Halloween ('78) vs. A Nightmare on Elm Street | Movie Death Match

0:01 Do you like scary movies? What's your favorite scary movie? My name is Chris Klemek, and today my firm but fair cinematic jurisprudence shall determine which one of a pair of thematically linked movies, each represented by a passionate and highly credentialed advocate, shall be preserved in perpetuity like Meryl Streep's status as the most Oscar-nominated performer in history, including a Best Actress nom for Wes Craven's Music of the Heart, and which shall be consigned to oblivion like John Carpenter's office and parking space on the Universal lot the Monday after The Thing opened in June of 1982 and bombed even harder than another glazed turkey that hit theaters the same day, Blade Runner. Because spooky season is upon us,

0:50 and because Jane Shanebrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is one of the things I did last summer, Our matchup this month is between two immortal teenage slashers. 1978's Halloween was among the most profitable movies ever made, leveling up the career of director, co-writer, and composer John Carpenter.

1:07 Halloween night.

1:13 A small American town. 15 years ago.

1:18 I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil.

1:30 And minting a new star in Jamie Lee Curtis, whose body of work would not be confined to Scream Queen roles. Six years later, A Nightmare on Elm Street renewed what by then had already become the tired teen slasher subgenre by setting itself in a place even more relatable and ordinary than the fictitious Midwestern everyburb of Haddonfield, Illinois, the realm of dreams.

1:52 The kids of Elm Street don't know it yet, but something is coming to get them. Whatever you do, don't fall asleep.

2:07 Let's meet those passionate and highly credentialed advocates. Representing 1978's Halloween is critic at large for the Haddonfield Herald. Sorry, that is the Podunk Picayune Post. My apologies again. I'm being told the publication is the New York Times. The Gray Lady, all the news that's fit to print. His books include Letterman, The Last Giant of Late Night, and more germane to our discussion, Shock Value, How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror.

2:37 He is Jason Zinnemann. Welcome, Jason.

2:40 Great to be here.

2:41 I know you grew up in Washington, D.C., where I'm speaking from now. Your mother, Joy Zinnemann, founded the Studio Theater, which is still one of our most revered stages when you were an infant. Did your D.C. youth include much babysitting work?

2:56 No, it did not. It did include a lot of watching TV. scary movies where babysitters were slashed, though. I was kind of a latchkey kid, which I think is the secret to my budding love of horror. My parents did not keep a close eye on what I was watching, which was probably irresponsible parenting, but to my long-term professional benefit.

3:21 To my eternal envy. I mean- D.C. in the 80s, early 90s could be a little scary. I was across the Potomac and the Virginia suburbs during those years. It was just like Haddonfield, Illinois, 90210. Lots of palm trees in Fairfax County, Virginia, is what I'm saying. That's true.

3:38 We did not have that in D.C. We were the murder capital of the country. And you suburban kids, we looked down our nose on.

3:45 As you should.

3:48 It is, by the way, I think an interesting thing about both these movies that In a time when there was a lot of fear-mongering about urban climates in the news, these are both, you know, the horror that takes place in suburban settings.

4:02 Yes.

4:03 Which is, I think, a little unexpected.

4:06 We will discuss this at length. Representing 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, we have a psychologist with specific expertise in the science of dreaming and the subconscious, In addition to her academic publications, she is the author of five books for a general readership, including The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist's Couch and The Committee of Sleep.

4:29 She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. She is a lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Are we sure that's an accredited institution? And an artist herself. She is Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. Welcome, Deirdre.

4:44 Hi. Happy to be here. I've done some research on nightmares, but my writing on films is much more obscure than Jason's. The only people that allow me to review films is the Association for the Study of Dreams, Dream Videophile Column, for which I've reviewed 200 dreams on film. And pretty much the only other films I've ever reviewed are ones about hypnosis.

5:13 Huh.

5:14 I can only thank you for being the most wildly overqualified contestant slash combatant yet to appear on Movie Deathmatch. We are grateful for your time. One of the things I found so appealing about the premise of this show and when FilmSpotting co-founder Adam Kempinar approached me about it was the highly credentialed advocates part. This is the opportunity to discuss my favorite subject with super smart people who have interesting jobs. But this one, I am sitting here with a comedy critic and a dream expert. This does kind of feel like the job interview question was like, if you could attend a dinner with any group of people in history, where would you go? So, Jason, let me ask you. So your books are about comedians and

5:56 horror filmmakers. Some of our best recent scary movies have come from Jordan Peele, Zack Kreger, you know, artists who... went from comedy to horror. What is it about these two areas of human expression that have what might seem like an unlikely overlap?

6:12 It's funny. In my personal experience, as someone who's covered a lot of the people who made these movies, both horror movies and comedies, it is true that horror filmmakers are generally very funny and they describe the atmosphere on set as a funny one. And comedians are, you know, true to form, they are neurotic and dark. And I think there's a really fine line between comedy and horror.

6:37 Most horror has a little bit of comedy. And if you see it from a certain perspective, a lot of comedy has a lot of horror in it. The form of it is very similar. You know, sort of famously, they're both about building tension and then a release and a kind of ruthless, one that's unforgiving for the artist because unlike many forms of art, you know for sure if it worked in horror. In comedy, you get a laugh or you don't laugh. That's the release. And if you don't get a laugh, it didn't work most of the time. In horror, that release is a jump or a scream in some cases. But the patterns are very similar.

7:14 And I think a lot of our best horror filmmakers use funniness to either manipulate the fear and you see some of that In both of these movies, I think probably not to go too far afield, but I would say that, you know, it's one of the things that distinguishes Freddy Krueger from other slasher villains is that there's a much more open embrace of comedy than than the other slasher villains.

7:40 Yeah, Freddy's Freddy's got jokes for sure. He got jokes. Deirdre, where to begin? I'm being cautious here because I know this is a question that could sustain a long conversation or a career by itself. But is it possible to say generally how sophisticated our study of dreaming has become? Is this as advanced an area of medicine as our understanding of the body, or does it still remain largely mysterious?

8:08 Well, you know, I think this answer applies to most of medicine and psychology and everything, which is I am always getting asked whether dreams are mostly solved or we still don't have any idea what they are. They're still so mysterious. And I think it's a false dichotomy. I think the way that science works is the more you learn the answers to some questions and the more it opens up other things that you didn't even know to be wondering about. So I think that over the almost 40 years now that I've been in the field, that we've discovered so much. I mean, psychology's been building longer on the sort of introspective, usefulness in therapy kind of aspect of dreams. But brain science has just exploded since

9:02 I was in graduate school. And so I think we know so much more about what the brain is doing during dreams that does map on to why they're so visual, why we don't reality test during them, to why they're so different from our waking experience. We know a lot more about the brain science of that. And we even are just starting to be able to intervene from the outside and tweak dream content in ways beyond some of the long known practices that they and early European mystics were influencing dreams with self-suggestion at bedtime and very subtle auditory input.

9:44 But now they're.

9:44 Things like beaming magnetic signals at certain areas of the brain. So I think it's just exploded in our understanding. But like I say, just about everything we find out about dreams raises more questions. So I think they're both... quite understood in some ways and will just stay mysterious infinitely.

10:06 But I think that's true of human beings. And most of psychology is never going to be all solved. I hear the AI people talking about AI is going to solve all science or all medicine. And I think it's going to work miracles. But I don't I think there's an infinite amount in this universe to be solved. And that applies to dreams, too.

10:27 I want to ask you 15 follow up questions. But unfortunately, we have far graver matters to attend to, which is the better slasher movie. Jason, one of the reasons I was especially keen to have you represent Halloween here is because The Times did not review the film upon its release in 1978. So your retrospective review from 2018, 40th anniversary of the movie, is the official New York Times notice.

10:54 Do you remember where and when you first saw Halloween?

10:57 Yeah.

10:59 By the way, that's one of the things I'm most proud of, by the way. It seems most absurd because I was only a few years old. But I was too young to see it in the theaters. But I was exactly the age that Michael Myers was when he murdered his sister when I first saw Halloween. And it might have had a similar impact on my life. Weirdly, Halloween...

11:27 aired on NBC in 1981 at 9 o'clock, and it was heavily promoted. And you can find it online. It has this really cheery, hilarious commercials introducing this movie. It's Halloween, the night he came home, when the deepest fears are made real.

11:51 When the darkest nightmares.

11:57 But, you know, as a six-year-old, I'm not going out to the movie theater. So the fact that it was coming to me was tremendously exciting.

12:04 Now, Halloween, you won't be watching it alone.

12:14 I wish I could say that when I saw it, I recognized it as this classic. But the truth is, I was just terrified by it. And I was generally of the generation, the slasher generation. And I loved Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. And I didn't make any great distinction between Halloween and Christmas. If you would have asked me in the mid-80s, I would have probably said I preferred Friday the 13th Part II or something.

12:39 But then years later, when I got older and I watched it again, I started to become a real admirer of it. And then when I wrote a book on horror films in the 70s, I watched it repeatedly and spent a lot of time with it and developed a real new appreciation for it as being distinctive in the genre. and spent a lot of time tracing the roots of a lot of its shots and influences and also its impact.

13:05 So I really like spent my whole life with this movie. I mean, I'd probably see it once a year, but yeah, it started early.

13:12 A seminal film. Deirdre, what is your connection to A Nightmare on Elm Street? Did you see this film before dreams became your profession?

