he never did get to find out who won Miss Nude America

ello

We’re going to keep it snappy today because I am on a deadline and also DEEPLY wanting to talk about this one because it’s possibly one of my top five favourite horror movie kills.

Folks, this is Glen Lantz!

1) yes that is Johnny Depp (booooooooo), 2) yes that is what he’s wearing and 3) if you substitute the giant chunky cube TV for a phone this is literally me listening to ASMR trying to fall asleep OH MY GOD

Glen’s about to die (so Ru probably wanted him to be happy).

And quite spectacularly (and messily).

the set-up

At this point in the film, Nancy Thompson (the spectacular Heather Langenkamp) is running on 99 percent caffeine and a mathematics defying 100 percent sheer anger. Having already lost her friends Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Rod (Nick Corri) to the dream killer she now knows is Fred Krueger (Robert Englund, and yes, he is credited as “Fred” here). Krueger, as per her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley), was an insane child murderer who killed twenty children in the area but was released from jail on a technicality. Infuriated, the parents of Elm Street burned him alive in an act of vigilante justice.

Nancy is, understandably, fucking pissed that her mother did not reveal this to her earlier (because the parents in this movie are THE WORST), given that it appears his ghost is taking revenge by killing those parents’ children in the place they’re most vulnerable: their dreams.

Nancy sets out to catch Krueger herself, having already discovered she has the power to draw things out of the dream realm and into the real world. But Krueger also has plans, and they involve Nancy’s boyfriend Glen…

Nancy attempts to call Glen’s house to warn him not to fall asleep - unfortunately, Glen’s parents (played by Ed Call and Sandy Lipton) pick up the phone and basically tell her to stay the fuck away from their son because they refuse to believe her, in the process dooming Glen to Death By Krueger.

Frustrated, Nancy sits down on the bed. The phone rings, and when she picks up the only thing she can hear is an ominous squealing sound.

Panicked, Nancy accidentally rips her phone out from the plug, breaking it. She prepares to attempt to go to Glen’s house (which her mother has made significantly more difficult of an endeavor by locking all the doors and barricading them in) but turns as she hears the phone ring. The phone which is unplugged on the bed. The unplugged phone.

What happens next is so rotted I can only do it justice by giving you the full scene below.

ROTTED! ROTTED I TELL YOU.

Anyway, Glen - who is attempting to stay awake by both watching TV (specifically, he’s watching the Miss Nude America contest because apparently THAT’S A THING) and listening to music on his headphones - dozes off anyway.

The clock hits midnight. The TV plays the American national anthem.

And then….

the scene

Okay, so there’s a couple of things here that make this an all-timer for me.

1. “and this is station KRGR leaving the air”, again ROTTED

2. Glen being pulled into the mattress by Krueger, TV and radio and all

3. the cut to poor Nancy, SCREAMING her head off with her mother not reacting at all.

4. the cut back to Glen’s bedroom, and the blood just starting to spray spectacularly from the cavity in the mattress.

5. Glen’s ma coming in, not quite processing what’s happening (BECAUSE HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU) and just screaming in segments as the blood just keeps gushing and gushing and GUSHING up the walls.

6. the cut to the paramedics arriving and the words “you won’t need a stretcher up there, you’ll need a mop”.

7. Nancy’s dad (a police officer) arriving on the scene, and seeing his daughter, in despair, looking at the scene below, deciding to WAVE at her. Her little wave back is so heartbreaking.

8. That one cop having to put a bucket down on the living room floor because the blood is dripping through the ceiling.

why it works

If we look at the idea of “The Kill” in a horror movie, specifically a slasher like this, there’s a couple of things it needs to do. First, it needs to make sense within the plot of the movie. Second, you need to be invested in the character for their death to matter to the story. Third, ideally you would want the actual kill to have some creativity in execution.

Glen’s death ticks all three. It makes sense within the plot because the way the movie is set up means that it was always going to come down to a Nancy-Krueger end game, and for that, Nancy had to lose one more person. By this point in the movie, you’ve spent the most time with Nancy and Glen. You know that Glen, while more than a bit baffled at his girlfriend’s sudden interest in survival tactics (as shown in the scene on the bridge, where he spots Nancy has a book about this exact topic), is willing to help her and believes her to some extent. And that’s what Nancy isn’t getting from the people she needs it most from: help and a sense that she’s believed, however outlandish it is to hear about a man killing teenagers in their dreams.

So you are invested in Glen, and when all signs start pointing towards his imminent demise via Krueger ripping his body to shreds (there exists on YouTube a slightly extended version of the scene where Mrs. Lantz walks into Glen’s bedroom, where Krueger brings Glen’s body back up, but that section was cut, presumably because for the purpose of storytelling, we don’t actually need to see this. WE KNOW. HE IS DEAD AS FUCK) you feel the same dread and powerlessness Nancy is feeling.

As for creativity in execution, just fucking look at that scene. Director Wes Craven used the rotating set to shoot the scene inverted (which you can see if you look closely at the direction the blood is gushing). This meant that the blood was flowing down out of the mattress instead of up from within. The plan was to subtly control the flow of the blood by rotating the set, a plan which nearly went spectacularly awry as the crew had failed to insulate the many, many exposed electrical wires on set.

The set was, according to Langenkamp, rotated in the wrong direction, leaving the blood to spill everywhere, with the crew unable to stop it. Englund, thinking quickly, grabbed Langenkamp’s hand and the two ran full pelt into the corridors of the studio. Craven and his DP Jacques Haitkin were stuck in the room, attached to five point harnesses and strapped to the wall in racing car seats, hanging upside down in the now pitch black room with fuses blowing everywhere.

Luckily both survived, and - to quote Craven: “But we got the shot, as they say.”

And what a shot it is.