Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: From Pennywise to Freddy Krueger: The Monsters of Adolescent Fear

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and in this video, we are continuing our conversation about, allegedly, the only thing we have to fear: fear itself. In my last video essay, I discussed how monster stories for little kids can be used to help conceptualize and manage fear, through media like picturebooks and animated movies. Monsters are infamously difficult to define, in no small part due to their tendency to occupy spaces beyond everyday definitions of human life and culture, and it is precisely that indefinable nature that often makes them so scary. For young children, that makes monsters a useful medium for conveying the message that sometimes the unknown or the different is not actually something that you have to fear. After all, when you’re three, most things are unknown, so learning to be open to uncertainty (within safe boundaries) can be a helpful lesson.

            But what happens when these kids get a little bit older? What monsters reveal the world of adolescent fears? That is what we’re going to dig into for this video. As you may imagine, things are going to be a lot less cuddly this time. We will be discussing the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and also the most recent two-movie adaptation of IT. Obviously, all horror media is meant to be scary, but I chose these examples because their respective monsters not only cause fear, but are literally fueled by it. Most vampires, for example, theoretically don’t really care if you’re scared or not; they just want to suck your blood. But Freddy Krueger and the titular IT require fear to exist, and their favorite targets are adolescents.

            So before we get started, a note on IT: most of the scholarship that I found and will be quoting from is about the novel, but I will be using this scholarship to inform my reading of the recent films, because that’s what I’ve seen. I have not actually read the book at this juncture. Is this best scholarly practice? No, probably not. Is the book a gaping hole in my monster-and-child knowledge base? Yeah. But it’s really long, and I already know from the movies that, while analytically, there’s tons of interesting stuff there, I just personally don’t click with the story all that much, so my motivation to read a thousand-plus page book is kind of low. I’m just not that much of a Stephen King guy, if we’re being totally honest with each other here. So this is the best I got. This means that this video is not going to include a discussion of That Infamous Scene from the book – if you know you know – because, while I have certainly been made aware of it, I haven’t read it, and obviously adaptations don’t include it. (If the previous sentence confused you, go look it up, because I don’t want to be demonetized.) I will, however, draw from the scholarship on the novel that does apply to the film adaptations, as well as just focusing on how the movies choose to portray the fears that fester in early adolescence.

            So with those disclaimers out of the way, let’s establish what exactly I mean by “adolescence.” Adolescence, you will not be surprised to hear if you have listened to even one second of this channel, is socially constructed. Like childhood, it is the category and associated meanings that a given culture places around a particular block of the human lifespan, but those meanings are highly variable across time and space, perhaps even more variable than childhood itself, and that’s also extremely variable. Adolescence is associated with puberty, which is, of course, a series of biological processes of physical and chemical maturation, as the body transitions to the forms it will inhabit during adulthood. What this period of physical transition means, and the roles that people in the midst of this transition play in society – those depend heavily on all the usual suspects: gender, race, class, and in this case especially, historical time period. For much of Western history, “adolescence” as its own category was not necessarily conceptualized as a cohesive thing. As kids got older and more physically capable, they mostly just started taking on the roles that they would assume as adults. For working classes, this often meant leaving the home for apprenticeships for boys or placement in domestic services for girls. Even that narrative leaves aside the work that pre-pubescent kids did in agricultural and factory settings, and there’s obviously another narrative entirely for kids of color, especially enslaved children, for whom “childhood” and “adolescence” barely even applied as far as white supremacist hegemony was concerned. That is not to say that those kids weren’t actually, in fact, kids – they were – but they certainly weren’t treated as such. Their lives were not organized as such within the mainstream power structures.

            And all of that cultural stuff is in place before we even get to anything resembling a modern conception of “adolescence,” which, along with the word “teenager” itself, didn’t really take shape until the twentieth century. This development coincides with this period of life now being increasingly associated more with high school, as opposed to the beginnings of the trade or career that you’d be doing the rest of your adult life. As the decades passed and fewer teens were working full time, their lives began to be organized less like adults’ and more like they were as children, but still with that distinct difference that come with the physical and cognitive changes of puberty and the years post-puberty. So they became cemented as their own thing, their own category – especially their own consumer category. If they were going to have the leisure time of non-working people (or at least part-time working people), then they could surely use that time to spend (their families’) money. A lot of the modern understanding of adolescence comes from the material and media desires that they are not only imagined to have, but are exhorted to have by advertising adjacencies from sea to shining sea.

            So we have this relatively historically new category of person, situated right in between innocent childhood and experienced adulthood, coinciding with a biological period of extreme external and internal change. Should we be surprised that this time period has come to absolutely scare the crap out of us? This is when it can all go wrong. This is the chaos between precious purity and full citizen. Throw gender, race, class, and sexuality in there, and you have plenty of recipes for sociocultural nightmares. Adolescence is ripe for monster-making. Just ask poor pubescent Regan MacNeil. But if the rest of us are scared of adolescents, what do the adolescents themselves fear? As they traverse this new period of life that’s been culturally carved out for them, what are their monsters?

            Wouldn’t you know it? It’s adults.

“WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HAVING FUN”: IT (2017-2019)

            The novel IT takes place in the 1950s and the 1980s, and the recent film adaptation bumps that timeline up to the 1980s and the 2010s. I think the shifted timeline makes a lot of sense for a new adaptation of this story, as the idea of nostalgia is so central to its proceedings. Nostalgia for the 50s has not really become less relevant (unfortunately), but 80s nostalgia is now the domain of the currently middle-aged – many of whom now have kids around the ages they were then, and a select few of whom are the ones making the movies. So the 80s is now the setting of the summer that seven thirteen-year-olds are made to be very, very afraid.

            But the thing is, they’re already afraid. As a very quick run-down, we have Richie, nicknamed “Trashmouth,” a crude and vulgar kid with a vulnerable core who is nursing a burgeoning but very hidden queer sexuality. (This is emphasized more in the flashback scenes of the second film in the two-parter.) There’s Stanley, the nervous son of a disappointed rabbi, who is now preparing for his bar mitzvah. Eddie is an angry kid whose deeply unpleasant mother has him convinced that he is constantly suffering from allergies and ailments. Ben is the bookish and fat new kid. Mike is one of the only Black kids in town, plus his parents died in a fire, plus he’s being trained to work in the family slaughterhouse which he extremely does not want to do, so he’s got a lot going on. Bev, the group’s only girl, has a sexually predatory father. And all of these kids are social outcasts who are bullied by their peers – often in violent and/or disgusting ways.