13:22 No, this dream was not out when dreams became my profession. Most psychologists like get interested in psychology in high school. They want to go major in it. And then toward the end of that, undergrad degree does not do you a lot in psychology. So you figure out what kind of grad school you want to go into. But my path was completely the opposite. As far back as I can remember in childhood, I just thought dreams were the most fascinating thing going on in the world. And I just talked dreams and focused on dreams. And you know, if I wrote little stories, they were about dreams. If I drew anything, it was dream images. So I picked dreams as a kid and sort of grew up to learn that somebody's going to pay you to do nothing

14:10 but dreams. You better major in psychology and go to graduate school in it. So I did see this film when it came out, but I'm Dating myself relative to Jason, I was out of graduate school and in a fairly short-for-me job at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. So I was living in a sort of a quiet, sleepy, suburban-looking area, pretty much like the visual setting, at least, even though it was a college town.

14:37 So how was the drive home from the theater and that sleepy North Carolina supper?

14:43 Well, I didn't go alone or even just with one person as I typically did. I was with several friends who I think all but one were psychologists, but none of them were particularly dream interested as psychologists go. So we went out. I forget if it was over a meal or over drinks and talked about the movie right afterwards.

15:06 And what was so interesting with this group of very psychological, but again, not particularly up on dream research people, was that we weren't talking about anything technical about dreams, like I might have been with those colleagues, but they were associating to childhood so much, like it was making them recall not just scary nightmares that somebody's chasing you and trying to kill you, which it certainly taps into, But other subtler little things about children's nightmare experiences that often adults don't have, like waking up and temporarily seeing something from the dream. And again, my colleagues who didn't spend their time studying sleep didn't know you call that a hypnagogic hallucination if you wake up and something from the

15:56 dream is still there. And it's common in children, and it's not that common in adults. But they were just much more spontaneously talking about little details about how the nightmares or the waking experience, thinking about the nightmares, was very true to their childhood experiences and in some ways that they'd kind of forgotten as they got to be an adult and did not have as large a percentage of nightmares.

16:24 Well, so you've gotten to know our contestants slash combatants a little bit. Let's get ready to rumble. Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Two totemic teen slashers with more than one generation of fans. Which one is gnarliest? Which one's scares are more indelible? Which shall endure once the ritual of justice by verbal combat we perform here today is complete? Those are the stakes. The call is coming from inside the house. This is a movie deathmatch. Jason Zinnemann, are you prepared?

16:56 I'm prepared.

16:57 Deirdre Barrett, are you ready?

16:59 Indeed. Indeed.

17:00 All right.

17:01 So we're going to move into round one. This is our opening statements and the movies in their time. This is where we focus on how these movies were received when they were first released. You each have the option, but not the obligation, to deliver a strictly timed 60-second opening statement. I say again, strictly timed. These are both 91-minute movies fighting it out for supremacy today, and we're aiming for a like degree of concision. Deirdre, would you like to make an opening statement?

17:29 Yes.

17:29 I think that Nightmare on Elm Street had a very dramatic impact out of a combination of playing to some just historic, longstanding human kinds of instincts and experiences. I mean, in many ways, it's in the tradition of nightmares play such a role in horror. Both nightmare scenes are so common in things, but also... Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was dreamed by her, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and they're not portrayed as dreams in the books and the films. So I think it really plays to that how much nightmares and horror go together. But also, it was very timely to 1984. We were getting to know a lot more physiologically about what's going on with dreams and The Vietnam vets were having their recurring nightmares. So there was a

18:26 lot of discussion about nightmares as a problem. And there were a slew of films. Brainstorm was out the year before. Dreamscape was out that year. I certainly think this was the best of what was an obvious trend for that time.

18:41 Thank you, Deirdre. Very persuasive, comprehensive. Jason, do you have an opening statement, sir?

18:45 Sure.

18:46 I think my case for Halloween would rest on sort of three things. One, and I'll try to be brief with each of them. One is influence, that I can't think of a more influential horror film in terms of the formal aspects, the music, the shots, the monster. It eclipses all other films of that era, I would argue, in influence. Second thing, rewatchability. You know, scary movies are a little like jokes, where the second time you tell them or you see them, their impact is incredibly reduced once you lose the element of surprise. Halloween is a huge exception, I'd argue. It's a movie that you can watch over and over again, and the terror sort of against all odds can increase. And the last thing is, I think it manages this impossible combination of being this

19:33 very commercial, crowd-pleasing entertainment, while also, the closer you look at it, being incredibly experimental, I would say even avant-garde movie, primarily because... of Michael Myers, who is in some ways the father of all Yes.

19:40 All right.

20:09 There's the case, because you both ran over by about the same margin, I am being penalized for your very cogent and thoughtful and, well, persuasive opening statements. A little context on these two movies before we begin in earnest. Halloween, shot in 20 days in 1978 on a threadbare, even for the time, budget of $ 300, 000. Producer Erwin Jablans had seen Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is kind of a cool urban Western where he and Deborah Hill first worked together. So after that, they co-write Halloween. Jablans comes to them with a pitch for a thriller about babysitters being stalked. The idea of setting it on a single night was conceived as a cost-saving measure. Later, they get

20:58 the brainstorm of making that one night the spookiest night of the year. The way Hill and Carpenter describe their collaboration is kind of a boringly gendered way, where Hill says she wrote the scenes among the various teenage girls, and then Carpenter writes the stuff where Dr. Sam Loomis, the Donald Pleasance character, is expounding on the nature of evil.

21:16 Nightmare on Elm Street was made for about a million dollars on a 32-day shooting schedule in 1984. Wes Craven has said it was a Los Angeles Times story about a family of Cambodian refugees that inspired his screenplay. He had read about a kid, the son of a doctor... whose family had brought them over to escape Pol Pot and genocide. And the kid said something was stalking him in his sleep. He was afraid he would die if he allowed himself to go to sleep. His father prescribed sleeping pills that he refused to take. The kid kept a coffee pot hidden in his room. When he finally does drift off, his family is awakened by screams coming from his bedroom where they found him dead. He seems to have died of a nightmare. So Craven says he

21:59 read that story in the Los Angeles Times. Everyone he talked to about it said they would absolutely see that movie, but no studio wanted to touch it, so he ends up with New Line, which is just a distribution company at that time, although the success of Elm Street and the franchise that it becomes will change that. So while both these movies were cheap for the time, by this point, by the point of Nightmare on Elm Street, Elm Street is like the hungry young comer, and Halloween, which is a three-deep franchise, is sort of the establishment slasher that maybe...

22:30 needs a kick in the teeth here. I'm going to ask Jason the first scored question of our competition. Jason, the runaway hits of 1978 were Grease, National Lampoon's Animal House, and Superman. So what is Halloween channeling in the zeitgeist of a time going wild for those movies that makes it become such a phenomenon?

22:53 So my answer is going to seem like a dodge, but it's not.

22:57 Dodging is permitted.

22:58 Well, I don't want to dodge because I think... Most horror films, most good horror films, are reflecting the anxieties of its time, intentionally or otherwise. But I would argue that the truly great horror films, and I use this in a very, you know, kind of simple, crude, the ones that really scare people over a long period of time, get at something more primal. something deeper than just fears of Vietnam or gas prices or the Iraq war, which inspired torture porn. And there's really no better example of this from the jump than Halloween. John Carpenter, unlike Wes Craven, who, you know, his early movies, you know, he would later say, uh, were about Vietnam or about these other things, things which

23:40 I approach with some skepticism. But Carpenter really did not intend to make something which was about his moment. And I think it benefits from that long term, that it's a movie that's set in the 70s, but it might as well be in the 50s. It's a movie that is not about any kind of topical political aspect to it.

24:01 It has, I think, more in common with a fairy tale. And The reason for that, I would say, is that the fundamental question that John Carpenter is engaged with is, what's the scariest thing in the world? And the scariest thing in the world is not the internet or a babysitter or this very specific thing. The scariest thing in the world is the unknown. That's his answer rooted in a reading of H.P. Lovecraft. And that's something that was in the air. His college classmate, Dan O'Bannon, who wanted to make Alien, had a similar answer. They both came up, you know, and went to school in the late 60s.

24:43 If anything, not only were they not sort of counterculture... but they were sort of counter-counterculture in a way. And they were real big fans of this disreputable genre of entertainments. And that made them weird at the time. They weren't trying to be Godard. They were trying to reach back to 1950s sci-fi movies and to Twilight Zone, et cetera.

25:03 And out of that creates a character like Michael Myers, who... has unlike, say, I would say like Leatherface, which is a much more specific place in time and has much more specific sort of textual phobias attached to it. Michael Myers is a blank. He has no psychology. He has no backstory. He doesn't move like any monster we've seen before.

25:25 He's an absence in the middle of this very realistic, meticulously established, normal suburban landscape. And because he's so impenetrable, he preserves the sense of the unknown, where in most horror movies, you sort of have the scariest parts are in the setup before you see the monster, the waiting for the boo. And in Halloween, even after you see the monster, you never really are sure what you've seen.

25:55 Ah!

25:57 Ah! Ah!

25:59 Ah!

26:00 So the scariest moments are actually, although there are jump scares in this movie, some of the scariest moments are him just staring and being still. And I think it transcends topicality. It transcends the moment. And it's why there's been so many imitators and why this movie comes back over and over again, because it speaks to much more than just 1978.

26:22 All right.

26:23 Thank you, Jason. Deirdre. The runaway hits of 1984 were Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Beverly Hills Cop. What is it about A Nightmare on Elm Street that makes it such a hit within the time that these are the most popular and beloved films?

26:42 I certainly think that Vietnam was a hugely influential country. thing for Nightmare on Elm Street and very differently than while the Vietnam War was at its peak. It was long enough after that that it was the peak of us becoming aware of all of the problems that the returned Vietnam vets were having integrating into society. And there were all these angry men who'd been done wrong by their society and were not Not getting help, but specifically it was when the concept of post-traumatic nightmares was something really separate from other kinds of childhood nightmares was coming into the fore. And I think that Nightmare on Elm Street deals both with the really traditional childhood nightmares that

27:36 stay with us forever, even if we don't keep having them, and all we were hearing and some people were experiencing of the Vietnam stuff coming back to haunt them.

