Freddy Krueger & Peek a Boo

A long love letter to horror movies.

Anyone who’s raised a child can tell you how quickly a scream can take you out of your right mind. It’ll make you agree to ludicrous compromises and expenditures, as the proprietors of Mattel and Disney no doubt know.

What we might hear inside of a scream are the things we’d rather not exist. It opens an altered state of consciousness in which the worst outcomes and bogeymen of the untended imagination crowd up. But where do they go after the screaming stops?

Freddy Krueger

As a kid, I loved A Nightmare on Elm Street, with its crispy-skinned, wisecracking child murderer. A strange thing to get enthused about, but I wasn’t the only one. They got nine theatrical releases and a TV series out of the guy.

The movies are about a bad guy, Freddy Krueger, the bastard son of a thousand maniacs, or maybe it was a hundred. He’s child-murderer, eventually burned to death by a group of vigilante parents. But even that doesn’t stop him - in death, he starts hunting their kids in their dreams, and killing them.

Nine, ten, eleven years old

The film and my obsession with it are woven through my prepubescent life. It seems unlikely, but I remember seeing the Dream Warriors (1987) at Showcase Cinemas on Main Street in Worcester. That one may have been the best of the bunch, with an opening epigram by Friedrich Nietzsche and cameos by Dick Cavett and Zsa Zsa Gabor. It knocked my socks off as a precocious nine-year-old.

By the time the fifth movie came out, I was twelve, and pretty much over it. But in the intervening years, I couldn’t get enough. I bought a six-foot high poster at a record store of Robert Englund in full Freddy makeup, along with an inconsistent overcoat. I dressed up as Freddy with a smelly rubber mask and a kid-safe plastic knife glove for Halloween. I wrote a short story about him for a contest in Fangoria Magazine, where the prize was one of the actual red-and-green sweaters worn in the movie. I rented a bunch of movies from the series so I could stay up all night for the electroencephalograph they did when I was eleven, and terribly depressed.

The idea

The idea behind the Elm Street movies is that your nightmares don’t go away when you wake up. Some of them have an independent existence and pass the daylight hours cooking up ways to terrorize and eventually kill you.

Object permanence

What happens to something when it goes away? One of the first cognitive leaps made by an infant is the realization that a person or thing continues to exist even when it moves out of their visual field. It’s why peek-a-boo is such an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride for the kiddos. The name for this developmental leap is object permanence.

Big grownups like you and me would believe we’re well past that. We know that when something leaves our immediate attention that it continues to exist. But what about dreams? But what about memories? We all have people, places and things we’ll never have occasion - or the ability - to remember again. So, what about the past? Does it continue to exist when we look away? Really? All of it?

Revenge of the unseen

Object permanence is a loose cobble stone, a place where the ground occasionally shifts under our feet. Ghost stories play with this wobbly bit of footing. In them, the dead come back, usually not doing so good, and often pissed. Now we must pay for our failure of object permanence.

How does object permanence work in regard to the dead? If the dead do still exist, what else do we owe them? Reverence? Property? Money? Blood? Our children? Visit any graveyard to see how people have historically hedged this bet.

Beam of the flashlight

Physically, we can only see so much in a given moment, even when we’re staring. Mentally, we can only hold so much in mind, even when we’re concentrating. Forgetfulness scatters what we gather almost as fast as we can gather it.

The unconscious - home to dreams and to Freddy Krueger - isn’t a blind spot. It’s the darkness that surrounds a single beam of light.

The surrounding darkness

Object permanence is the germ of superstition. It demands we allow for the existence of what we can’t see anymore. But what if we never really saw it? What if we can’t agree on what we saw? What if our reasoning about what we may have seen is highly motivated?

These questions apply to who we were before we became who we are - personally, as children, infants and fetuses.

One proposition is that everyone was born with a tabula rasa, a blank slate of consciousness. Ideas came later, through daylight experiences that occurred in step with mental development, starting with something like object permanence. This notion affords some sense of ownership and control over the contents and behavior of one’s own mind - a nice enough thought that it’s tempting to entirely dismiss evidence to the contrary.

But the slate’s not entirely blank. We’re born knowing how to do a few things that we can all agree upon because we’ve seen newborns do it - to swallow, to suckle, to breathe and to scream.

A preference for trauma

What we can’t agree on is the unconscious, partly because it necessarily includes things seen at best peripherally in dreams, words misspoken, art, fantasies, and the occasional surprising faux pas.