            Bill, the most main of the main characters, at first seems to have it relatively easy compared to a lot of his friends. He has a stutter and he is very much also bullied, but the film opens on a sweet moment in his bedroom with his younger brother, Georgie. Bill is sick with the flu, so he can’t go out into the torrential downpour to play like Georgie wants, but he can make a little paper boat for Georgie to chase down the gutter. Georgie is portrayed as an absolutely idyllic child, who hugs his older brother in gratitude and then dashes out into the rain in his iconic yellow raincoat. Everything about him screams childhood innocence – so it makes sense that the story begins at its loss. Even if you know little else about this story, you are probably aware just from cultural osmosis that Georgie’s boat falls down the sewer drain, where it is caught by a waiting Pennywise, the dancing clown. Georgie is wary, then briefly won over, and then unnerved again by Pennywise’s hypnotic voice and promises of popcorn, but it is his fear that Bill will be mad at him that drives him to reach into the drain to retrieve the boat. Pennywise, unfortunately, is no ordinary clown; he is, of course, IT, a cosmic entity that creates and consumes fear – and also sometimes consumes actual kids. He bites off Georgie’s arm and then drags him into the sewer. From the window of a nearby house, an adult sees Georgie crouched over the grate; and then the next time she looks out, she sees no child, but a stain of red washing away with the rain. Neither time does she do anything to intervene.

            So this literal loss of a child is what propels Bill into the unstable space of adolescence. As new teenagers, he and his friends are smack in the middle of the puberty portion of the proceedings. As portrayed by actual kids – and kudos all around for their performances – this group is realistically at different stages of development, with some voices changing, others still high, some stretched by growth spurts that have yet to appear for the others, etc. All of them, however, are very much visibly still children. That’s what makes the way they talk to each other so potentially shocking to adult audiences – although I’m not sure that the characters’ speech is intended to shock. I feel like it’s intended more to remind the audience of the experience of being thirteen. That’s not to say that every thirteen-year-old acts exactly like the Losers’ Club, but yeah, young adolescents often swear and make dirty jokes and just generally test the adult taboo waters – at least with their peers – all while still at half-embodying a shape that’s socially supposed to be innocent. These movies and this story in general have a weird relationship with nostalgia, and I think the sort of gleeful vulgarity of the Losers’ Club is an example of how. It’s like the film is saying, no, take off those rose-colored glasses of innocent childhood, especially if your adult brain has stretched that innocence up through early adolescence. That’s not what it was like. Instead, be nostalgic about how weird and dirty and crude you were at this age instead. Right? It’s presented with this real kind of fondness for the kids’ transgressiveness, and on the one hand, I can kind of dig that, but on the other, it almost wraps back around to romanticizing the experience of youth again, just in an edgier way.

So we’ll definitely come back to that. But meanwhile, as school lets out and summer begins, the kids all start to have terrifying experiences. Mike sees a vision of his parents’ hands pressing against a burning door as they scream for help. Stanley, whose dad has a Modigliani-esque painting in his office that he’s always found unnerving, is chased by the twisted woman in the portrait. Ben, new and friendless, spends his time in the library, following his hunches that this town he moved into is super messed up. There, he encounters the classic ominous red balloon – a symbol of childhood if there ever was one – and the apparition of a headless boy who died horribly in Derry’s past. But these early encounters with IT are not the only things that these kids have to fear. Ben and Mike both join the Losers’ Club after horrifyingly violent (and fatphobic and racist, respectively) incidents of peer bullying, as spearheaded by Henry, whose willingness to carve his name into his victims even freaks out his little henchkids. (And then when I was writing this, I had déjà vu, and then realized I’d written a really similar sentences when talking about Let the Right One In. So the excesses of adolescent cruelty is a well that horror writers can’t help but dip into over and over.) Bev joins the Losers more of her own accord, though we see her experiences of highly gendered bullying that tellingly remain in some ways invisible to the boys. They know that she is constantly slut shamed, but they don’t necessarily know that she gets wet garbage dumped on her head in the girls’ bathroom. Still, this peer violence is one of the main things that binds them together – as reflected in their reclaimed name for themselves. They need each other to face the everyday fear of being an outcast kid, because they sure can’t count on any adults to help them.

Just like the adult looks away from the window when Georgie is killed, a carful of adults drives by as Ben is being physically assaulted by Henry. They look but do not stop. As they pass, a red balloon rises up in their backseat. IT doesn’t even need to do anything here. IT can feed on Ben’s fear without lifting a finger, aided and abetted by the adults who let the conditions of that fear persist without intervention. In “‘They Were Not All Found’: Ecosystems of Child Maltreatment in Stephen King’s IT,” Brennan Thomas grounds his analysis in exactly what his title implies: the different systems that organize and influence a child’s life, and how the narrative of IT shows those adult-governed systems failing at every level. The microsystem, which Thomas explains includes the child’s home, school, friends, and direct social environments, is clearly not going great for any of these kids, except for on the friend level. Their parents are ignorant at best, and actively abusive at worst. Their school has completely failed to protect them in any meaningful way, as has every other institution in Derry, Maine. The mesosystem is the next step, which consists of “interactions between two or more environments of the microsystem and their influences upon each other and the child.” Thomas provides the example of interactions between teachers and parents, and how their relationship can have positive or negative consequences for the child’s “social, academic, and emotional development.” Again, I can’t speak to the novel, but the films make the decision to essentially portray this level as nonexistent. Adults don’t talk to each other; no one from one system is checking in on any of the others to see how these kids are doing in their different environments.