27:46 Yeah.

27:47 An idea I had looking at this again and just thinking about what transpires in the six years between Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street is now, by Nightmare on Elm Street, we are in the rah-rah Reagan 80s. This movie comes out a week after Reagan is reelected. And this has been discussed a lot, the punishment of teenage sexuality in these movies and things. But That was an electoral issue in the 80s, right? Like the moral majority was a big part of the Reagan coalition. And probably there's much more hand-wringing about that, at least as it's represented by Hollywood in 84 than there was in the 70s.

28:25 You know, is that a piece of the nightmare formula you think, or is that just incidental?

28:30 Yes. Well, I think that people get punished for their sex acts, but even just their sexual thoughts or desires in horror films. It's just a trope that has been there forever and even through the most liberal of times stays there because I think it is sort of deeply rooted in anxieties and guilt around sexuality, whatever society is telling us at the moment. So I think you see it play out very differently in Nightmare on Elm Street than in the more classic horror films where there's clearly this, somebody gets killed because they've had a sexual thought. In this one, the young couple has just had sex very explicitly and gone to sleep before Kruger moves in.

29:19 I knew there was something about you I liked.

29:22 You feel better now, right?

29:24 Tina gets killed right after having.

29:26 Sex with her boyfriend.

29:31 Guys can have nightmares too, you know. You can get a corner on the market or something.

29:36 Tina gets killed right after having sex with her boyfriend.

29:41 Please God.

29:42 This is God.

29:47 So it's much more explicit and it's incorporating that a lot of teen audience want to see this portrayed as a, you know, normal, happy part of teen life. And yet there's still this undercurrent of some kind of guilt or anxiety about it. But it's different, but in a sense, the same theme as in earlier horror stuff.

30:08 Yeah. The Tina death in Nightmare, I think, is the most prolonged and visually spectacular one where we see her flying all around the room. And it's probably the most elaborate visual effect in this low budget movie.

30:20 It is. Actually, I talk about this movie so much with other dream buffs, and I have seen the dream scenes like more than a dozen times each, whereas I think I've only watched the film fully through three times, or maybe one of those wasn't even quite fully through. And when I talk about it with other people, that scene of Tina's death is most people's favorite or scariest because of seeing the perspective of the dream is sort of being brought into waking reality and you see everything that would be happening to her and yet you don't see Freddie. And that's a very powerful effect for a lot of people. I actually find the bathtub scene with Nancy to be both what I would call my favorite and what I think is the most terrifying but that's

31:18 probably a distant second in the polls I've heard but I think it's it's so nightmarish that it's really playing to the same thing as this shower scene in Psycho that it's a place that you're used to being relaxed but you're so vulnerable that if you're at all prone to anxiety you're a little anxious and the the shower scene plays to that because of the curtain and You know, you can't see the rest of the room. But the bathtub is, I mean, so many bodies of water are deep and you can drown in them or sharks can come out of them. And the bathtub is a normally safe one, but as you relax, you're in water and there are all these stories about people drowning in bathtubs, which I think you have to be intoxicated or something

32:13 else to actually do, but some people are afraid they're going to fall asleep in the bath and drown.

32:18 Nancy?

32:21 What, mother?

32:22 Don't fall asleep in there.

32:24 You could drown, you know.

32:25 Oh, for Pete's sakes. It happens all the time. I've heated up some warm milk for you, honey.

32:31 Warm milk? Gross.

32:36 I think somebody who's not under the influence would wake up immediately as air is getting into their nostrils. Anyway, I think it's just this, like, fear of drowning or fear of things grabbing you out of water. And so that setup that it's a bathtub and yet, as in a dream, it can suddenly become a lake or a, you know, or a huge cavity filled with water that can suck you down. I just find that so... powerful to sort of how any safe place can become scary.

33:10 That's my favorite scene.

33:11 I know I'm supposed to be arguing with Deidre, but I completely agree and think that is also the scariest scene and is the reason I do not take baths.

33:21 Not since 1970, whenever.

33:24 All right.

33:24 Other question for round one. This is more granular and specific than the previous. Now, even though, as we've said, these were both very low budget films, They still needed a name, even if it was just a name familiar to genre buffs, to help them get the financing that they needed. In Halloween, they pursue hammer horror vets Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of which turn them down for the role of Dr. Loomis. So they get Donald Pleasence, who's a pretty familiar face. Many, many credits, but he's in The Great Escape. He plays Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, the Bond movie. Now, In Nightmare on Elm Street, their quote-unquote name actor is John Saxon, who plays Police Lieutenant Donald Thompson. He had been a teen heartthrob. He

34:07 had already played lots of cops, including in the slasher Black Christmas. So he's a face and a name that genre fans would know.

34:15 Jason.

34:16 Can you argue that Donald Pleasance is bringing more to Halloween than John Saxon is to A Nightmare on Elm Street?

34:23 Yes, I think it's an easy argument. I mean, Donald Pleasance is a spectacular actor and he has a light Cushing and Christopher Lee who really regretted not taking this role. He both has this combination of playing in the genre and also having a lot of stage experience. He has a kind of gravitas and a commitment that really plays a key role in what could be a really silly series of scenes. There's not a lot of dialogue in this movie, but there's a couple key monologues. And he has probably the most important one where he is defining Michael Myers as evil. He has one line reading of the line.

35:01 My DSM code for this patient is evil. Exactly.

35:04 He's like, I mean, he's a doctor of some sorts, but he functions like the detective in this movie, the person chasing. But he has one line where he says, and you know, the whole movie, you want to know, what's the deal with Michael Myers? I can't figure him out. So every word about him from this guy who's known him since he was six, you're paying close attention to.

35:23 And he has one line where he describes his eyes.

35:25 And he says, I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, Emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes.

35:40 The devil's eyes. And he delivers it with this incredible mixture of theatricality and gravity that you can imagine, you know, Peter Cushing had or Christopher Lee has. But what he adds, there's a kind of offhandedness to it. that makes it more grounded. Like, of course, he's got the blackest eyes and devil's eyes. There's something a little ridiculous about it, but he's not winking at the camera. And it really is a key moment in the movie. And it's the same thing where, you know, he's completely committed to this movie.

36:17 And in a lot of ways, the story of Halloween and slashers in general is the story of shifting your point of view from monster slasher to victim. Back to Monster. And you see that with the camera work in both these movies. But what you find at the end of this movie, it puts you in the point of view of Dr.

36:36 Loomis.

36:37 And I don't know if there's spoilers here for a movie this old, but you have to feel his desperation. And for this creature who's neither supernatural and neither real... And he really evokes that as both something that is desperate, but also terrifying.

36:54 I mean, I think if only for the fact that just three years after Jaws giving a speech that is so close to the Robert Shaw Indianapolis, you know, black eyes like a doll's eyes talking about the shark that, you know, the. Pleasance speech lives in your mind as a separate thing.

37:08 Let me ask you one other point. One other point that where they have in common, Shaw from Jaws and Donald Pleasance, they both are veterans of the stage work of Harold Pinter. And I think that comes through. Pinter is about the menace of the pause. And he is an unlikely influence on this whole generation of horror directors.

37:31 They all said as much. And I think you see a lot of Pinter performance in Loomis' character.

37:38 Yes.

37:39 For listeners who want to hear more about the influence of Pinter on 70s horror, Jason writes about it at length with great insight in Shock Value, his book, which I'm happy to plug, having read it twice.

37:50 All right.

37:51 Deirdre, John Saxon, certainly a handsome man. What's he bringing to A Nightmare on Elm Street that adds value?

37:59 Well, I think I'm partially going to dodge this question because I think he's a very good actor and I think he is doing an excellent acting job in that, but I don't think in terms of the script that he has the most juicy part. He is basically, I think, the stand-in for the normal, rational, waking world. He's the nice guy who means well and and does well when things are operating logically. But in this crazy, nightmarish dream thing, he's not getting what Freddie is. He's not getting what Nancy is trying to tell him she's experiencing. So I think he's kind of the straight man for some of the other characters. And I think it's how well Freddie is portrayed as just terrifying at times, but as we

38:57 were discussing earlier, how humor and terror can combine, that he's really good at flipping from that subtly over-the-top saying something that's so extreme. It's a funny, scary moment, and then just being sheer terrifying at other times. And even though Nancy's part with the lesser actress could kind of be a cliche of the young, vulnerable teenage girl who the monster is coming after for sexual reasons. I think that she plays it very subtly in all this confusion between what's real and waking versus dreaming. So I think it's some of the other characters that Carrying it. And then also I wanted to mention, I think the series in general is more known not for casting people who are already major actors, but Johnny Depp is playing this

39:52 only medium-sized role as the boyfriend. And he's already got that sort of punky teenage, even though he was 20 when he made it, anti-hero character. thing going on really well. And some of the sequels had like the first main performance by Patricia Arquette was.

40:13 In a sequel.

40:14 Yeah.

40:15 So I'm glad you mentioned Heather Langenkamp's performances as Nancy there, because I'm ducking the obvious question here, asking about the Halloween as the launchpad for Jamie Lee Curtis, because Obviously, she goes on to have a much more varied and notable career outside of horror than Langenkamp does. And, you know, we all know there are factors other than talent and work ethic and whatever that go into being a success in Hollywood. So it just felt like it was not a fair question to ask. All right. So as we come to the end of round one, I have a tie game here so far. Jason, I gave you a full three points for your response about how Michael Myers, as a more primal representative of the unknown, you know,

41:00 rather than some specific representation of the zeitgeist, was very persuasive. Deirdre, I gave you full points for the significance of Tina's very explicit death.

