Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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more successful horror films tend to subvert expectation. Barry Keith Grant writes
that film genres “encourage certain expectations on the part of the spectators, which
are in turn based on viewer familiarity with the conventions.” (2007; 21) Grant later
states, “Familiarity with a generic field of reference allows spectators to enjoy
variations, however slight, in a given film.” (21) Steve Neale further argues that
“Genres do not consist solely of films. They consist also of specific systems of
expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and
which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”
(2000; 31) Edward Buscombe notes that, “a genre film depends on a combination of
novelty and familiarity.” (2003; 22)
This can account for the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. A
Nightmare on Elm Street, while applying the slasher formula, infuses it with more of
a supernatural horror element than was common at the time. The killer in the film is
Freddy Krueger, a child killer who has returned from the dead to haunt and kill
children in their dreams. The significance of dreams in the film itself is related to
writer/director Wes Craven’s awareness of academic discourse on psychology and its
relationship to horror stories. 4
Within this film and its first couple of sequels, the
eye/camera retains giallo eye/camera aesthetics, much like the slashers of the late
1970s-early 1980s, with its stress on proximity fear and disorientation. These films
adapt Italian horror’s aesthetic distortion of perspective like that in Suspiria and
Black Sabbath (1963; dir. Bava) to create the dream worlds of the characters in the A
Nightmare on Elm Street series.
4 This can be deduced from Craven’s proficiency in the horror genre combined with the fact that he
obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in both English and Psychology from Wheaton
College in Illinois (Muir; 1998; 8). During this time, “Craven became obsessed with dreams and their
origins,” (8). This provides a direct link to his eventual creation of A Nightmare on Elm Street.