Exosystem is next, which is comprised of “interactions between one or more settings that, while not necessarily part of the child’s microsystem, nevertheless affect one or more of the child’s environments.” Thomas gives the example of how a parent’s employment environment would affect their kids. Now, this one, I know is more prominent in the novel based on my scholarly readings about how King portrays class, especially with IT’s non-Loser victim kids. This is de-emphasized in the films. Although class makes an appearance in, for example, the rundown setting of Bev’s apartment versus Bill’s all-American single family home, the films do not dwell here, and it’s worth thinking about why that may be. There is a somewhat homogenized vision of small-town adolescence presented here: male with one exception, white with one exception, generally middle-class with mainstream pop cultural touchstones. This is another instance of the films’ uneasy, in my view, relationship with nostalgia and memory. Remember how hard being thirteen was? it seems to say, but for many people, thirteen looks a whole lot different than it does in Derry. A single narrative, of course, can’t and shouldn’t represent every possible person, but by flattening even the variations in the exosystem present in the original novel, the films do lose some acknowledgment of the diversity of adolescent experiences.

Finally, there is the macrosystem, or the “cultural, political, or economic climates in which the child is raised, which in turn affect how the child is raised.” Both the 50s in the novel and the 80s in the film were times of intense political and social pressures of conformity in the United States. The Losers’ Club is made up of kids who, for some reason or another, are not capable of fully conforming. Their bodies do not conform, whether that’s due to race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, size, or perceived disability. Their minds do not conform to either childhood or adulthood standards. They cannot “behave.” That is an incredibly vulnerable place to be – an incredibly scary place to be. No wonder IT is having such a field day.

As we’ve already established, IT shapeshifts to embody its victims’ worst fears, and the Losers’ fears are grade-A adolescent. Many of them are tethered to the microsystems of childhood, but also representative of the rapid changes and looming burdens that come with puberty. Stanley’s creepy painting lady, for instance, is a child’s fear of the scary thing in his house that he doesn’t like, but also is associated with his unkind father and the pressure he’s exerting over Stanley’s bar mitzvah, which represents, of course, his coming of age. Eddie is chased by an old-timey leper: a childish, reductive understanding of illness and disability, but very much instilled by his emotionally abusive mother who uses her son’s health as a means of controlling him into adolescence. IT’s guise of Pennywise appears to all of them, as a sort of universal childhood fear, but Richie is the one who admits that his greatest fear is clowns. He, of course, is the clown of his friend group, and the second film reveals that he grows up to be a comedian. But what is a clown if not pure artifice? Literally a painted face, hiding the real one? And this is where the second film leaning into Richie’s repressed sexuality I think was a good idea, even though I feel like they could have leaned a little harder. But the fear that underneath the funny exterior lies something dark and dangerous is definitely a fear that pairs well with the terror of the very self-conscious identity formation that takes place during adolescence.

Bev, meanwhile, gets to deal with menstrual horror. Her fear of her changing body, however, is not just the typical uneasiness that humans encounter when new processes start happening – though that would be enough. But unfortunately, in her case, it’s also tied to her fear of her father and his predatory attention on her. The more she “grows up,” the more dangerous he becomes. He menaces her after he sees that she has bought tampons: “Tell me you’re still my little girl.” She cuts off her hair in an obvious attempt to be less attractive to him and to other men. Later, this hair forms a (really disgusting) rope down the drain, leading to the whispers of lost children, who tell her, “We float. We change.” The hair latches onto Bev and pulls her close before the sink releases a geyser of blood, drenching her and the entire bathroom. Her father cannot see the blood, but the other Losers can. Adolescents frequently can see and understand more than adults give them credit for.

To wit, the Losers’ Club unravels the mystery of IT, who awakens every twenty-seven years to go on a child-scaring-and-killing spree before returning to hibernation. ITs evil influence over the town is the supernatural cause of the adults’ over-the-top apathy about the constant disappearances over the course of that year, though of course this monster is the metaphor for adults’ broader blindness to children’s actual needs. IT also heightens the violence of the most troubled children, like Henry the bully. Henry’s cruelty is a mirror of his abusive father’s, who also happens to be a cop, so that’s a source of authority and control that an adolescent certainly can’t get out from under. All Henry can do is grow harder and meaner in a clearly desperate sort of way (and kudos again to the young actor here). As Henry’s father says himself, “Ain’t nothing like a little fear to make a paper man crumble.” Henry can’t keep himself from crumbling, but he can at least take others down with him. So as both a product and a source of fear, Henry is irresistible to IT. IT exhorts Henry to kill his father, which, I suppose is one way – the only way – an adolescent could escape that situation. It’s not like Henry would have the legal or financial ability otherwise. Not that I or the movie are endorsing Henry’s violence: he is absolutely an abject figure, an embodiment of all the things that can go wrong in adolescence. But those things went wrong at the adult level first.

This, the kids know, is not how things are supposed to be. At various times, different members of the Losers’ Club protest against the deepening danger by pointing out that it’s summer vacation. “We’re supposed to be having fun,” says Stanley. Later, Eddie declares, “This is summer. We’re kids.” They know the cultural script. This is the time they’re supposed to treasure, supposed to be nostalgic for later. Society says that they’re meant to be carefree. The social construct is not matching their reality.

As I was reading some of the scholarship that exists about IT – and there’s a lot of it – I came across an interesting disagreement among some of my sources. In “Nightmares of Childhood: The Child and the Monster in Four Novels by Stephen King,” Sara Martín Alegre analyzes the Losers’ Club (among others) as “sacrificial children” (105). She notes that the children’s lack of control over their own lives is the ultimate source of their fear, and “Nothing, King hints, can protect children from fear, adults least of all” (110). Alegre’s reading is quite critical of how King handles that theme. Honestly, I have not read enough of his works to have a fully formed opinion, but I do think there’s absolutely a conversation to be had about how much of King’s portrayal of child victims in his work is pushing back on the social constructs that disempower kids and how much is, as Alegre argues, exploitation of “disturbing images of victimized and victimizing children” (105-106). But then some of Alegre’s arguments began to give me pause. She writes, “The presence of the supernatural framework – and possibly the sheer excitement of the suspense-driven plot – precludes finding a solution for the issues raised in the realistic background of the text, hence the failure of the novels as texts addressing particular ethical problems ingrained in the behavior of Americans” (112). She goes on to argue, “This is why despite [King’s novels’] high value as entertainment – a problematic value granted by the arguably pornographic use of violence against the child – they are quite irresponsible, even irrelevant as regards the discussion of children’s defenselessness in modern American society” (112).

