download this issue as a PDF
download this issue as a PDF
download this issue as a PDF
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
alarm clock. She h<strong>as</strong> to synchronize it with her dream experience of finding Freddy until the alarm rings and to<br />
grab him at exactly the right moment without him getting her first. Curiously, <strong>this</strong> seems to imply that time<br />
runs at the same pace within someone’s dream <strong>as</strong> in reality: Nancy’s wristwatch in her dream is synchronised<br />
with the alarm clock in her real bedroom. Thus, dreams in Nightmare appear very reality-like: without a<br />
distortion of time (at le<strong>as</strong>t not for the dreamers), without surrealist landscapes etc. Once she h<strong>as</strong> brought the<br />
killer over to her world and attacked him, Krueger seeks revenge, setting Nancy’s sleeping mother on fire (we<br />
remember that she w<strong>as</strong> part of the mob who killed him, turning him into an undead dream phantom in the first<br />
place) who subsequently sinks into her bed, thus entering Freddy’s world for good (and somewhat grotesquely<br />
waving goodbye to Nancy and her father <strong>as</strong> she does so). After her disappearance in the bed-portal, Freddy<br />
himself emerges out of the same bed, first stretching the sheet into Freddy-shape, similar to the wall above the<br />
bed in the scene mentioned above, then cutting through it and going after Nancy (00:82-00:84). Thus, the bed is<br />
once more identified with a gate into Krueger’s world of nightmares: it is an entry <strong>as</strong> well <strong>as</strong> an exit point for<br />
the dreamer/victim and the killer alike – Freddy now explicitly coming out of the bed (without Nancy’s<br />
mediation), and finding the sheet <strong>as</strong> his first obstacle.<br />
Another interesting <strong>as</strong> well <strong>as</strong> iconic scene in which the bed is depicted in <strong>this</strong> function, is the one rendering<br />
Glen’s (Johnny Depp) death (00:65) – though the p<strong>as</strong>sage works only one way for Glen who does not try to<br />
consciously enter or exit the dream world. As Pinedo writes, he ‘lulls himself into a false sense of security. After<br />
all, he is home in bed, his parents are downstairs, and he is surrounded by stereo and television.’ (Pinedo, p.<br />
95). We find the teenager in his bed, falling <strong>as</strong>leep – despite Nancy’s vehement warning ‘Whatever you do, don’t<br />
fall <strong>as</strong>leep!’ (00:58), which she repeats ten years later to her son in New Nightmare (00:73) –, the TV set on his<br />
lap, which plays the US national anthem and announces the time before its picture and sound collapse into<br />
white noise after midnight. Similar to the idea staged in Poltergeist, 15 where ghosts emerge from the television<br />
set’s white noise, <strong>as</strong> they seem to be transported through a canal in which there is no longer any information<br />
submitted, here, Fred Krueger emerges <strong>as</strong> soon <strong>as</strong> the white noise enters Glen’s room at midnight. His red-andgreen-striped<br />
arm reaches out of Glen’s bed and violently pulls him into it. As soon <strong>as</strong> the boy can no longer be<br />
seen, the hole in his bed spouts a huge blood fountain up to the ceiling. Glen’s body is thus dematerialized and<br />
turned into the equivalent of the television’s white noise: a stream of blur which is yet, somehow, the essence of<br />
what w<strong>as</strong> there before. Although there is no violence shown, <strong>this</strong> scene sticks to a viewer’s memory <strong>as</strong><br />
especially gruesome – perhaps in part because the sense of security and comfort suggested by the bed is so<br />
brutally disrupted.<br />
In <strong>this</strong> scene, <strong>as</strong> well <strong>as</strong> in the scenes discussed above, the bed is, first, established <strong>as</strong> a direct gateway<br />
connecting waking reality and dream experience. In Nightmare 1’s horrific context it is definitively detached<br />
from positive connotations of repose and refuge <strong>as</strong> the bed <strong>as</strong> a safe space turns into a place of sudden and<br />
violent death. By blurring the boundaries between reality and dream, which is done by aesthetic and narrative<br />
means, <strong>as</strong> well by the fact that harm experienced in a dream affects the real person, Nightmare 1 further draws<br />
our attention to the circumstance that the bed is where a profound ontological insecurity is established <strong>as</strong><br />
dream and reality merge into one. We encounter <strong>this</strong> phenomenon in our everyday lives when an element out<br />
18