41:11 For dodging the question.

41:12 Yes. Well, oh, absolutely. No, the politician's instinct to answer the question you are prepared to answer versus the one you have been asked is an absolutely welcome tactic here, which you also kind of did to bring in other actors besides John Saxon in the second question, which is why I gave you full points for that, because, you know, you got to play the game. So that's how we ended up with a score of six to six at the end of round one. Suspense.

41:40 It's a barn burner.

41:41 That's right. Okay, so moving into round two, the movies in our time, considering what these films have come to represent in the more than four decades since they were new. Deirdre. So as we mentioned earlier, Nightmare on Elm Street is expounding from this Los Angeles Times story, a Cambodian refugee haunted by a dream boogeyman being afraid to go to sleep.

42:16 So the film brings in this idea that Fred Krueger's victims are possibly sharing dreams or at least describing similar nightmares to one another. To what extent, if at all, does The Nightmare on Elm Street reflect the science as it stood in 1984 or as it stands now of dreams and the subconscious?

42:36 Well, about your specific that they're sharing dreams when they apparently haven't even heard about Freddy Krueger before. Some of my psychic believer dream colleagues would think that that's accurate to dreams. I think it's coincidental when that happens. But you may or may not know this, but the Hamang Nightmare Death Syndrome among Cambodians is an actual illness. They have found a gene that predisposes you to this now.

43:15 And I remember one family's case getting more attention in the media for some reason. But there were also instances where groups of recent young Cambodian men were like sleeping in sleeping bags on church basement floors where they were being given temporary housing. And there were accounts of like third of them having a nightmare on the same night when they were sleeping in this new place and one would end up dying and the rest would just have a terrible nightmare. It was unlike in this movie, they weren't having the same nightmare, but they were having a really dramatic rate. And clearly some of that was they were coming from a sort of traumatic setting. They were in a brand new country where they didn't speak much

44:08 of the language, and they were in temporary housing, and so everything that would just give you more nightmares anyway. But there was a very unusual rate of young men dying in their sleep who often had been screaming and thrashing just before that and or had been reporting really terrible nightmares that were not lifelong, but that had begun, at least in their dramatic form, a matter of days to weeks earlier. And they really were dying in their sleep from hyperarousal. And there's a gene that makes this more likely. And it's in the Cambodian population and the Hamang specifically. And they now can give you some meds that kind of the same things that help Public speaking phobia helped this. But it's on set. It's much more

45:07 common in men. It's on set is teen years. Adolescence seems to have something to do with setting it off. And back in Cambodia, there are all these stories about what causes it. There's a goddess who, in some versions, kills you just for having bad sexual thoughts about women. But in other cases... If you're married, she kills you if you've been unfaithful to your wife. And it's a little bit like you've probably heard of that one where men in another culture are afraid that their penis is shrinking up into their body and will even tie it to the bedpost. And that one does not have a physiologic basis. But Hamang Nightmare Syndrome is... Is a thing.

45:56 And we just had a wave of Hmong refugees landing in the U.S. at that time. So it's very accurate to that, except they have nightmares that are not all about a guy with claw nails.

46:11 Anything.

46:12 Thank God. I mean, when someone expires in a dream, if there is a commonality that you know about from this, I mean, is it the brain? Is it the heart?

46:22 Is it like.

46:23 physically, what happens in response to this emotional or subconscious overstimuli?

46:29 They didn't have these guys in a sleep lab. I think somebody did that back in Cambodia many years later. And that at least some of these episodes that got the heart rate up incredibly were in rapid eye movement sleep. But in general, cardiac deaths out of sleep are actually more likely in something called night terrors, which is happening in non-REM sleep. And it either has no content associated with it or there's just a scary image. And just like nightmares, it's more common in kids and tends to diminish.

47:05 But the highest heart rates ever recorded in normals who didn't die are out of the night terror thing that happens. It's really different from a nightmare. And the kids wake up screaming. And then they roll over and go back to sleep and don't remember it the next morning, unlike like staying up hours, not able to go to sleep out of a nightmare. And it's the parents that are traumatized by it. So at least the initial... Speculation by sleep researchers was that more of the deaths were probably happening in a night terror, non-REM sleep state, because that's known for getting the cardiac system even more riled up than REM sleep.

47:45 Okay. So I see this as a major strength of A Nightmare on Elm Street, that we've wound an enduring fiction out of a real-life, well-documented, if not fully understood fiction. phenomenon so let's return to the premise of jason's halloween review from 2018 and also you know something writes about quite a bit in in shock value that that the sort of you know absence of a specific tie the tabula rasa of uh michael myers is what what makes him such a enduring villain jason make the case that halloween is the more influential of these films.

48:25 Well, I think, I guess I'll look at it two ways. One, I think Halloween is, it's not the first movie with a horror movie about a killer with a mask. Texas Chainsaw Massacre precedes it by a couple of years.

48:36 And why is he not called Shatner Face? I mean, Leatherface is such a good creeper name.

48:41 You're bringing up a key point of it, which is that originally they were going to get a clown mask. And then they said, you know, that's too specific and a little cliche. Let's just get whatever's at the store. And they had some Star Trek fans in that area. And they got a William Shatner face and they painted it to make it blank. Shatner face would be terrifying.

49:02 I am drinking from a Star Trek mug as we record this. Let the listeners know.

49:06 Donald Pleasence is doing some Shatner-like acting, I think you could say, in the movie. But, you know, simply the entire 80s explosion of slasher genre that you've been talking about is obviously all traced- to Halloween. There's three major franchises, the biggest franchises that everyone knew back then, if you mentioned the one name, Michael, Freddy, and... Jason.

49:31 Referring to Jason Zinnemann, of course, the then and now comedy critic.

49:35 You could guess what second graders, what avenue they used to make fun of me back in the day. So that meant something to me. But Michael was obviously first. And I think one way to look at the influence is this. Those are the three franchises that have been countless sequels and remakes. Friday the 13th is explicitly a Xerox of Halloween. The people who made it said as much. Now, I think it misunderstands some of what makes Halloween great.

50:03 So two-thirds of the big three completely come from John Carpenter's head, right? Now, the third, which is Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street, which I think is, you know, in a lot of ways, Robert Englund's is fascinating and important. I'm sort of arguing the opposite case. I'm arguing Deidre's case here, which is that for a long while, horror films had these charismatic monsters. They were all about the actors playing them. And then they weren't about the actors, you know, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and then with the Hammer films, Cushing and Lee. And that kind of ended in the 70s for the most part. And Robert Englund is a real exception. He has an incredible charisma as a performer. And I think distinguishes that franchise from the

50:50 other two. That said, I'd argue that Nightmare on Elm Street isn't even the most influential Wes Craven franchise. That would be Scream. Hello.

51:00 Why don't you want to talk to me?

51:03 Who is this? You tell me your name, I'll tell you mine. I don't think so.

51:10 What's that noise?

51:11 Popcorn.

51:12 Scream, which is a movie where if we were to argue the importance of Scream, it would be that it introduced this kind of meta knowingness to the horror genre.

51:21 You like scary movies?

51:23 Uh-huh.

51:24 What's your favorite scary movie?

51:27 Halloween. You know, the one with the guy in the white mask who walks around and stalks babysitters?

51:33 Yeah.

51:34 What's yours? Nightmare on Elm Street.

51:40 Yeah, Freddy Krueger.

51:45 Two points about this. Halloween, I think, already has that. Halloween is as much about watching movies, both in the actual text of the movie. You see Laurie Strode watching the thing from Another World in it, but also in the way that Michael Byers is placed on the screen. He's often almost like one of the Mystery Science Theater 2000 characters, like in the lower end of the screen, looking at things. His terror is often as a voyeur.

52:11 The first image is him as... moving around and you see his point of view and then you often just see him looking. It's a very self-aware movie in the way that Scream is. Secondly, the content of Scream is about breaking down the rules of a horror film. And if you look at what movies the characters focus on mostly in that first one, it's Halloween. There are a ton of horror movies made before Scream, but if you were just watching Scream, you'd think that Halloween is the most influential. So those two things give you a real sense of how large Halloween looms over it. I'll just say one other point for Halloween, which is sort of dumb but underappreciated, which is the title. It's an incredible...

52:52 It's one of those titles where you're like, how come no one had used this before? Like, even if Halloween wasn't a good movie, I think it would be a success because of the title. And since Halloween... There's been a ton of movies titled holidays, right? And Eli Roth famously parodied this in the trailer for Death Notice when he did a movie, a slasher movie called Thanksgiving, right?

53:14 So there is something about, even though the movie is not really about, at least the original is not much about Halloween outside of, you know, where the... some of it's set, but the title is also tremendously influential. So you have the, the title is influential. The shots are influential. The shaky point of view camera shot, you see not only in countless movies, but you see in political advertisements, you see all over the place. The music is arguably more influential than anything to horror movies right now. John Carpenter synthesizer is first of all, terrifying. And I think distinct from like, Psycho and Jaws, which also have wonderful music, which tell you something terrible is coming. The Halloween synthesizer

53:58 tells you something is never going away. And that synthesizer shows up in all kinds of movies today. And that's not even getting to, obviously, the mask and the teenagers, etc. So, yeah, I think that as great as Nightmare on Elm Street is, I think that in terms of imitation, you don't see it as much as you do for Halloween.

54:16 I certainly take your point about the title. Certainly Gary Marshall's New Year's Eve, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day. None of these middling romantic comedies could have been possible without John Carpenter's innovation. No, I mean, the fact that this was at one point going to be the babysitter murders, right, or something to that effect.

54:39 Yeah.

