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pulls the cover off Tina (00:16). However, we soon learn that Freddy’s nightmarish actions affect reality too, as
he slashes open Tina’s stomach – reproducing her slit nightdress from the scene discussed above, one level
deeper, if one will. Finally, the girl is impaled by his claws and dragged up along the wall and to the ceiling,
leaving a trail of blood before dropping down on the bed again and off it, on the floor, while her boyfriend is
watching, paralyzed with fear.
Following Robin Wood’s ‘simple and obvious basic formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the
Monster,’ 14 this sequence starts out with a notion of the bed as where teenagers have sex when their parents
are not at home, and ends up representing the same bed as a place of violent slaughter and horror. Through
Freddy’s actions, the intimate retreat turns into a crime scene and the setting of Tina’s dramatic death, while
her boyfriend Rod turns from a lover into a murder suspect. Indeed, he gets arrested later and finds his own
dramatic death in a prison cell, where a bed sheet animated by Krueger wraps itself around his neck, pulls him
out of bed and hangs him, staging a suicide. Somewhat similar to Tina, Rod is thus killed by Freddy after going
to sleep in a bed that is not his own, is violently dragged out of it and to the ceiling in his death throes (00:38).
While these beds are first shown as being common in the sense that they are used for repose and sleep, Nancy’s
beds seem to be haunted from the very beginning. When she stays over at Tina’s house in the night of her
murder, sleeping in her friend’s bed, immediately after everybody goes to sleep, the crucifix, which has offered
some kind of solace to the nightmare-plagued Tina before, falls off the wall. After that the wall above Nancy’s
bed (it is actually Tina’s bed but Nancy sleeps in it in this scene) seems to turn into a membrane, through which
Freddy tries to make his way into the bedroom: His head and hands press through it, stretching it like a rubber
sheet (00:13). Nancy wakes up and knocks on the wall that has suddenly turned solid again under her scrutiny.
After finding it on the floor, she replaces the crucifix – a gesture that apparently stops Freddy’s attack, or rather
directs him toward Tina. This scene suggests, however, (and this is elaborated later in the picture) that Freddy
can penetrate the real world during someone’s nightmare, the bed, or the space around it functioning as a
gateway for him. Apparently his entrance can be prevented, the gate shut, so to speak, by a symbol of faith such
as the crucifix.
At her first shown encounter with Freddy, Nancy falls asleep in school, and not in a bed at all (00:22-00:28) –
which further suggests that her bed is not a singular space of relaxation but just one of many places in which
she can (and does) sleep. She also falls asleep in the bathtub, which is subsequently turned into a deep lake by
Freddy’s dream-shaping powers (00:31-00:33). When we finally do see Nancy sleeping in her own bed, she has
already gotten a sense of what is going on and uses the bed as a transitional space to deliberately enter
Freddy’s realm and look for him (00:36-00:40), instead of falling asleep because she cannot fight it and being
surprised by the killer. Later, she does that again, this time succeeding in pulling him over into her real worldbed,
which now serves as the starting point of a chase through the booby-trapped house (01:10-01:20). Here,
the bed is first represented as a sort of portal to Freddy’s world, which can at least be entered knowingly –
though not necessarily exited by one’s own will. Nancy experiences this in her first nightmare at school where
she only manages to escape Freddy by making herself wake up by burning her arm on a hot pipe in his boiler
room. Having considered the problem, Nancy finds a way to deliberately leave the dream world by setting an
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