1, 2 Freddy's coming for you....

”The whore, she's corrupted, she dies first. The athlete. The scholar. The fool. All suffer and die at the hands of whatever horror they have raised, leaving the last to live or die, as fate decides. The virgin." - The Director (Sigourney Weaver)

 After watching The Cabin in the Woods this quote is all I can think about while watching typical slasher films anymore. It sums up (with minor differences in character tropes) almost every classic slasher movie around, including The Nightmare on Elm Street. We start in a suburban location with "The Whore" in this film, Tina, who has been having nightmares of a man with knives for fingers (it's apparently not that weird at all that her boyfriend had seen the same man in his sleep as well). Tina later has sex with her boyfriend, "The Fool" trope in my opinion. She dies first of course in a brutal way (no matter how corny it is it's still brutal) in her underwear. The next to go is her boyfriend, another supporting character who is not really useful to the story and I hate to say it but neither is Johnny Depp's character. The only really important character is Nancy, the Final girl or "The Virgin" who faces off with the deformed monster, Freddy, at the end.

The Final girl is important in these slasher films because the audience (male and female) are rooting for her. We see her lose her friends and struggle with dealing with the monster. She gets character development. She's doesn't have sex and is usually very smart and strong (emotionally and sometimes physically). In the article, John Carpenter is quoted as saying that the Final girl and the killer share a link, which is sexual repression. Nancy doesn't have sex in the film and Freddy is continuously taunting her and using sexual violence to do so (maybe this is his way of getting the repression out?). The knife hand in the bath tub is a really creepy scene and it's frightening because you're thinking what if that happened to me? And I don't mean what if  Freddy Krueger actually existed and did that. I mean that Nancy is in a vulnerable state, naked, in the bath usually a place where you're exposed and helpless. And this is probably why the shower scene in Psycho also gives off that same creepy feeling. It would be a terrible way to die.

However, this is from a female's point of view of watching the film. I love horror movies. I've watched plenty and I've been beginning  to wonder what the male audience feel while watching scenes like that. Being in the killers (the man's) point of view or perspective in that certain scene but also knowing the character development and sympathizing with the victim (always the woman)  do they identify with the killer or do the identify with the victim?

But anyway, back to the sexual repression of Nancy and Freddy, one of the links between them. Carpenter goes on to say that the repression of the Final girl comes out when she eventually kills the monster. Since this is a class about the 1980's I was thinking about how this could relate to what was happening during the time this film came out and I kept relating in back to the fact that the 80's were when AIDS was first discovered in the US. People were finding out that sex could actually kill you. The 80's also showed a rise in conservatism due to Reagan being president and the founding of the "Moral Majority". So, in Nightmare On Elm Street. the girl who has sex is the one who dies first along with her boyfriend and Glen who wanted to have sex with Nancy. Nancy, the character who doesn't have sex stays alive throughout the film and gets her sexual repression out by killing Freddy who taunts Nancy in sexual ways. Thinking of the film in terms of what's happening in the 80's, Freddy is AIDS and is killing teenagers who have sex. The girl who doesn't have sex lives and confronts "AIDs" and tries to kill it while getting her sexual repression out but in the end, is still trapped by it. A true nightmare.

Am I crazy for thinking of this analysis? Who knows. But in the end the Nightmare on Elm Street. is still a classic horror film and a good, fun, cheesy one!  

Blade Runner

This is the first time I've ever watched Blade Runner in full. I do remember specific scenes from it like when Pris grabs Deckard around the neck with her legs and Roy going after Deckard and howling at him. I think that when I was younger and tried to watch this film I must've been like "this is way too weird for me" and zoned most of it out. However, while watching the film during class I was still sort of having that same feeling. The film is a bit slow and hard to understand when you first watch it. You are left with so many questions and not enough answers. I think that the voiceover that was brought up in the reading could've helped with the confusion a little bit but I'm not sure. After the discussion we had in class the movie made much more sense to me and I could see the many deeper themes within.