54:40 I know one of the extras on the Halloween, whichever edition you get when you buy the most recent 4K. And I mean, some of the special features on it were clearly created for earlier editions. But not Yablans, the producer, but Mustafa, blanking on his last name, the money man.

54:57 Yeah.

54:57 I mean, they cut to a clip of him saying like, I thought the word babysitter was good because everyone in America knows a babysitter.

55:05 Exactly.

55:06 It really is an all-timer for, like, there's no hidden meaning to anything. Everything about the creation of Halloween is the most literal kind of explanation you might imagine.

55:19 Well, there's other babysitter horror films, right? But I do think that the fact it's Halloween and not the babysitter murders makes a big difference commercially.

55:29 I don't know. Certainly, my mom would have been much more likely to see it if it had the word babysitter in.

55:34 It, I think.

55:35 Okay.

55:36 So for our other movies in our time question, I want to connect both of these to Psycho, which I think we can accept as the original slasher. It is the same year as The Archer's Peeping Tom, right? But that was not a movie that made a big impact in the United States, certainly not in 1960. So I'm going to Unless, Jason, as our horror expert, you object, I'm going to treat Psycho as sort of the ground zero.

56:01 It's a fool's errand to battle over this question. Psycho, you can't go wrong.

56:07 Okay. So just for our purposes here, Deirdre, I'll throw this one back to you. Nightmare on Elm Street borrows from Psycho the wrong footing about which character will be our main protagonist, right? As you've said, we spend... 20 minutes getting to know Tina, and then she is brutally, horrifically killed a third of the way through a movie that's only 91 minutes long. Is that lineage to Psycho something that you think the movie does deliberately and memorably?

56:39 I've never read anything where Craven addresses that, but that would be my assumption. I mean, he's a big fan of Psycho, so I would think so, but I don't. I don't know for sure. But I wanted to push back at Jason on the best title idea. I think Halloween is a very good title. It conjures up scary things, and especially childhood scary things that resonate with us more.

57:10 But I would argue that it's a little broad. It could be the title of many other It happened not to be. And I do think that's part of why Nightmare on Elm Street was not just called Nightmare because there are at least two previous films that at least in their time had.

57:31 There were four of them released in 1981.

57:33 Named Nightmare?

57:35 I'm kidding.

57:38 There actually could be four or five or six or whatever. But there are two that were really sort of big deals in their time, the first of which being this British one, which isn't even mainly about nightmares. It's about false awakenings where this guy wakes up, gets invited to this party, goes off to it. At first, it's nice.

57:57 Horrible things start happening. And then he's back in his room and wakes up and gets an invitation to the party. And But that's like in the 1940s or something. Anyway, nightmare had been used enough that I think it would not have been a great choice on its own. But nightmare is a word that I would argue carries even more sort of primal terror something. And then I think the reason for Nightmare on Elm Street lies in how bland the rest of the title is. Elm Street just sounds like the typical suburban street in that kind of town that lots of us grew up in, but that is being portrayed in the film. And I think it serves to put most of the emphasis on Nightmare, and yet You know, this primal thing is coming to your

58:50 little suburban town. So I think it's a brilliant combination of the powerful word and then this hint that it's coming to your American community.

59:03 Okay.

59:03 So returning the psycho lineage point to Jason, Deborah Hill is apparently the person in the center. who points out that Jamie Lee Curtis is the then 19-year-old daughter of Janet Leigh, the star of Psycho. They had already named Dr. Loomis in their script after Sam Loomis, the boyfriend of the Janet Leigh character from Psycho. Certainly, Curtis's subsequent career showed us that she had the chops. She wasn't just a famous name. But do you feel like her presence in Halloween makes this the true heir to what Psycho began?

59:39 That's a good question. I think it's definitely a powerful bit of casting that nobody would have missed at the time. And you're right. It turned out she's a fantastic actress, and she gives one of the great Final Girl performances. And it stands on its own. You know, Carpenter, when he shot Halloween, they had the number system for how terrified she should be at each different moment. And she was as good at the threes as she was at the sevens, or the nines, or the tens. And the art of being a screen queen is tricky and requires nuance, more nuance than people give credit for. And Jamie Lee Curtis, I think, is a perfect example. She's as much a part of the rhythm. Her level of fear is as much part of the rhythm of this movie as John

1:00:29 Carpenter's synthesizer. But, as you point out, there's no way you cast Jamie Lee Curtis if you're instantly paying homage to the most famous and revered horror film for a genre that the people who made these movies, very much including Carpenter and Craven, felt were disreputable and got no respect.

1:00:50 I will say, though, I am of the opinion that a lot of these filmmakers were as much... reacting to Hitchcock as paying homage to him. And an artist who had a big influence on both of these movies is Roman Polanski. If you look, say, at some of the most memorable, surreal imagery in Nightmare on Elm Street, like the hands going through the walls... That's a direct quote of repulsion. And even if you look at, you know, which also has probably the most famous of a jump scare that has one of the biggest genre jump scares that there is, which is the famous, you see something in the mirror in the bathroom and the mirror shifts a little bit and you see something else that's also in a repulsion and you see a spin on that

1:01:33 in Halloween. So in a way, I would say the movies are for sure in conversation with Psycho. in both the casting and, as you pointed out, in terms of killing off the main character early on. But I think in terms of the shots, which have really lived on, their origins are kind of in a weirder, less Hollywood style.

1:01:54 lower budget tradition. You know, the Halloween shaky camera is not something that you would see. It doesn't instantly bring to mind Hitchcock, although manipulating point of view does. But Polanski was also doing that. One of the cool things about the horror genre is that the hardcore fan base is very familiar with the history of the genre. So the movie, these, both these movies are constantly in conversation with the past. And I mean, I'll say just one of the things that I find terrifying about Nightmare on Elm Street is the idea of you're going to die if you fall asleep and there's no getting around falling asleep.

1:02:29 We all have to, we all get tired and we've all been in situations where we're fighting falling asleep. I've done it when I've been reviewing plays before. I'm sure you have too, Chris.

1:02:37 Yeah.

1:02:38 It's a capital sin to fall asleep during a play you're reviewing, but when you're getting exhausted, you're fighting it. You know exactly what they feel like in Nightmare on Elm Street. But only a few years earlier, Invasion of the Body Snatchers employed that same device.

1:02:52 I'm tired.

1:02:53 Stand up. Now walk around.

1:02:55 I'm dry.

1:02:55 I'm very dry.

1:02:56 I'll get you something to drink.

1:02:57 Just don't fall asleep.

1:02:59 Which is, if you fell asleep, you're going to turn into one of these body snatchers. So that's also something that I thought about seeing that movie. That is funny.

1:03:06 That is the second episode in a row in which the 1978 invasion of the Body Snatchers has come up on this show. That's the one you're referring to, right? It's the Philip Kaufman. Oh, yeah.

1:03:16 That's the one I mean. That's the one I mean.

1:03:17 And it's so interesting that your associations are to the waking. It would be such an embarrassment to fall asleep when you're in a film theater or at a play.

1:03:28 Whereas I.

1:03:31 I think of that theme as, again, playing to early childhood. So many children hear that someone has died in their sleep and somehow that you can die in your sleep, you know, gets imprinted on their consciousness. And I don't, I mean, there must be some adult somewhere in the world that worries about falling asleep and they'll die. But children moderately commonly do. I think there are just so many things in Nightmare on Elm Street that play to these very primal childhood fears about sleep and dreams.

1:04:02 It's absolutely why I did not see that film until I was an adult, because in the 80s, I wasn't going near it. I was absolutely too scared. No, I love the detail you mentioned, Jason, about Carpenter having sort of a one to 10 point system for Jamie Lee Curtis about how scared she is in any given scene, because it's always... If you're a cinephile or a theater person, you know, the idea of like what a director actually does is a question that always seems to live in your mind, especially if you're, you know, contrasting the role of a film director with a theater director. But the instructing the actors part, you know, it's always like I always feel like every time Carrie Fisher tells her that George Lucas, you know, would just say like faster when

1:04:42 he wanted a different line reading, you know, and that was always used as like this guy doesn't have any bedside manner. He doesn't know how to talk to actors. He's just a tech guy. But I think just a real value of studying low-budget films like these is it does kind of strike the pretension away, right? And just show you in a very nuts and bolts. You've got 20 days. Yeah, yeah. You know, you've got to get your pages done for the day.

1:05:05 Hitchcock is famous for treating his actors like, you know, I think he said cattle. So I think there is... And some here, to be fair, I imagine he wouldn't treat Donald Pleasance quite the same way, but there are some actors who appreciate more direction.

1:05:20 Yeah, sure. Again, for much more detail about how Brian De Palma, for one, treats actors, I refer you to Jason's book, Shock Value.

1:05:29 All right.

1:05:29 Well, as we come to the end of round two here, for Jason, I have three points in response to the first question about suggesting that Scream is iterating more successfully some of the ideas that Wes Craven introduced in the Nightmare series. Full points for Deirdre for bringing us back to some of the more Common medical phenomenon noted among refugees that was extrapolated in Nightmare on Elm Street. I also awarded Deirdre the full three points for her second question for her redirection, interrogating the title Halloween. And then finally to Jason, I also have three points for bringing in the detail about the point system, which means that at the end of round two, we still have a tie game. We have a 12 to 12 nail binder.