Was the unconscious always there? Is it always operating? Does it have any real power? Freddy Krueger and Sigmund Freud would argue yes.

But the world has moved away from the view that our minds are conspiring in inexplicable ways, either in congress with Freud’s sex-obsessed demons or Jung’s tutelary angels.

Over the last decade or so, trauma has become the central pop-psychology narrative for the inner life, irrational passions and twisted desires. It’s replaced the 1990s shoulder-shrug of depression, which replaced Freudian terms like repression, which replaced earlier terms like hysteria and nervous breakdowns.

While a prominent protuberance, trauma is not the only feature over which the opaque fabric of a personality can drape.

“But why are they assholes?”

It was a horror movie that first made me suspicious of trauma. Midsommar (2019) follows a young woman with a bad boyfriend. It’s not totally his fault. She’s needy and depressed and prone to anxiety attacks, as so many people are. The writing and acting are good, so the interplay of the troubled girlfriend and annoyed boyfriend are very believable. We’ve seen this couple. We’ve been this couple.

But the movie still needs to prove that it’s not the girlfriend’s fault that she’s needy and depressed and prone to anxiety attacks. So it opens with a familial murder-suicide. I’m not against onscreen mass-murder, but this was manipulative in the worst way, using the murder to justify emotions that everyone already has. It was unnecessary, like the extra detail a liar adds to their story. I liked the rest of the movie. But the opening was fishy.

“But why are they massholes?”

The awkward shoehorning of unbelievable trauma into the opening credits of Midsommar reminded me of Manchester by the Sea (2016 (and not a horror film), which follows an angry guy in Massachusetts who starts bar fights with strangers and isn’t very emotionally available. In the movie, this is because his wife and children are killed in a fiery inferno that he may have been responsible for.

Being from Massachusetts, I can say with some authority that there has never been a shortage of guys who start bar fights with strangers and aren’t very emotionally available. By my math, if every such guy in Massachusetts had a backstory that included a family burned alive in their own home, there would be about six houses still standing in the Bay State.

My point is that it’s dishonest to insist that people have clear reasons for strong feelings. It makes it hard begin to understand people as they are. It also obligates people to explain themselves in the most tedious way possible.

Exploring vs. explaining

Trauma is fine when discussing the problems of an acquaintance, but it’s too weak as a metaphysics to carry a horror movie. Films like The Babadook (2014) leave me cold. Even Hereditary (2018) works only because the estranged dead mother was an agent for something more than human.

This is because trauma, as a theory, is more about explaining than exploring.

As a theory, it’s also sterile. It starts with a common, beginning blank slate that can only ever belong to you. How trauma transports you from what you were to what you are is through events that a jury of your peers could agree upon. I mostly hear an impatience that wants to get everyone’s problems explained, sorted and put away, to get back to that nice blank slate.

The Exorcist

One classic plot that plays with the blank slate is possession - a powerful concept that people continue to make into movies and TV shows on a regular basis.

William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1973) is the foundational example in my lifetime. It’s a terrifying movie, and an even more upsetting book. I read it in the seventh grade in Catholic school and it had me sleeping with my rosary beads.

Part of what gives the story its power is the momentum of its first half, when the cosmopolitan and affluent mother takes her daughter to the best doctors, who run state-of-the-art tests. They’re baffled. Her daughter is young, with a mostly blank slate. But something has gotten into the blank slate, and upset it more than mere experience ever could. They can only shrug their shoulders. This loss of everyday, scientific context is upsetting.

The first conclusion is terrifying - something has taken over the girl’s secret self, her once-blank slate. It has taken possession of her supposedly innate property. This violation opens up a scary question: If we own ourselves, might we also be owned?

Ghosts vs. demons

The next thing that ratchets up the fear in The Exorcist is the revelation that we’re dealing with a demon, which upsets our sense of reality worse than a ghost.

A ghost is a dead person. We’ve seen people and we know they die. A ghost suggests we should’ve been more assiduous and applied our object permanence to the dead. But a demon comes from a place we’ve never seen. The appearance of a demon suggests that the tools we have for understanding reality were inadequate and doomed from the start.

In the early Nightmare on Elm Street films, Freddy is just a badass, evil ghost. In one the later ones, perhaps to justify making so many movies, they say “well, actually, he’s a demon, definitely a demon.” Fishy.

But it gets worse

The Exorcist leaves no doubt that the girl is possessed by a demon, one vulgar, violent, stomach-turning episode following on the last. She’s doing all the things antithetical to how a girl would act, as if to spite the former owner of the girl’s body and reputation. And just to put a finer point on it, she’s speaking ancient languages she hasn’t had time to learn.