So, okay. Before I get into the other source that I found that also addresses Alegre’s critique directly, let me offer my own reaction. First and most obviously, I disagree with her assessment of the supernatural framework as a hindrance to narratives about issues that impact children. As evidenced by this channel, I actually think that supernatural frameworks and metaphors can be very useful in illuminating the things that society in general prefers to ignore when it comes to young people. Monsters are eye-catching, attention-grabbing. If you want to make the point “adults pretend that childhood is idyllic and ignore the needs of kids for whom that isn’t true,” doing so with a horrifying eldritch consumer of fear that is sustained by the terror children regularly encounter when adults are pointedly not looking is a pretty good and loud and clear way of getting that across. Like it or not (and Alegre clearly does not), people communicate with monsters. They’re not always the most effective means of communication, but that’s not a fault of monsters or horror or fantasy themselves; that’s just true of any narrative tool, because some people write more effective stories than others. But yeah, I reject the notion that supernatural elements in a story automatically obscure real issues, especially when those real issues like abuse and neglect exist side by side with the demon clown in the narrative.

Then there’s the claim that IT and King’s other works are irresponsible at least in part because they don’t offer solutions to the problems that they raise. To which I would ask, is that the responsibility of a novel to do? Now, that’s a bigger question about the purpose of art than we have time for in the scope of this video, but I would argue most fiction, including realistic fiction, does not generally offer society-wide actionable solutions to, what, like, child abuse in general? I don’t know that that’s really what a novel or a movie is for. Which is not to say that there is no purpose – not at all. I think fiction, at its best, is really good at getting people to personalize large issues and to care about them. At least, that’s what fiction has always done for me in many cases over the course of my life as a reader and viewer of fiction. And that, again, is something I think monsters are particularly good at: they can reveal that which too often goes unnoticed. How well Stephen King’s IT performs these functions is up to your own interpretation. As I said, I’m a bit meh on it myself, which we’ll get into more as I wrap up my discussion of nostalgia in a little bit. And it’s entirely possible if I’d read the novel and particularly That Scene from the novel that I might have stronger opinions about the “pornographic” nature of child suffering in the book. But I do feel that Alegre’s critique is far too sweeping in its condemnation of supernatural horror or of stories that show bad stuff happening to kids in general. And I think, especially in our current age of censorship that so often uses the sanctity of childhood as a cudgel, I have a hard time trusting rhetoric that denigrates anything that isn’t overtly didactic or solution-based when it comes to its portrayals of childhood. There is plenty of fiction – including plenty of horror – that does definitely exploit children’s suffering, but extending that charge to an entire genre, as far as I’m concerned, is also irresponsible.

James M. Curtis, in “‘You’ll Float Too’: King and the Death of Childhood,” directly addresses Alegre’s critique to also disagree with her analysis of the supernatural. He argues, “through King’s refusal to cater to idealized cultural constructions of childhood, we are given a very real opportunity to think critically about the aspects of childhood that we (as a society and culture) have chosen to abject, despite their visceral presence in the lives of real-life children.” He also argues that framing the Losers’ Club as sacrificial children “ignores the power and agency that those same children exhibit.” So how exactly do the Losers exercise their agency? Well, they defeat IT – twice. As kids, they force IT into an early hibernation by following it to its lair. The kids realize that IT needs their fear to complete its kills. So the kids must refuse to be afraid.

That is definitely easier said than done, especially when Bev is caught in ITs “dead lights” – its true form – and floats in a catatonic state. Ben wakes her with a kiss. “True love’s kiss” is a fairytale plot, an archetypical children’s story. Then again, these characters’ first actual kiss as thirteen-year-olds is a milestone that marks that adolescent transition into more “adult” romantic and sexual relationships. It is embracing this specific moment of adolescence that helps to save them. I don’t necessarily love that she is not in a state to consent when it happens, but the two characters had been established as sharing the beginnings of romantic feelings.

Then, IT makes a fatal mistake: it tries to pit the kids against each other. Though fear had formed fractures in their relationships at various points in the film, the Losers love each other fiercely. When IT, in the guise of Pennywise, tries to convince the others to leave Bill and escape with their own lives, it is Richie, who has the greatest fear of clowns, who rushes the entity. From there, IT just keeps making them mad. Bev stabs IT when it wears her father’s face, demonstrating that, though puberty heightens the danger that her father poses to her, she is progressing towards an age where he will no longer have the control over her as he once did. Bill once again asserts that they are not afraid, and IT finally disappears down the well in its lair after experiencing its own fear for the first time.

But though they’ve saved themselves, the Losers’ Club did not manage to destroy IT entirely. Which is fair. IT is an immortal cosmic being, after all. So 27 years later, IT returns, and Mike, the only one who has remained in Derry, sends messages to the now-adult Losers’ Club to bring them all back to finish the job, as they made a blood pact to do as thirteen-year-olds. Those who have left Derry no longer have memories of their encounter with IT, or, indeed, much of their childhoods at all. The fantasy reason for this is another of ITs influences; otherwise, presumably, someone might escape and come back with a larger force to attack. But more figuratively, this is a time-honored practice of adulthood: forgetting childhood. Rewriting it, editing out the worst stuff. Stuffing it into that box of nostalgia, whether it fits or not.

Not all of the Losers can survive the reemergence of their adolescent fears into their adult lives. Those who do, however, defeat IT in a pretty similar way to what they did the first time, after a frankly too-long MacGuffin hunt and the ritual of Chud, which they changed from the book but I don’t think for the better because this version came with a ton of exotifying Native American lore, and honestly it doesn’t actually really lead anywhere, so the less said about it, the better. What really gets IT in the end is not just the now-adults’ anger, but also their belief that they actually can defeat it this time. IT feeds on fear and dies by confidence. In order for the adult Losers to access this confidence, they have to un-repress their memories and connect with their adolescent selves – but they also have to prove that they’ve moved beyond them. They throw all of the “small” fears that IT has mimicked back at the entity. Oh, wow, big eldritch being, scaring kids who already have terrible lives by turning into a clown. That’s not that hard to do. Getting adults to forget the fears of childhood and adolescence, to turn away from their younger selves and from the new generation – that’s unfortunately not that hard, either. But when the bonds forged during that most turbulent time persist, and then adults, with greater power than their adolescent selves had access to, actually face what happened to them, then they can finally outgrow the fears that once haunted them. IT diminishes into the size of a horrible baby and makes it easy to reach right in and take ITs heart. IT says, “Look at you. You’re all grown up.” And with that, IT is no more.