1:06:22 As we move into round three, the movies for all time, considering how they echo through eternity, I think this is an appropriate place for maybe some contextual stuff about what these two films did to the careers or did for the careers of John Carpenter and Wes Craven. Jason talked about the origins of Halloween and Carpenter's earlier association with Dan O'Bannon and how these guys really... We're against the idea of genre films needing any kind of artistic upscaling or, you know, they liked genre stuff being genre stuff. Please stop me if I'm paraphrasing you inaccurately, Jason. But a detail that I love about this is that the only Oscar attention that either John Carpenter or Wes Craven will

1:07:10 ever get are acting nominations that actors get in their films outside of their most famous genre for Starman. John Carpenter's 1984 sci-fi romantic drama with Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen that comes out a month after A Nightmare on Elm Street. Jeff Bridges will get an acting nomination. This is a movie that gets fond reviews, but it's not a financial success. And coming on the heels of The Thing, which was another, you know, expensive in-its-time bomb for John Carpenter, these dual financial failures, whoever good the movies are, kind of...

1:07:46 seal John Carpenter's fate. He's going to stay in low-budget world for the rest of his career now. One of Meryl Streep's acting nominations comes for Wes Craven's Music of the Heart, his drama. So at some point, both of these directors are at least trying to.

1:08:01 I forgot she got a nomination for that. That's crazy.

1:08:04 Yeah, right? I mean, but they're attempting to get respectable. They're attempting to make something that appeals to a different audience. My other thought about this is that then the month before A Nightmare on Elm Street comes out in 1984, we have The Terminator, which takes the slasher tropes, but brings them into a sci-fi setting and action movie gunplay setting, which was another disreputable 80s genre that was really gathering steam at that point. And You know, James Cameron is the one who will eventually win a directing Oscar for a movie that's outside of sci-fi or horror or whatever.

1:08:44 I mean, he's not the only one. Obviously, Jonathan Demme and, you know, Martin Scorsese, lots of people who had worked for Corman, you know, will go on to become A-list, venerated, revered directors. But I don't know, this sort of ambivalent relationship towards breaking out of the horror audience. is kind of an interesting element of these directors' careers to consider.

1:09:04 Well, just two quick points. One, I think you're right. It's particularly interesting now because now we're in the opposite. Like, horror gets so much respect now. Not only are there prestige horror films, but... You know, I would say that the case against horror getting its respect is probably strongest in acting. That now the actress Indy Navarrete is in the discussion for getting an Oscar nomination for Obsession. That would have been unthinkable in the 70s where, like, Sissy Spacek should have definitely gotten a nomination for Carrie. But to your other point, so back then, both these filmmakers are coming out of a time in which the assumption was your parents were going to be embarrassed that you

1:09:41 were making horror films. that Carpenter famously said making a horror film was not much different than making porn. But it was the beginning of this shift. I would say one other point, you bring up Terminator, and I think one important point about the distinction between these two movies, and really a distinction between the 70s and the 80s, is that when you ask somebody about the Terminator, what's a line from the Terminator that you know, right? It's going to be probably... I'll be back, right? It's the age of these 80s catchphrase slow. And all of the action, all the genre heroes have these quips. And it's usually Arnold is usually the one who people point to. He's parodying The Simpsons, et cetera. But I would say just

1:10:24 as important is Freddy Krueger. That Freddy Krueger, it was unheard of to have the slasher killer have these kind of quips. And I would put a direct line between The Terminator and to Nightmare on Elm Street. Now, the quips got more common as the series went on, but you still see a germ of it in the early one.

1:10:44 Yeah, I think these are God is in the first one.

1:10:48 Oh, yeah.

1:10:49 When she's starting to pray and he.

1:10:51 And he cuts, what about when he cuts his fingers off?

1:10:54 Uh-huh.

1:10:54 That's kind of a little weird joke.

1:10:56 Jason, I'm feeling compelled to stick up for Rainer Wolfcastle here. I think your suggestion that he's nothing more than a Schwarzenegger parody is reductive. Let's give Mr. Wolfcastle his flowers, please.

1:11:07 That's fair. That's fair. I'm glad. I'm glad to hear it. Apologies to him.

1:11:13 All right. So, well, I'll turn this one back to Deirdre. You know, Jason already brought this up, but certainly one of the things that Halloween contributed to the broader culture is that John Carpenter score, which I would have recognized as the Halloween theme for decades before I ever saw this movie. Because, again, I was way too scared to watch any of these in my formative years. I was a dumb kid who did not get camp at all.

1:11:37 So I came to these as an adult, but I knew that music. I knew that Carpenter's habit of scoring his own films was very unique. So my question, Deirdre, is there a single element that you can extract from A Nightmare on Elm Street, whether it's Freddie's costume or Freddie's quips or his makeup design or anything that you would argue is as distinct and recognizable in isolation as that Carpenter Halloween score?

1:12:05 Well, I'm not sure. I think this is essential, but it's just something that strikes me as very subtly perceptive on his part. I'm not even sure how much was conscious, but you were just mentioning the music in Halloween, and Jason was mentioning Scream Queens as a big part of horror and slasher films, and although there's mood music and there's some screaming in Nightmare on Elm Street, I think that he damped that down quite a bit because one thing about dreams is very few people report any auditory soundtrack to their dreams. Their dreams are just super visual.

1:12:48 There's even more visually vivid stuff going on than typically when we're awake even. But even when you're dreaming, you're having a conversation with someone, if you really ask the person, did you hear their voice? Well, no, I'm not even sure their lips were moving. It was kind of more telepathic, people will say. And normally they're screaming and screaming in the scariest scenes in films. And if you notice in Nightmare on Elm Street, there is some screaming, but it is usually in a scene where It's at first being taken for waking reality and only becomes dreamy and odd a little later that the menaced female character will be screaming as Freddy approaches. And then there's even more screaming

1:13:38 by anyone who's not the dreamer but is watching the person get these gash marks on them. And they keep the actual dreamer experience more quiet. There's sometimes some subtle music.

1:13:50 He doesn't.

1:13:51 It would be bolder to have the soundtrack go silent when you're in a dream. I think that would actually be even more powerful, maybe. So the lack of using some of the usual tropes of the scary noise all the time and the shrieking and shrieking when you're in the dream world, I think was a very good effect that people might not consciously register, but that's something that's making it so convincingly dreamlike.

1:14:19 I'll just add one thing, because Deidre has spoken a couple times about the difference between how children dream and adults dream, which is really interesting. And I'm a big believer that sort of your most formative fears start in childhood. So that's really... relevant to it. And to me, the equivalent of the Halloween synth theme song in Nightmare would be the children doing the kind of nursery rhyme when they're jumping rope. One, two, Freddy's coming for you. That was terrifying for this kind of reason that she's pointing out about, I think, that you feel it deeper and shot at juxtaposing this childhood sound with This very adult violence of somebody who, by the way, Freddie is a killer of children, specifically, is really effective and horrifying.

1:15:15 I mean, that's exactly the way I was going to turn that question back to you, Jason, was to bring up the doggerel that, again, like I remembered hearing on the playground, one, two, Freddie's coming. Like, I don't know who Freddie is. That's still scary. That's still scary. Haunting. And I had, I mean, I even assumed that that was some kind of, you know, traditional pass down through the generation. But Charles Bernstein, I think, is the composer for Nightmare on Elm Street, who I thought they said the extras that he actually came up with that. So if that's right, I mean, yeah, that's certainly in isolation, I think, is as frightening as that Carpenter musical theme.

1:15:58 This is... Just making it harder and harder for the judge to find a point of contention on which to name a victor here. All right. Well, let me ask you both this one. Haddonfield, Illinois is imaginary. We don't know where Elm Street is meant to be. But Wes Craven has said that he chose Genesee Street in West Hollywood as a filming location because it looked like the Midwest.

1:16:22 I'll start with you, Deirdre. What do we make of the fact that both of these Los Angeles shot movies are representing themselves as the heartland?

1:16:30 I think that's a powerful horror trope that we're sort of in this bland middle America if it's a U.S. film, but just kind of horror coming to a quiet little sleepy town that we think of as safe. I mean, even Frankenstein is raging through the countryside and, you know, in small So I think that that's more powerful, like I said about just the title of the street, that these are conventional. And Jason pointing out that Freddie's originally a killer of children as the background, I suspect that the only reason he wasn't a killer of children as opposed to teens, young people, in this was that you just couldn't make as explicit a film about a guy.

1:17:20 slashing children or something, that that's got to be his backstory, but that it is kind of that fear from childhood. One point I'd like to put in for Nightmare on Elm Street as the ultimate slasher film is that I think you're right that the genre kind of goes back to Psycho. And Psycho and many of the subsequent incarnations have just been a really vicious guy or monster with a knife who's going to stab you with this one knife.

1:17:52 And I think Texas Chainsaw Massacre did a good try at overdoing the knife as this giant chainsaw coming at you. But I think the ultimate slashing instrument is these long metal claws that you can Slash people in 10 places at once. I think it's the literally the ultimate slasher is Freddy Krueger.

1:18:18 I mean, we see Freddy making the finger dives in the opening sequence of A Nightmare on Elm Street. That's one where I, you know, it's so primal and frightening that it occurs to me only later. It's like, wait, who's? Whose perspective am I in? You know, is this like whose reality am I seeing here? Am I in Freddie's mind?

1:18:36 Is Tina dreaming about Freddie?

1:18:38 I'm thinking you're in one of those dreams that several characters share, but I'm not sure. They're not very explicit about that.

1:18:45 Well, to the Midwestern point, one of the things that several characters in the early sequence of the film. where they're talking about shared dreams or, well, not necessarily shared, but all having had nightmares, one of them says, well, maybe there's going to be an earthquake or something. And I'm thinking, wait, aren't we supposed to be in the Midwest? Like, are there a lot of earthquakes in Ohio or Missouri? Yeah.

1:19:08 Yeah, no, I think it's a kind of random thing to play to dreams foretelling the future, especially bad things. But yeah, I wouldn't defend that choice as the specific action in that.

1:19:19 All right. Jason, anything to say about the idyllic, maybe, Midwest or prototypical Midwest of Haddonfield?