Finally, the mother calls for outside help - outside of science and the materialistic reassurances of 20th-century America - the priests. They have some frame of reference for this, though they’re struggling, with modernity, with their faith and with their health. All around them, the reassurances the material world are creeping in, undermining their beliefs, making the communion wafer back into plain bread, same as you could buy at the store.

The priests do battle with the alien personality that’s taken over the girl. The only thing that can finally get this terrible invader to consider leaving to invoke the name of guy who died 2,000 years before.

This is where we glimpse the deeper fear that The Exorcist and other possession stories sneak into the minds of the readers and viewers under cover of the stomach-turning shocks and blasphemies. It’s a proposition that seems to explain why the Vatican is reluctant to talk about exorcism.

Scarier than possession itself is the implication of the exorcist’s words: “As previously agreed, this one belongs to us, not you.” In other words, the slate of an individual’s personality was never blank, and it never belonged to the individual.

The suave gentleman

When I was doing research for a novel about possession, I read a lot of what there is in the way of articulate thinking on the subject. Some writers in this area propose a state too subtle and terrifying for cinema - something called “perfect possession.”

It’s the complete and uncontested takeover of a personality by a spirit equally expert at managing the subtle, social reality as we all inhabit. If it happened to you, no one who would ever know. If someone asked you who you were before, you might be inclined to say, “Before I was me, I was no one. Don’t bother looking. There’s nothing there - that part’s blank.”

The ledger

The first blank slates in the archaeological record were in the hands of the early administrators of Mesopotamian city states, who used them to keep track of grain, oxen and slaves.

Leaving out slaves for a minute, no two sheaves of wheat are the same, nor are any two oxen. But there was a single symbol for ox and one for wheat. As far as the ledger was concerned, neither the wheat nor the ox had any unique characteristics. They were recorded on the blank slate. And the blank slate imparted some of its blankness upon them. It made a natural phenomenon into a commodity, also known as a known quantity. It probably had a similar effect on the slaves.

Possession, they say, is nine tenths of the law. Things look different after you buy or sell them.

Poltergeist

The market demands a certain amount of blankness. Diamonds can be reduced to carats, beef to USDA prime, select and choice cuts, wheat can be organic or whole wheat and so on.

But the unique qualities of each one persist in physical reality. No slate was never truly blank. You may have failed to look at the slate carefully. Maybe you were fooled. But what about the guy who fooled you? Why didn’t you press him for details? Wasn’t he also paying your salary?

In the film Poltergeist (1982), the blank slate is ordinary suburban life - built not on the earth, but on real estate. The deed describes a plot of earth, but what it does is protect your right to be in a location within a larger series of agreements about who may be where. A deed for one patch of land isn’t necessarily different from the deed for the patch next to it. They’re equally blank patches in the eyes of contract law, so have at it with the split-levels and mock Tudors. Sign on the line and it’s yours for the having.

But suddenly, there’s something wrong with the kids. They’re flying across the floor and hearing strange voices. Now a tree’s trying to eat one, and the other one’s disappeared into the television. Their toys are flying around the bedroom. What happened? You call a scientist and a videographer and a psychic.

They have some ideas. But the real problem is that the quarter acre of real estate wasn’t the blank slate you assumed - it was a graveyard. The dead, robbed of the little real estate they’d been promised, now want to renegotiate the whole agreement, including who goes where on the threshold of the living and the dead.

Micro- and macro-rococo

Space is never empty. There’s always a breeze or an odor. Even in a vacuum, a quantum foam is always bubbling away. The stately firmament consists of galaxies in disarray, prone to collision. On every scale, it’s busy and baroque.

The baroque is easy to mock in America, where the aesthetic reaches most of us through our immigrant parents and grandparents cluttering up their homes with kitsch to drown out the insecurity and impermanence that dropped them an ocean from their ancestral homes.

But the baroque told a sort of truth. And it assumed that the eye was hungry to see something, something more than it could easily access.

A clean, minimalist look

The baroque, like Freud, has fallen from favor. The builders of the physical world prefer the minimalism of an iPhone or a fjord-side retreat. In it, there’s nothing to overwhelm the eye. If anything, the aim is to leave a person visually unchallenged, and thus, a master.

From it, one can participate in the blank slate’s fantasy of calmness, clarity and most of all, control. The minimalism of the last twenty years may be a response to the perpetual provocation emanating from our phones. As structures, they’re cheaper and faster to throw up.

