My Midterm Paper

I did pretty good on it, so since I'm proud of it, and since it's an easy blog credit, I figured I'd post it. I went with the lens of fairytale.

Birth and Life of the Unquiet Spirit

Once upon a time, a man was born of unusual circumstances. These circumstances, though out of his control and easily lost to time, shaped the events of his life and eventual death. When I read those first two sentences it sounds right to me. It’s something I’ve grown up with, reoccurring again and again in various forms of media. However, thinking it over, it really is something out of a fairytale.

The first obvious connection a person would make here is with the virginal birth of Jesus Christ, but the story goes back even further than that. Throughout all mythology, there seems to be this connection with birth and life. Now it has become a standard device for motion pictures, a card that is played as often as the “stereotypical nerd friend” or the “reluctant hero cop.” In the movie Powder, a pregnant woman is struck by lightning in an astonishing freak accident that tragically takes her life. Her child goes on to live an astonishing, yet tragic, life. In the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort’s birth is the result of the misuse of a magic spell meant to serve his greedy mother. Voldemort himself then goes on to be the evil heel that misuses magic to further his own greed. Positive events during a birth dictate what kind of protagonist the character will be. At the other end of the spectrum, negative events will decide the type and intensity of an antagonist.

In order to continue exploring this idea, I decided compare and contrast the two furthest ends of the spectrum. On one side I have the nativity story of Jesus Christ, as told in countless Christmas specials. On the other side I have the evil child predator Freddy Kruger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. At first glance you may not think there is a connection between the two, but upon closer inspection I found that the two are both part of the same system of human mythology.

In 1984, when the first Nightmare on Elm Street was released, there was very little religious connotation to the movie. In fact, writer/director Wes Craven has said that much of the concept is based on Eastern teachings of transcendence. One of the few specifically biblical references is found in the nursery rhyme the children in the movie sing.

“One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, you better stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again.”

I believe that the few biblical references that did make it in are, in fact, seeds for what the Freddy Kruger character will evolve into in the later installments. Joseph Campbell, in his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, talks of the monomyth and how people as a whole will push our characters towards a heroic ideal, quite often something like Jesus. It seems to be the same with our villains, pushing them ever closer to Satan. Freddy Kruger started off as a vengeful spirit full of hate. By the third movie, he had become demonic in nature.

Where the second installment of the series had looked deeper into the psycho-sexual aspects of the story, specifically the fear of homo-eroticism in 80’s culture, the third would begin exploring the religious overtones of the series. A lot of this I attribute to Frank Darabont’s involvement in writing the script. Darabont frequently uses religious iconography in his movies, an interesting trait as I didn’t find any specific statements he has made about his faith. In fact, he has been quite critical of the Christian faith in many of his films, a trait shared by one of his collaborators, Stephen King. But if you watch The Shawshank Redemption, a movie shared between the two, you will see that, at the end, the protagonist rises from under the ground, hits a messianic pose, and is then baptized in the falling rain water.

In this 3^rd movie, Freddy Kruger is described as, “the unquiet spirit,” by the ghost of his mother, a nun named Sister Mary Helena. She also describes him as, “the bastard son of 100 maniacs.” Before, the back-story only consisted of Freddy Kruger being a child molester that an angry mob had burned alive. Now, the back-story is that Freddy Kruger’s mother was a nun who worked at an asylum for the criminally insane. Just before closing for the holidays, she was accidentally locked inside with the inmates. The inmates kept her hidden, raping her for days. When she was found, she was half dead and with child. This is by far the polar opposite of Jesus Christ. In the nativity story, a regular woman is blessed with a divine child on what will become Christmas. Freddy comes into being over the holidays, but it is a divine woman who is cursed by a legion of evil men. Jesus’s actions will see to it that his mother has eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. Freddy’s actions will lead to his mother killing herself, forever battling and being in torment by the demons that brought about his birth.

As the series continued, the substance of the piece began to dry up. As this happened, what was once subtext was brought forward and became the only text. The series relied more and more on the Eastern philosophy, Christian iconography, and the archetypes that were all over-explored and used up. The philosophy became confused gibberish, the iconography became blunt and tacky, and the archetypes became stereotypes. Something else I find of note is that, as the violence became more explicit, the sexual overtones became more implicit. Sure, like most horror franchises there were a number of bare breasts thrown in as an attempt to make more money. What I’m referring to is the psycho-sexual exploration like the 2^nd in the series had done. It seemed that the later part of the series was trying to hide the sexual nature of things, such as designing a tunnel to hell to look vaginal. Doing this tied the concept of sex to the evil nature of Kruger. It was as if the audience had said that it was okay to watch young teens die, but not to watch them have sex.

According to Bryan Stone, and his book Faith in Film, the reason for the virginal birth of Christ was to illustrate to humans that we cannot save ourselves. Perhaps the vile birth of Freddy Kruger shares a similar purpose. Maybe it illustrates that, contrary to reality, no actual human could be so evil. One would have to sell his soul or come from hell to be so evil as to kill helpless children in their sleep. In the last movie of the series that is just what happens. In a flashback, we are shown Freddy as he is being engulfed in flames. Three sperm shaped demons offer him power, and he accepts it and them into his body.