1:19:26 I mean, I think that both these directors understood that If you're going to deal with really outlandish material, supernatural material, monstrous material, If you want it to have a really big impact, you have to carefully, meticulously set up the realism at the start. If you just begin with it. Now, other filmmakers have shown that you don't need to do that.

1:19:53 But I think that Halloween really cares about not just getting the suburban landscape right, although they make a few mistakes, like you can see a palm tree in the background at one point.

1:20:03 Right.

1:20:05 But also the dialogue among the girls, I think, is actually quite well done. Better than a lot of subsequent versions. Debra Hill did do a great job in capturing, I think, these like spunky, funny, distinct characters in a very short amount of time. I would say similar to Black Christmas also has it. I feel like a lot of those 80s slasher films had kind of cookie cutter victims who had no personality. And nothing to distinguish. Their role was to get killed. And the art of the movie was about the theatricality of which they were killed. And you heard that from fans that movies were judged by the kills.

1:20:44 Right.

1:20:45 And I think Carpenter, even though I do think that Michael Myers is this like really radical new kind of monster. He's a traditionalist in this sense, in the way that he's crafting these supporting characters. He's not just moving from kill to kill. Now, that said, I would say one other thing about if you look at the kills, you know, Dieter points out rightly that the knife hands of Freddy are terrifying and a great innovation in the genre. The way that Michael Myers' kills escalate in Halloween is... is both tremendously effective and also, I should say, absurd. Like, they get more and more elaborate. Like, Michael, if you...

1:21:26 I always wanted to see.

1:21:27 A version of the movie where he's like... When he brings in the tombstone, like when he dresses the room with his previous victims, and here's a tombstone... Only Hannibal Lecter put more set direction into his kills.

1:21:38 He is a film director. He is a set designer. That's why the movies, to me, Halloween is a movie about movies. And it begins... enveloping you in this realism. And then once you're on board, it doesn't matter that a lot of this doesn't make sense. The relationship between realism and surrealism in Nightmare on Elm Street, I think, is different. It is more wrapped up in dream logic and blurring of dreams and the real world. But that's not a criticism. To me, actually, I think one, if I was to make an argument in favor of Halloween as opposed to Nightmare, is that because Nightmare is rooted in dreamlike imagery... It leans on special effects in a way that Halloween does not. You have the extending arms

1:22:25 of Freddy. Even the costumes, the way he runs around. Some of it doesn't age as well, I would argue, as some of it because the special effects would be different now. But also you just see this goofy guy moving around more than with Michael Myers, which is just a human being in a jumpsuit. Then and now requires nothing else. If you didn't find that scary back then, you're not going to find it now, but it doesn't age at all.

1:22:51 There is a great little detail in one of those extras where Deborah Hill says that they've, you know, for whatever reason, the guy who was the body of Michael Myers is He wasn't available or something. So they tried to do a shot where Deborah Hill was just standing in for Michael Myers. And she's like, there was no way we could possibly angle it or frame it or position the camera so that the body dimensions worked out.

1:23:12 Like you could just always tell it was this much smaller woman wearing the Shatner mask.

1:23:16 I definitely think they're scary in sort of different ways that don't map on to more or less necessarily that Halloween is a little more waking world you hear that there are these horrible killers out there to get you and it's sort of an exaggeration of that whereas i definitely think of probably craven in general but certainly the nightmare on elm street series as as tied to less logical things and again maybe even more so the childhood fears i associate cronenberg with out of that tradition i want you max I thought Jason's point about how some of his effects are out of repulsion is also true.

1:24:05 But even more of them, like Videodrome has somebody pushing the wall of the TV toward the room.

1:24:13 Don't keep me waiting.

1:24:16 Please.

1:24:18 And the first Nightmare on Elm Street has Freddy coming out of a flexible wall. And one of the later ones has the TV thing. even more like Cronenberg's when Freddie jumps out of the TV and strangles somebody. And I think that it's just much more the fear of the irrational, impossible, uncanny, and confusion about what's real and what isn't. That's the terrifying core of Nightmare on Elm Street, even though it's certainly within the genre of slashers if you're busy cutting people with your ten fingernails.

1:24:57 Well, neither Halloween nor A Nightmare on Elm Street was the first or last franchise to be diluted by a bunch of disappointing sequels. And in both cases, there have been so many that there have even been more than one attempt to, you know, right the ship after all agreed that that various follow ups went awry. And, you know, so we get into this confusing bit of like, well, these ones count and these ones are canonical and these ones we're just forgetting about. And so I'll start with Jason for this one. Do you Any of the Halloween sequels mean anything to you at all? Do you have any affection for any of them?

1:25:32 I mean, I'll just mention one, which I have a soft spot for, which is the third one, Season of the Witch, which is famous for being the only time in horror franchise history where you have, you know, this established famous killer and they decide to do a movie where he doesn't appear in it at all. It has no relation to the storyline of the first two movies.

1:25:55 And only at one point does a character turn a TV on and you hear the sound and Halloween is on it. That's the extent of it. I mean, the boldness, the guts to do that, first of all, I admire, especially because you know it's going to fail the box office. It really is going right at the expectation of the audience.

1:26:13 It was disliked at the time, but like with so many of these movies we've talked about, like The Thing, as time goes on, it's developed into this cult classic. It's a movie, the third one, which actually I think has a sort of dream logic and this incredibly surreal imagery and is much more than any other movie in all of the Halloween universe about the holiday of Halloween.

1:26:38 It's about the Celtic origins of Halloween and Halloween. It actually has some very terrifying stuff. So I would actually recommend it as long as don't expect a Michael Myers movie. But if you're expecting an interesting, scary movie, the third one is a good one.

1:26:52 This is a move that comes to be known as the Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, I believe, where Werner Herzog said he's like, look, it has nothing to do with Bad Lieutenant. I could get the financing if I put the words Bad Lieutenant in front of my title. And there you go. That's many years later. Deirdre, any nightmare sequels? Perhaps Wes Craven's new nightmare? Any other Elm Street films that you feel any affinity for?

1:27:17 I think there are two I haven't seen. I generally have a low opinion of sequels, but I should see them. They're among the few dream films I haven't reviewed. But of the ones I've seen, and I think I've seen... two, three, and five, I think. Anyway, of the ones I've seen, there's no one I would put forward as anywhere near as good as the original in its entirety. But as I already mentioned, some of them have these debut performances by some of these amazing actors.

1:27:49 It's the.

1:27:54 Rooney Mara in the remake that isn't Craven at all. She's doing an excellent job of acting. She doesn't have a very strong script to do it with. But a couple of things I like about some of the sequels and where I think they maybe match the original are some of the dream scenes. And there's one in part five, which is otherwise, I think, one of the worst of the ones I saw. There's a scene where a character on a motorcycle, he's just driving sort of demonically, cutting through traffic. And then he begins to merge with the motorcycle and tendons from him and even his skin begin to grow over the metal of the motorcycle. And cards and gear and things from the motorcycle start integrating with his body. And it's just... And then Freddy's face is

1:28:55 kind of on the center of the... Of the front part of the motorcycle. And so Freddy is reaching out and slashing at the guy in his typical manner, while the guy is really being destroyed by sort of merging with all this hot metal. And it's one of the most extreme pieces of body horror I've ever seen. And it seems very dreamlike. And I think it's as good as any of the dream scenes in the original. It's certainly the most horrifying, I would say.

1:29:29 It sounds very H.R. Giger, the biology and motorcycle parts merging.

1:29:36 And then it's part three that has a kind of a reenactment of the Cronenberg person coming out of the television. But even though it's derivative in a sense, I think it sort of takes it further in some interesting directions. It's a scene where Dick Cavett is doing an interview.

1:29:56 Did you ever go to any kind.

1:29:57 Of acting school? Not in the beginning.

1:29:59 I started on a talk show.

1:30:01 And Dick Cavett morphs into Freddy. They got old footage of Dick Cavett, but he turns into Freddy Krueger and starts attacking the actress.

1:30:12 Can I ask you something? Certainly.

1:30:14 Who gives a f * * * what you think?

1:30:17 But then he's coming out of the TV at first stretching like in video drum, but then his arms come out to drag the hapless young woman into the screen, murdering her. This is it, Jennifer.

1:30:32 Your big break in TV.

1:30:36 Fuck the prime time, bitch.

1:30:40 And it's very much the video drum TV scene, but it's a really good elaboration on it. So some of the dream scenes in the subsequent ones hold up, but not much else except except some acting too bad scripts.

1:30:56 Okay.

1:30:57 All right.

1:30:57 Well, to bring us to a concluding point here, I know we've talked quite a bit about what each of the boogeymen of these two films represent. Fred Krueger, again, I don't think we call him Freddy until the sequels, right? Has an amalgamation of two names from The Last House on the Left, which I learned of again from Jason's book, Shock Value. So we have the nod to the two earlier Wes Craven characters. Freddy's sweater was chosen, Craven has said, because the two colors of the stripes clash most violently to most viewers. Apparently the hat came out of some memory that he had of some random guy who frightened him on the street. We've talked about what a quipster Freddy is. Someone calls him the Henny Youngman of Horror,

1:31:43 referring to later installments. That was you? Okay, excellent. Good phrasing. So taking all of this, Deirdre, what is the case that Freddy Krueger is the more elemental, the more frightening, the more immortal villain of these two?

1:31:58 I think he combines what is terrifying in most slasher films with the really extreme way of slashing and, you know, very well-played murderer coming after you. He combines that with this much more uncanny fear of the irrational and fears from our unconscious and fears from childhood that so many of the dream scenes and just that he's coming from your sleep and dreams to kill you. I think he pulls like both of the major modes of terror in at the same time.