The central theme of Blade Runner is the question of humanity. Who is a replicant and who is actually human? A psychological test has to be taken to discover this. The test has a number of questions focusing on empathy, being it the sign of one's humanity. The replicants in the film are shown as being much more empathetic than the actual humans, especially those who are on the streets. They are cold and impersonal to each other, not even seeming to care that a woman is getting shot at right in the middle of the streets (even if she is just a replicant how would they know?) This is juxtaposed with the replicants who obviously care about each other and have actual emotions. Pris dies in such a dramatic and emotional way and Roy is upset to find her dead. Roy is the character who has the most emotions throughout the whole film but yet he is the one who is supposed to be the robot. In comparison, the supposed "hero" of the film is Deckard and he has almost no emotions. He treats Rachael as if she's an object during the "love" scene. Basically, by the end the audience is questioning whether Deckard is a real human or a replicant. I think that this is what Ridley Scott is getting at. What makes someone a real human? And, will this be our future? Will we be totally null of emotions and empathy for other people and animals? Will there be no nature left in the world? These are questions brought up while watching the film.

I also thought that Blade Runner was very cinematic and a visually stunning film. In "Building Blade Runner",  Klein writes  that "When (Blade Runner) came out in 1982, many critics called it the success of style over substance, or style over story. But the hum of that Vangelis score against the skyline of L.A. in 2019, as the film opens, continues to leave a strange impact on artists and filmmakers." This impact can be seen so much in movies and art now a days. While watching the film the one thing I kept thinking is how familiar the dystopian like city and panoramic shots looked to me and then it came to me. It looks like Nolan verse Gotham city. The color schemes and atmospheric smoke and lighting are directly paralleled in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. 

 Not only that but the actor who plays Roy was also in Batman Begins. I think that this was more than just a coincidence and that Nolan was acknowledging the influence of Blade Runner on his films.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

To me, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of those classic films that can be seen over and over again and you can find something that you never noticed about it before in previous watching's. This was definitely certain while I was watching it in class. One of the first new things that I noticed was the amount of smoke and fog that is found in the film. In fact, while watching one of the first scenes with the kids sitting around the table I noticed what looked like cigarette smoke billowing around them which made it seem like the setting was a bar filled with adults rather than a bunch of kids sitting around playing Dungeons and Dragons.

This was surprising to me because before I had always thought of E.T. as a kids film about a boy who befriended and shared feelings with an alien and it was as simple as that. After re-watching the movie I think that it has much deeper issues impacted into it including the breakdown of the American family. This cultural anxiety is implicated in the film so much. The running theme of there being no father around in the family, as he's "in Mexico with Sally" and the mother being so distressed by this she doesn't even notice that her kids are housing an alien in their room is huge.  Not only that, but all adults (except Mary) in the first half of the film are only shown as mysterious silhouettes or (even more mysterious) shown from the waist down.

This is most prominent for the character of Keys (ha keys, I see what you did there Spielberg). He is not only completely mysterious to the viewer in the beginning of the film but also in a way he is really scary and creepy. Then, his face is actually revealed near the middle/end of the movie and (to me) he is STILL scary and creepy. I never trusted him when he was talking to Elliot about how E.T. had "came to him too." He was about as trustworthy as Elliot's actual father in my mind.

There were some other things brought up in Tomasulo's essay "The Gospel according to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" about the film that I also had never noticed before. I am not very religious and was quite skeptical about how E.T. related to it before reading the essay but now that I have, I do see a lot of the Christian imagery being used in the film including E.T. being almost Jesus like and being resurrected and such. The Christian imagery that was brought up that interested me the most though, was the E.T. movie poster basically replicating Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel artwork depicting God creating Adam. The images really parallel each other. 

Overall, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is still an amazing film and will always be a classic no matter how many religious or other comparisons there are and I loved finding new things about it.