At the end of the second part of the movie, we see a flashback of the adolescent Losers’ Club, riding their bikes in town. This is framed as a very sort of idyllic image, and it indulges in a less critical sort of nostalgia. I’m always harping on the fact that narratives can both challenge and uphold social constructs simultaneously, and I think that the IT films are a perfect example of that – with the same exact construct both times, no less. It’s a fine line, because I am a big proponent of treating your memories of your child or adolescent self with fondness. I appreciate that the films encourage audiences to remember actual truths of adolescence, warts and all – the crude jokes and mean jabs among friends, the fear of and disdain for adults who you knew weren’t deserving of all the power they had over you, the ride-or-die friendships when it really felt like it was your group against the world. But even that can get romanticized, and while I suppose it’s better than the standard childhood innocence romanticization, it still kind of lets adult audiences have a softer landing that I don’t know if the story really earns. Like, it’s such a bleak picture up until now, but hey, then they win the day, and weren’t they great when we were kids? Isn’t it cool that they managed to recapture the imagination and togetherness of adolescence – which this narrative is definitely naturalizing, even as it acknowledges the constructedness of other aspects of our ideas of what adolescence means. So I don’t know. Something about IT just leaves me a little bit cold. I think it shines a light on the terrors of early adolescence quite well, but at the risk of sounding like Alegre’s critique, which I literally just said I don’t think holds water, I still feel like there’s not a ton of follow-through. It just seems like there’s still some essentializing and universalizing of what it means to be an adolescent through the Losers’ Club that undercuts the critique of how the rest of the society essentializes and universalizes childhood and adolescence.

Regardless of my mixed feelings, IT certainly does capture the rock-and-hard-place aspect of early adolescence. Still a child in terms of in terms of your diminished social power, but increasingly aware of all the bigger things there are to fear in the world. Less precious, less innocent to adults, but not yet more worth listening to or believing. Liable to be forgotten, even by your future self.

And all of that’s just the beginning of adolescence. Things don’t necessarily get easier once you hit high school. Just ask our next set of 80s teens in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

“I WAS JUST TRYING TO PROTECT YOU”: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

            A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most 80s thing that I’ve ever seen. This one was new to me for this video, because I’m not much of a slasher fan, so most of the slasher classics, I’ve missed. Similarly to my attitude towards IT, I think there’s a lot of interesting analysis to be done here, but as far as my personal entertainment goes, it’s just not really my jam. With that said, I did find certain aspects of the film more effective than I really expected to. And there sure is a lot to say about adolescence.

            A Nightmare on Elm Street opens with – what else? – a nightmare. Tina, a teen girl whose name, I’m now realizing, is so on-the-nose that it’s almost a pun, runs through an industrial boiler room. She is pursued by an attacker with a glove tipped by knives, and when she wakes up, there are actual slashes in her white nightgown. At the door, her mother and her mother’s boyfriend seem more annoyed than anything else about Tina’s nighttime screaming. Left alone in her room again, Tina takes the crucifix down from over her bed for protection. This sequence fades into the iconic jump rope rhyme, as hazy angelic children in white chant, “One, two, Freddie’s coming for you.” Already, it’s clear how many horror tropes really trace back to this film, and it’s also clear that childhood and adolescence are going to be absolutely central to the proceedings.

            Despite opening with Tina, she is not destined to be our protagonist. That honor goes to Nancy, Tina’s best friend, who she meets up with the next day. Both Tina and Nancy have boyfriends, and if we’re familiar with slasher tropes literally at all, we can already pretty much predict the outcomes for this group of four. Tina’s boyfriend is Freudian-ly named Rod – and we are going to have to get Freudian with this one, it’s unavoidable – and he is the most sexually aggressive and also just aggressive-aggressive of the four kids. He’s got a switchblade, even! Nancy’s boyfriend is Glen, and they are the more cautious couple to the very sexually active Tina and Rod. But one thing all the kids have in common is that they’re all having the same nightmare, in which they are pursued by the same knife-gloved maniac in a striped sweater, whose hat barely covers a horribly burned face.

            Tina is particularly freaked out by this, which I think is reasonable, so she asks her boyfriend and her friends to stay at her house while her mother is away with her own boyfriend. So broken family number one: check! Tina and Rod have sex, essentially sealing their fate, and then when Tina next sleeps, she meets her end. We get our first full look at Freddy Krueger’s bag of nightmare tricks. His arms grow to horrifying, inhuman length as he pursues Tina – and yes, it’s phallic, most stuff about Freddy Krueger is. He disappears and reappears, demonstrating that he is not governed by physics, but by horrible dream logic alone. He takes off his face to reveal his skull, and he cuts off some of his own fingers in a classique castration substitute. And then he goes in for the kill, and what a kill it is. Tina is pierced by his knife gloves over and over. She is pulled from the bed, thrashing and screaming, dragged up the wall and onto the ceiling of her bedroom by what appears to the horrified Rod as an invisible force. Once she is well and truly bloodied, Freddy releases her, and Rod, understandably, beats it out of there, leaving Tina to be discovered by Nancy and Glen.

            Obviously, the conclusion everyone comes to is that Rod killed Tina, but Nancy continues to be plagued by the nightmares she shared with her late best friend. In one of these dreams, Freddy chases her into her own house, and as she tries to flee, her legs sink into the stairs to the second story. Each step turns into viscous sludge. This was the most effective scare in the film for me, because it really captures that feeling of a nightmare. I’m pretty whatever on the actual slashing of this slasher, but that one sent a real chill down my spine. Anyway, Nancy is sure that something more is going on here, especially since Rod, right before his arrest, insisted that something killed Tina in her sleep. And poor Rod is next – he did kind of suck, but he doesn’t deserve this – as Freddy, invisible in the waking world, twists up his prison cell bedsheet into a noose. Once again, I would be remiss not to mention how phallic this is as the rope creeps across Rod’s neck. The adults assume that Rod’s hanging was self-induced, but at this point, Nancy definitely knows better.

