Whatever happened to movies like Psycho and The Birds? Alfred Hitchcock is lauded as one of the horror/thriller genre’s most significant forebears, yet there seem to be no attempts made by modern day Hollywood to recapture his unique approach. These films were effecting in their lack of blood and guts, yet somehow the genre has come to entirely ignore that concept, leaving us with a trend of gory one-upmanship. Scary movies no longer leave anything to the imagination (unless the MPAA insists on it), and the supposed thrill that an audience gets from seeing so much human destruction takes utter precedence over the kinds of subtleties Hitchcock tended so masterfully. Nightmare on Elm Street lives safely in this trend; an absurd, callow, unoriginal assemblage of grisly vignettes with no obligation to story or plot or character development or, well, anything that might make a movie worth your nine bucks. To put it another way: I want my nine bucks back.
Peter Wertz
Wertz of Wisdom 
