Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy

When I started Movie Lottery, this was the movie I was most excited about watching. Never mind the fact that I didn't even have access to it 'til five days ago.
Never Sleep Again is a four hour documentary about the entire Nightmare On Elm Street series (including a brief chapter on the Freddy's Nightmares television show). There are interviews with a whole lot of cast and crew members and they talk about the scripts, the stories, the special effects, the fan reactions, everything. It's glorious.
By way of reviewing the movie, all I can say is I kind of checked out after the segment on Wes Craven's New Nightmare because as far as I'm concerned that is the final Nightmare movie. Sure, you can talk about Freddy Versus Jason but ... meh. Who gives a fuck?
I never realized until today just how much I resent that fucking movie. I haven't watched it since it was in theaters. I've thought about watching it, I've even kind of wanted to watch it, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Something about it really irks me. I want to fight it. Freddy Versus Jason Versus Me!
Anyway, yeah, the whole documentary was fantastic and, unlike how I felt about His Name Was Jason, it didn't feel rushed or abbreviated. Also, where the Jason movie felt longer than it was, this one felt shorter than it was. It did feel like a pretty long movie, certainly, but I didn't feel like I'd been sitting there for four hours.
But, as I mentioned at the end of my review of His Name Was Jason, I am a biased ding dong.

I don't know if I'll ever understand what it is about the Nightmare On Elm Street movies that appeals to me so much more than any of the other big slasher series. I can't blame it on my crush on Robert Englund because I was fascinated by the Elm Street movies long before I knew who Robert Englund was.
I have a very strong memory (that for all I know is inaccurate) of being maybe five years old at my dad's house and staring at the cover of the soundtrack for The Dream Warriors, with the artwork of Freddy's eyes over the blades of his glove with the four people standing in the foreground, facing away from (for lack of a better term) the camera. I was obsessed with that picture and I still am; when I found that poster for eight dollars at Weekend Of Horrors, I snatched it up so fast. (In fact, I didn't buy a single thing at Weekend Of Horrors this year that wasn't Elm Street related.)
When I was younger and too scared to watch horror movies, my older brother would tell me all about whatever ones he'd just watched and occasionally he managed to talk me into watching bits and pieces of them. He convinced me to watch the library and shower scenes from It (I loved the library scene but couldn't sleep after the shower scene), The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrell from Creepshow (which I liked a lot) and, the scene that had the greatest effect on me, Nancy's defeat of Freddy from A Nightmare On Elm Street. I think after watching that was the first time I ever went to school acting like I had watched a horror movie. ("...and she says 'I take away all the energy I gave to you; you're nothing' and he leaps at her, but he just disappears!...")
I'd memorize everything Brad told me about the movies and repeat everything he said to me verbatim to my classmates, pretended that I'd been the one watching the movie. My favorite movie to do that with was Dream Warriors. When I finally got around to watching Dream Warriors for the first time a month or two ago I had several "Oh, I remember this!" moments and had to keep reminding myself "No, you don't remember this. You've never seen this before."
I have vague memories of being interested in the Friday The 13th movies when I was younger as well (I loved the I (heart) NY poster for Jason Takes Manhattan) but not nearly to the extent that I was interested in the Nightmare films. I don't know if it was Freddy's glove or the dream imagery or just the pretty colors on the Dream Warriors album cover or what. Maybe it was the fact that Freddy Krueger really became a pop culture icon right around the time I was four or five (the age when I really started developing memories and becoming a person).
I was obsessed long before I even knew what I was obsessed with.
And I'm still obsessed. Especially now that I've seen all the movies and I've seen this amazing documentary about all the movies.
And I'm going to continue to be obsessed. A Nightmare On Elm Street has been a part of me in one way or another for as long as I can remember. Which maybe just proves I'm a little off in the head, but a girl could do worse than growing up with a role model (even a word of mouth role model) like Nancy Thompson.

P.S. I don't know if they're going to use the footage, but if you watch the upcoming documentary I Am Nancy, and you see a girl in a plaid purple skirt telling Heather Lagencamp about how she used to pretend she'd watched the Nightmare movies back when she was to young and scared to actually watch them, that's me!

End of line.
-Sally