1:32:37 All right. Very persuasive. Jason, what do you got? Why is it still Michael Myers?

1:32:42 I think in a way, what is Michael Myers? Why is he scary? There's a relentlessness to Michael Myers that I think on one sense, it's not realistic. In another sense, anyone living through our time who can see that there are certain inexplicable evils in this world. can understand why the idea of Michael Myers is so terrifying. We're taping today on September 11th, the 25th anniversary. I was in New York on that day, and it was obviously a horrifying day for many reasons. But one thing I think about is there, and, you know, talking to a lot of people about what they went through in that day, there was the moment when the first tower got hit and people didn't really know what it was. And then there was a moment when the second tower got hit.

1:33:37 And then there were all these rumors swirling around. There's many more things coming. Who knows what's going to happen? It was some time between that and labeling what this thing was and arguing over what it was. That moment was, to me, the most horrifying moment when you didn't know what this thing was and it could have been anything.

1:33:58 And it's everywhere. It could be everywhere. It could be anywhere. And there's something comforting. about saying, okay, here's who the bad guy is. It's this thing, whether it's in the real world or whether it's, and it's something that we do as a culture. We say this group of people is bad. It contains that. What Halloween asks us to do is to say, no, you can't contain it. You can't understand it. It's something that seeps much deeper. And there's something about the abstraction of it that is weirdly true to life. And I think where you look at Nightmare on Elm Street, what makes it less scary to me as the years go on is its specificity. I'll end with like a simple point, which is at the end of the day, it's a guy named Fred. It's

1:34:43 a guy named Fred in a hat. It's... How scary can a guy named Fred in a hat who looks like he's coming out of a Soundgarden concert in the 90s really be? That's my closing statement.

1:35:00 Yeah. I mean, the knife fingers seem like you're overcompensating a little bit, right, when you put it in that context. I mean, do you think if he had had a cooler first name, a lot of suffering could have been avoided? Is this a sort of reverse Boy Named Sue scenario?

1:35:15 It did make you wonder why he went back from Fred. It is Fred in the credits.

1:35:19 Yeah.

1:35:19 But then, I don't know, maybe Deidre would know better. But I think he goes by Freddy in the first film too, doesn't he? Or does he not? Yes.

1:35:27 Although his name is said when the adults who know about him, I think they say Fred Krueger more than once. But the young people who learn about him, most of the references are to Freddy. And that's even more in the going forward ones. But I just want to say, I think Michael Myers would be scarier yet if you were doing it on Elm Street. That's like where we live.

1:35:52 And I also wanted to mention that I was not in New York for 9-11, but I am currently facing a window where those two memorial lights will be visible in a few hours. And I collected dreams for an article on dreams about 9-11. And I wrote a whole book called Pandemic Dreams about, I had nothing else to do during the pandemic, but collect people's dreams then. And terrifying as the real events are to read about, I swear, reading the dreams about 9-11 that get into the metaphoric, Weird exaggerations. And similarly, all the representations of the invisible pandemic as invisible monsters and just footsteps behind you that are going to get you instead of an obvious jump scare.

1:36:49 I think the dreams about both those events are scarier yet.

1:36:53 Deidre, what's the name of this book? I want to get it. You got to plug this book.

1:36:56 Pandemic Dreams.

1:36:58 Pandemic Dreams.

1:36:59 Okay.

1:36:59 Yes.

1:37:00 We will put a link in the show notes to Pandemic Dreams, to Shock Value, to anything else each of you would wish to plug. I want to chide myself here for failing to heed my own note to refer to Wes Craven throughout as Frightmaster Wes Craven, as he is called in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I was like, got to say that. Got to properly address him by his title. He didn't Go to fright school for eight years not to be addressed as Fright Master Wes Craven whenever he's referred to. And I totally failed to do that. And I'm vamping while the scoring committee in my mind attempts simple addition. In this third round, I had full points to Deirdre for redirecting back to the Freddy knife fingers. And then I had full points

1:37:50 to Jason for his recommendation, sort of, of Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, the sidequel, but also full points to Deirdre for her recollection of a horrific dream sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, which I will have to look up the subtitle of, which means that with respect and gratitude to both advocates for the substance and passion of their scholarship, the court finds on the basis of the evidence presented here today, A 24-23 victory for Deirdre Barrett, PhD. dream scholar. Thank you both. Thank you both. This means that A Nightmare on Elm Street shall enter the pantheon as the superior teen slasher. Deirdre, did you see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma?

1:38:43 No, I did not. And, I mean, Jason is the clear winner on Film Scholar here.

1:38:50 No, no, no.

1:38:51 Congratulations. You're the winner. Accept it.

1:38:54 Yeah, but he made a few of the good points for Nightmare on Elm Street.

1:39:00 Well, we're a movie show, Deirdre, so he is more clearly in his lane.

1:39:04 Well, let me just say that the idea that dreams, I've never thought about it, but the idea that it's visual, not oral, I'd never thought about that ever. And that's so true. It's fascinating. And I think that does have huge implications.

1:39:19 Yeah.

1:39:23 Listeners, now it's your turn. Go to moviedeathmatch.com and vote for which of these two teen slashers still haunts your nightmares, whether you have been persuaded by one of our expert combatants today or whether you had a clear favorite from which you will not be moved. Let us know. Vote now at moviedeathmatch.com. We'll take a moment now to mourn the erasure of Halloween, a beloved and influential slasher slashed in single combat. Jason, thank you for your honorable but doomed defense of Halloween.

1:39:53 I appreciate it. Good being here.

1:39:54 He's nodding vigorously, listeners. So, so vigorously. Deirdre, thank you so much for dressing up our movie show with genuine medical expertise. So gracious of you to give your time to this enterprise.

1:40:12 Yeah.

1:40:12 Now your listeners will have this new fear of Hamang Nightmare Death Syndrome.

1:40:21 Oh, my God.

1:40:21 Yeah.

1:40:22 My fear was always not being able to sleep. I started having anxiety and insomnia. It got really bad when I was in college. The notion that you could die from lack of sleep was certainly something that frightened me, but it was because I was afraid I could not sleep, not because I was afraid to go to sleep. I was desperate to go to sleep. I think that's probably another reason that delayed my exploration of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise for a many, many years, even past college.

1:40:54 Well, it's interesting that you have a horror podcast if you're worried about trouble falling.

1:41:01 Oh, it's all.

1:41:02 We did concert films last month. We're doing film noir next month. We move around. We try to do a topical peg each month.

1:41:09 So.

1:41:10 Well, let me ask you, Deirdre, where can listeners follow you? Where can they find your work, learn more about your research and scholarship?

1:41:16 I have a website that's just DeirdreBarrett.com, D-E-I-R-D-R-E, B-A-R-R-E-T-T. You just have to spell the first name right and you'll get to my website. Harvard has a page with all my academic research and they're innumerable. videos of me talking about everything about dreams, but most commonly about dreams and creativity, telling stories about how many novels and films came from dreams.

1:41:47 Even though there are some great films I love about dreams, even more than Nightmare on Elm Street, I'm also very interested in films that don't even reference dreams but come straight from them, like Three Women by Altman. He says he dreamed that almost exactly as he as he made it. But there's one brief reference that a woman is starting to tell a dream at the end of the film.

1:42:10 But otherwise, it's cast as occurring in the waking world, but it's very dreamy.

1:42:16 Any favorite dream movies? You know, you mentioned earlier some that are explicitly... Oh, yeah.

1:42:21 For ones that are explicitly about dreams, I think my very favorite is a Tom DeCillo film called Living in Oblivion.

1:42:30 Oh, yeah? I just.

1:42:32 Love that. And I won't do many spoilers, but it's just got dreams at every level. It's about the director is making a film where the dream scenes are the crucial and they can't get it right. And they're doing all these silly cliches with fog machines and dwarves to make them seem dreamy. And those all unravel. But then characters have dreams within it. I will not do the The big spoiler for how all the dream things interrelate.

1:43:05 But I think it's just brilliant about dreams at so many levels. And then Arizona Dream with Johnny Depp. And it's one of the only two straight roles that Jerry Lewis ever played, along with King of Comedy. I like him much better at non-comedy. And I really love Waking Life. That's a little more recent and a little better than Richard Linklater.

1:43:29 Oh, that's Linklater, yeah.

1:43:31 That's mostly about lucid dreaming, but it's about false awakenings and maybe some related states of consciousness stuff. So those are three of my strong favorites.

1:43:45 Jason, that obscure publication that employs you once again, is there a URL you could, I'm afraid we won't remember, graylady.tv, where can listeners find you?

1:43:58 You can get me at the Grey Lady of New York Times, or you can find me on Instagram, you know, threads, all the usual places that rot your brain.

1:44:09 Yes. All right.

1:44:10 Well, thank you both again. Listeners, you can always email us at deathmatchatfilmspotting.com. Tell us how we can improve our highly flawed scoring system. Suggest a deathmatch you'd like to see. Deathmatch at filmspotting.com is that address. And join us for our next movie deathmatch when, in honor of Noirvember, we'll go back to the monochromatic mid-century to pit two of the greatest films noir ever against one another, both featuring immortal performances by Orson Welles, one directed by Welles, though editor Walter Murch had to recut it to his specifications 40 years after its initial release for his greatness to be unlocked. We take you to the post-World War II Vienna and to the California-Mexico border when Carol reads The

1:44:51 Third Man, one of my personal Letterboxd 4, takes on Orson Welles' Touch of Evil on the next Movie Deathmatch. Movie Deathmatch is produced by Chris Klemek, who is me, and by Golden Joe DeSoe. Without Golden Joe, the show wouldn't go. It is executive produced by Adam Kempinar and Sam Van Halgren. My quest to find rhyming nicknames for them both is ongoing.