We’re treated to a bit of a pieta image of Nancy holding the dead Rod, which when I watched it the first time, I felt was a bit thrown in for the easy cultural shorthand. I felt similarly about Tina’s crucifix. But as I was writing this, I reconsidered the religious references. While perhaps underbaked, they do fit into the film’s overall attitude towards the failure of culturally sanctioned domains of safety for adolescents. So before we dive into Nancy’s whole arc, let’s look at what we have so far. In “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family,” Pat Gill discusses the way that 80s slashers turn the geography of the American dream into horror settings: “The suburban haven, away from the dangers of the city, not only fails to protect its children, it has become the breeding ground of living nightmares unknown to urban landscapes” (16). The neighborhoods of A Nightmare on Elm Street look like what was packaged to white Americans specifically as the goal: spacious single-family homes, tree-lined streets, material goods for your kids, etc. But the foundations are rotten, because those single families in the homes are crumbling. In addition to Tina’s, Nancy’s parents are also separated, and they are utterly incompetent at every turn, which we’ll delve into further in just a moment. These kids may be surrounded by the trappings of American success, but there is no safety net beneath the big open suburban space. This includes, I suppose, religion – specifically Christianity – despite the 1980s being a real big decade for the coalescence of the religious right, which declared itself the “moral majority” and gifted us with so much of the modern think-of-the-children political rhetoric that persists to this day. So while the film doesn’t necessarily do much with its religious symbolism, it certainly is not culturally or thematically out of place.

Nancy takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of her nightmares, but she is not helped by any adults at all. In fact, even the most well-meaning ones do everything in their power to hinder her efforts – and frankly, “the most well-meaning” is still a pretty low standard in this film. Her mother at least genuinely loves her, though she is a hapless alcoholic. Her dad is the town’s chief of police, which just means that he has more power to not listen to her and to obstruct her investigation. Once again, we see this symbol of order and authority rendered not only useless, but actively unsafe. It would be one thing if Nancy’s parents just didn’t believe her story about a murderous nightmare-hopper because, let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t, either. But when Nancy describes Freddy Krueger, clearly both of them recognize the killer – and yet they still lie and misdirect, even when faced with proof that Nancy is telling the truth. Nancy’s mother doesn’t come clean until Nancy forces a confrontation by smashing her bottle of wine.

Only then does she tell her daughter the story: Freddy Krueger was a murderer killing children in the neighborhood. (There is clearly a sexual dimension to his predation implied, though his crimes are kept strictly to “murder” in the script. However, we’ve already seen his knifed hand creep between Nancy’s legs in the bath, so, you know, there’s that. Always interesting to compare what can be seen versus what can be said.) Krueger killed over twenty children around the suburban neighborhood in which Nancy and her friends lived, but at the trial, it was discovered that “someone forgot to sign the search warrant in the right place” and so Krueger got off scot-free. To which I say: hmmm. I reacted to this film a couple months ago when I first watched it over on Patreon – and if you want raw reaction videos, consider joining! – and I mentioned there that this rang pretty false to me. Like, if he killed twenty children, there’s probably going to be some evidence unrelated to a single search warrant that allows him to not just be released. I think that here again the film is trying to do a “systems won’t keep you safe” thing, where the legal system fails to protect the most vulnerable, which, to be clear, it does, all the time. But also the way that they chose to frame that, with it being a “technicality” that also happens to trivialize the necessity of valid warrants – which everyone living through the winter of 2026 in America can attest to being extremely vital for a functioning and safe society – that’s irritating to me, and also indicative of the sort of muddled politics of the film in general. Like, we’re critiquing the failure of the court system – but in a way that makes it seem like the fault is with too much care for legal rights. We’re critiquing the ways in which adults fail to support or listen to their adolescent children – while demonstrating that mostly through moral panic around divorce and sexually active teens. There definitely is a lot of conservative, even reactionary, ideology baked into these narratives. Gill writes, “Teen slasher films both resolutely mock and yearn for the middleclass American dream, the promised comfort and contentment of a loving, supportive bourgeois family” (17). It’s similar, to me, to the way that IT both critiques and indulges in nostalgia. These films are saying, yes, society has gone all wrong for adolescents, but don’t you really wish it had gone right – where “gone right” still means that mainstream vision of success. We’re not necessarily critiquing the American dream as a narrative; we’re just pointing out that it didn’t happen. The implied solution is to just live that dream better, especially if you’re a parent. As Gill says, slashers “teach hard-hitting conservative lessons about parents’ responsibilities to children” (24). That’s not to say that I think that messages like listen to your kids or don’t lie to them or pay attention to their changing needs are conservative, but representing the failure to do so through mainly divorce is. Thinking back to Thomas’s systems critique, this film keeps everything at the level of the family microsystem, and doesn’t even really acknowledge or imagine that we should maybe consider adolescents’ broader communities, as well.

Anyway, Nancy’s mom explains that the neighborhood parents took matters into their own hands once Krueger was freed. They locked him inside the boiler room he used as a lair – the same setting as the nightmares – and burned it to the ground. Nancy’s mom even has evidence of Krueger’s death in the form of his knife glove. She tells Nancy, “He’s dead, honey, because Mommy killed him.” The language here – the use of the infantile third person, the word “Mommy” – demonstrates Nancy’s mother’s desire to place Nancy back inside that space of early childhood, where the parents could control their children’s environment, both destroying danger and then, crucially, keeping their own violence a secret. But Nancy is too old to be ignorant or innocent anymore. Adolescence is not so easily contained, especially when the parents’ vigilante justice clearly did a number on all of them psychologically. Their secrets fractured their marriages, made them cold and distant, made them untrusting and untrustworthy.