But at least everyone’s calm…

Blank street coffee

One day, I was out and decided a cup of coffee would anchor my wandering in some kind of purpose. I stopped into a place with that leisure-time-for-technocrats, Ikea-on-next-gen-benzodiazepines aesthetic, surely enough called Blank Street Coffee. It promised a pricey beverage and a bloodless interaction. The barista, though, was keen on his employer, and talking the place up to the customer in front of me. The jewel in his crown of praise was that this particular coffee chain was “backed by private equity.”

Evidence

Blankness has always been, at best, wishful thinking. But I get the sense a lawyer was involved.

Shelter

In a horror movie, the theory of the universe - be it aggrieved ghosts or demons - exists mostly to draw you into a place where the evidence overwhelms the theory. If the horror can be adequately addressed, then it was never a true horror.

In the Friday the 13th movies (1980-2009), Jason Voorhees (though it’s his mother in the first one) it’s a theory of revenge - for negligence at a summer camp. Revenge is a genre unto itself, with countless movies devoted to it. When a hero does revenge, though, it’s measured and bounded by the terms of the original offense. He may even offer to let a guy go now and then.

But Jason never stops. This violates the theory of revenge. Even after killing dozens of these kids who had nothing to do with the original incident, Jason keeps on going. This is what delivers the horror.

No lessons this time

Stories for children have a moral, like always tell the truth or be kind to others. The story implants the moral by showing what happens if you don’t do the right thing, then offering safety if you do.

To seek out a clear moral in A Nightmare on Elm Street is to hit one dead end after another. The victims in each film try to suss out what makes Freddy tick, and come up with theories, but they never work.

At the end of the first movie, Nancy the heroine says she’s not scared of Freddy, and that seems to put an end to him. But nope - he’s hauling her off a scary car and yanking here mother through a window one scene later, then the credits. In subsequent films (1985-2010), Freddy’s tormented victims keep yanking at straws, burying Freddy’s remains in hallowed ground, releasing the souls that Freddy has stolen, I think they make Freddy give birth in one, and then use a Tibetan dagger in another.

It kind of doesn’t matter. The world of Elm Street is one where any sense of justice, and even cause-and-effect, is a red herring.

Elm St. P.T.A.

So what is Freddy all about? He’s out there, in the sleep of teenagers, terrorizing and killing them gruesomely. He purees a young Johnny Depp and sprays the guy onto the ceiling of his own bedroom.

We’re told that Freddy’s doing it because the parents of the kids burned him to death in a high school basement. Maybe that’s justice? But the parents murdered Freddy because the living Freddy was already murdering kids. If anyone had it coming, it was Freddy. So what gives?

The uncomfortable question for the audience is: What kind of world is it where you can't even rely on vigilante murder to protect your kids? Maybe that’s the nightmare for the residents of Elm Street.

Gophers

My grandfather grew up a semi-orphan shifting among friends and relatives on the Lower East Side. As an adult, he had a small back yard behind the house where he raised my mother, aunt and uncle in Flatbush, Brooklyn. One day, gophers started digging up the back yard, so he had it paved over. Blank slate. His yard.

Managing your own mind isn’t as simple. Paving it comes with real consequences. And the gophers still come.

People still find Freud periodically irresistible, though generally distasteful, just as they did 100 years ago. To imply that we don’t entirely own our own minds - when most of us already own so little - is just rude.

Why horror

To live is to take responsibility for ourselves. This responsibility comes with the temptation to imagine we own ourselves. Like all common misunderstandings, this one comes with a temptation - ownership implies control. But to own ourselves is to imagine we know our own extent. And to own ourselves is also to open ourselves to the logic of being owned.

The logic of ownership reduces the knowable personality to a trauma narrative, an agreed-upon person who’s subject only to known events in a known world. And the logic of ownership makes us commodities, whose only fate is to go up or down in value. In this up-or-down condition, a person can only logically experience ambition or revenge, and death can only be seen as a total loss.

In the popcorn-fog of a horror movie, though, the proposition of self-ownership can be challenged, and its disproof can be survived.

Or, to put a finer point on it, in the words of Bruce Joel Rubin, from Jacob’s Ladder (1990), "If… you’re holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But… the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."

Selected bibliography

The novel I wrote about possession

The best book I read about possession while researching it

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

An essay about the unconscious and the creepiness of minimalist design

An essay about zombies

An essay about buying and selling human souls

An essay by Sam Kriss where he says some similar things, maybe better

The screenplay of Jacob’s Ladder