One of the true originals...

Rating: Null/10 (17 November 2000)

For a horror film to achieve legendary status, it must offer its audience something truly original. It must have the ability to elicit its shocks and scares in a way that its target audience can identify with, without boring them to tears or insulting their intelligence. It must present protagonists we can empathize with and root for, and an antagonist that presents a threat that can represent something that we all fear, first and foremost, death in all its guises.
HALLOWEEN managed this somewhat, but John Carpenter's crowning achievement owes as much to Hitchcock and the 'giallo' stylings of Dario Argento, as it does to Carpenter's talent for introducing tried and true conventions in a way that audiences had never seen them presented before.
FRIDAY THE 13TH was actually no different and no better than most of Herschell Gordon Lewis splatterfests, or any of the infamous drive-in gross-outs that held sway all through the '60's and early '70's. What set it apart were the vast technical improvements over those earlier films, plus the unmistakable ability of master makeup artist Tom Savini to take cinematic gore to newer, more shocking and more repulsive levels. Which, bottom line, is about all that FRIDAY had going for it.
Leave it to the writer/co-producer/director of what truly WAS the granddaddy of the slasher genre, the almost unwatchable LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, to come up with one of the last, truly terrifying monsters of the horror canon.

The moment we close our eyes and enter our own subconscious minds, traversing the lands of our private, individual dreamscapes, is the moment we become the most vulnerable. Even more exposed than our naked flesh, our open minds are subsceptible to suggestion, to outer and inner stimuli, to the light and dark sides of our psyches that otherwise we would never have a chance to explore...or dare to.
So what would happen if we introduced at this point, a creature who could take all the rules that bind the id, the ego and the superego, and slash the rulebook to bits? Someone who could wreak havoc at will the moment you fall asleep, free to torture, to maim, to murder you and your friends in your sleep, and not just make it SEEM real, but bring it all into the realm of waking, bleeding, screaming reality?
That is the brilliance and the power of the original NIGHTMARE, eons before Fred Krueger became a razor-fingered Rodney Dangerfield, tossing off goofy quips while dispatching trendy teen actors ranging from Robert Rusler, to Jennifer Rubin, and even occasionally, the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. This was like an ABC Afterschool Special whose script somehow found its way into the word processor of Clive Barker, took a left turn into THE TWILIGHT ZONE and never looked back.
Compared to the havoc that today's directors can now wreck with CGI, it may seem crude by today's "Matrix"-style standards. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and there are a few glaring gaps in continuity, but in the casting, the acting, the direction, the special effects and the music (a truly spine-chilling score by genre specialist Charles Bernstein), very few movies of its decade could measure up. It raised the bar for overall ability to scare the squirts out of you, and I can't recall the last time a film frightened me as much as my first ELM STREET viewing did.
[And that definitely includes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which, IMHO, is a really pale imitation of LAST HOUSE. Get yourself the unrated copy of this horror-in-the-deep-woods gem, turn out the lights, sit back and let it enfold you. Afterwards, if you can still speak, you tell me if you think BLAIR WITCH is still the scariest movie you've ever seen. Anyone who has seen the complete version wouldn't have been surprised at all, that the same director came up with NIGHTMARE and the SCREAM movies. I certainly wasn't.]