Indeed, even after this point, the parents continue to utterly fail their kids. Nancy’s mom won’t let her out of the house to warn Glen about Krueger, and Glen’s dad, meanwhile, disconnects the phone, irritated by Nancy’s calls. So there goes Glen, sucked into his bed and transformed into a fountain of way more blood than the human body actually contains. The bedroom and the bed itself are the least safe place for any of these teens, despite the childhood bedroom being culturally the place that is supposed to be the most sacred and protected. Suburbia itself, as it has been constructed in the U.S., essentially is built around the childhood bedroom, wrapped in layers of protective space – the rest of the house, the yard, the quiet streets, far from the crime-ridden (read: nonwhite) cities. But with adolescence comes the sexual connotation to the bedroom, transforming this geography into a site of panic and fear. As I just said, I think this film has mixed messages in that regard, but one possible reading is that the adults’ efforts to preserve the bedroom as a space of innocent childhood, and therefore their refusal to address the changing needs of their adolescent children – such as the need for more communication and information – is part of what dooms their kids.

At this point, Nancy knows that no one is coming to save her, so she’ll have to do it herself. She is determined to pull Krueger out of her dream and into the real world where he can be destroyed. She booby traps her own bedroom – acknowledging that it is now an unsafe space, but seeking to exert some control over that – and then tucks her own mother into bed, reversing roles with her even as her mom drunkenly mumbles about how she wanted to protect her daughter. Gill writes that in 80s slasher films, “children either become shallow, selfish replicas of their parents, susceptible to deadly mishaps and grisly predators, or stalwart survivors of an adolescent hell who must relinquish their deficient families in order to create functioning ones of their own” (29). Tina and Rod’s wanton sexual behavior and unhealthy relationship dynamics mirrored the worst of the Elm Street parents’ excesses, showing the broader societal fear that the degradation of the family would be a self-replicating problem. Now, that is more of an adult fear about adolescence than an adolescent fear itself. As Gill points out, “Adolescents in teen slasher films inhabit worlds constructed from ‘myths’ about children of broken homes” (19). But Nancy is forced to face the actual adolescent fear, the true nightmare that Freddy Krueger represents: she is not, and perhaps never has been, protected.

Nancy is brave as hell, and she does take Freddy out of her dream. Except, though she had asked her cop father to be ready for her, he isn’t, so now she’s just trapped inside her own house with Freddy Krueger. She lights Krueger on fire (again), but this only results in him invading her mother’s bed while still alight, burning her and sucking her down into the bed with him. He reappears in Nancy’s room, birthing himself from her sheets. Nancy, realizing that Freddy’s power derives from his victims’ fears, turns to face him and says, “I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing. You’re shit.” And it seems like that does it. Freddy Krueger, the embodiment of unspoken fear, of the terror of children, adolescents, and parents alike, cannot exist in a world where he is not a loathsome secret. He can only chase you if you run, and can only find you if you hide. Nancy refuses to do either.

We are likely all now familiar with the term “Final Girl,” which first appeared in Carol Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover describes this slasher archetype as both an embodiment of terror and the sole possessor of inner strength. Though we see the Final Girl “scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again,” she is the only one who “finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (35). Clover calls out Nancy specifically as “the grittiest of the Final Girls” (38). Clover reads the Final Girl as “boyish,” because she is presented as less sexual than the other girls in her films, and because she is skilled and resourceful in her fulfilment of the classic hero story narrative, which is historically male (40, 41). Clover reads this as taking phallic control of the story. Now, there may well be something to that, given the constant phallic imagery of Freddy Krueger, and Nancy’s (seeming) besting of him.

However, I do think there’s another way of reading the power of the Final Girl alongside Anita Harris’s work, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. By the title, you can tell that we are dealing with a timeline a bit after A Nightmare on Elm Street, though not by that much: the book itself was published in 2004, twenty years after Elm Street, but obviously talks a lot about the cultural milieu of the 1990s leading up to the turn of the century. Harris analyzes girlhood in late modernity, which she says is “defined by complex, global capitalist economies and a shift from state support and welfare to the private provision of services” (3). That is a shift that very much defined the politics of the 1980s. Young women, Harris argues, “have become a focus for the struction of an ideal late modern subject who is self-making, resilient, and flexible” (6). However, since it has always been evident that not every adolescent girl is perceived as achieving those characteristics, or performing them as her society may want her to, girlhood gets divided into two categories: can-do and at-risk. Harris writes, “While can-dos are optimistic, self-inventing, and success-oriented, other young women’s behavior has become a focus for a more general moral concern about juvenile delinquency, nihilism, and antisocial attitudes” (24). Specifically, sexual behavior is associated with the at-risks, as the can-do girl makes sure to safely avoid outcomes like teen pregnancy.

Now, Harris’s analysis of the at-risk girls focuses a lot on race and class, which are present in A Nightmare on Elm Street only by their absence. It’s like how Karen J. Renner in her book on evil children notes that most of horror’s creepy kids are white, because that’s what’s culturally associated with innocence. It’s only a shock if you pair the seeming opposites. Similarly, A Nightmare on Elm Street shows a lily-white world that isn’t the safe suburban haven from the (racialized) cities that these families were promised. So the at-risk girls that are predetermined to be at-risk by a racist and classist culture are not present in this movie, but the film portrays how risk has infiltrated even the white, middle-class late modern world and manifested in highly sexualized figures like Tina. The Final Girl, Nancy, is sort of a twisted can-do girl, because the film acknowledges that, no, actually, the consumerist futurism of late modernity that imagines a girl who can have it all is not real, and the people who espouse that dream are liars, because adults are always lying to kids. But Nancy still embodies many of the attributes of the can-do girl that Harris lays out: it is her individualist resourcefulness, restraint, and self-reliance that make her the Final Girl. I think this is likely another case of critiquing status quo ideologies with one breath and upholding them with the next, but also an interesting way of reading this aspect of Nancy’s character could be that she needs to embody individualism not because it’s a virtue, but because who the hell else does she have to rely on?

Also, crucially: the Final Girl does not actually succeed here. After Nancy declares that she is not afraid of Krueger – the same formula that vanquished IT – it appears that she has set everything to rights. Her friends and her mother are alive again, and she leaves for school on a hazily sunny day. She gets into her friends’ convertible – and then the car starts operating of its own accord. The convertible top crashes down, and it’s patterned like Krueger’s sweater. As the four kids are locked inside, Nancy realizes what’s going on, and she screams out the window to her mother for help. Her mom, clueless as ever, waves happily. Then, as the car speeds away, Krueger’s knifed hand smashes through the door from inside Nancy’s house and pulls her mother inside. And that’s the end of the movie.

Now, I know there’s roughly eight million sequels and reboots to this film, but a) I haven’t seen them, and b) I think it’s important to analyze a film on only the narrative that it includes, not just the opening for future sequels. And to be sure, that is what this is, but it’s also worth thinking about the significance of this ending within the story of Nancy specifically. When I first watched it, I didn’t really know what to do with it, and in some respects, I still don’t. If we’re thinking just about the actual logic of the plot, it’s confusing. It would seem to indicate that the whole final sequence is another dream that Nancy is now trapped in, which would mean that the dead were not actually resurrected. But then, why does Krueger attack her mom, if her mom isn’t even real? The only other explanation is that Nancy did win enough to resurrect four people, but not enough to stop Krueger from becoming even more powerful in the waking world, which makes even less sense. So on a pure story level, I don’t like the ending.

However, the Final Girl not actually succeeding does make the themes of this movie even more bleak and harrowing. Nancy did everything she was supposed to. She was prudent and resourceful and brave. She relied on herself, in the absence of adult support. She literally faced the fear that blights adolescence. And still she fails. So maybe I was wrong with my paraphrase of ol’ FDR at the beginning of the video. Maybe for adolescents, there’s a lot more to fear than fear itself.

CONCLUSION

The National Youth Rights Association provides the following list of rights that are legally restricted for people under the age of majority:

It’s likely that, if you are an adult, at least some of this list may make you feel a little uncomfortable, particularly that last one, which I would understand. Children’s work is a difficult issue, and the solution is obviously not to return to the pre-child labor law era. However, young people’s financial dependence is a major aspect of a system that keeps them legally tethered to adult decision-makers – with far too little recourse if those decision-makers are not doing right by them. And while very young children are not cognitively able to, for example, make medical or educational decisions – those are things that, like, a three-year-old is not going to be able to fully comprehend – these conditions legally persist up through the age of seventeen, when the cognitive argument is really not even relevant anymore. (Also, young people’s input about their own lives could definitely start to be taken into account way earlier than most people would think, but that’s not what this video is about.) I know that everyone likes to toss around the soundbite that the brain doesn’t finish developing until age 25, but fun fact: that is an interpretation of a study that has been so misrepresented that it is just straight-up scientific misinformation. Link to a fuller explainer of that one in the works cited. Now, are there differences between the brains of a thirteen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old, and a thirty-seven-year-old like myself? Yeah, obviously. Do those differences preclude the former two age groups from making and enacting decisions about their own well-being and their own sociopolitical beliefs? No – or at least, they shouldn’t.

It is extremely telling that our popular narratives about the fear-monsters of adolescence explicitly identify those fears as adult oppression. And while many would argue that individual abusive parents, for example, does not systemic oppression make, what else would you call the almost complete legal inability to do anything about abuse – or bullying, or neglect, or any of the other things the Losers’ Club and Nancy and her friends experience? And if adult systems aren’t set up to listen to kids about their own lives, forget about broader issues. Just look at the “Hundreds of K-12 students across the country [who] have received detention or suspension after participating in classroom walkouts to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts.” Per reporting from The Hill, “experts say leaving school grounds is not a form of protest protected under the First Amendment for students, and Republican leaders are warning of consequences for those who participate.” One said Republican “leader” is Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who tweeted, “Young Oklahomans: Free speech is sacred, but truancy robs your future. Stay in school, build skills, and make your voice heard responsibly.” It’s a good thing that I pre-script these, because if I were reacting to that live, I would just devolve into incoherent snarling here. Rest assured that I did just that as I was writing this section. More intelligibly, this is a clear example of the outsize power that adults have over adolescents. Now, if an adult walks out of their job to protest, can they receive disciplinary action? Yes. (Do I think your job should discipline you for participating in protesting ICE? Of course not, and they’re garbage if they do.) But Stitt’s little statement about the perils of truancy is particularly inane when the punishment being meted out is suspension – that is, the denial of a period of education. And while, at least in some cases, threats of the importance of the “permanent record” to colleges, for example, can be exaggerated, punishments like suspension do loom large over young people’s fears about their future opportunities. Plus, there’s the perennial issue of punishments like suspension being meted out more liberally to students of color, often hand in hand with increased actual policing and incarceration of those kids for so-called disciplinary issues. A link to a study about that, as well, in the works cited. So yeah, adolescents do have a lot to be afraid of, and when they try to do something about those fears, like raising their voices in protest, adults just find more ways to “scare them straight.”

So then what are we adults so afraid of? Why do we – and by we, I mean our systems – exert such outsize pressure? Adolescents are visibly growing up. They are poised to join the ranks of adults – and too many adults in power, both on a macrosystem and a microsystem level, are very afraid of those adolescents becoming the wrong kind of adult. Our society creates systems to try to circumvent adolescence altogether, to go straight from innocent, ignorant childhood to carbon-copy adulthood by denying information and opportunities to young people. Think book bans or gender-affirming healthcare bans.

For all the flaws that I see in stories like IT and A Nightmare on Elm Street, at least they show that adolescents can fight back – if not legally, then in their own, oblique ways, as they address the problems that adults refuse to acknowledge that they even have. I look at those student walk-outs, and I think that the Pennywises and Freddy Kruegers of the world have their work cut out for them. But it’s up to the rest of us – the rest of us adults – to not be the adults in those movies. It’s time for all of those who have held onto power over young people for far too long to face their own fears this time.

Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end of another long one. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion, and I’d love for you to keep it going in the comments section. What would you identify as the monsters of adolescent fear? For more conversations like this, make sure to subscribe to the channel. I put up video essays every other Sunday, and on the off-weeks, I am reading from my YA werewolf manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth. Come for the gruesome transformations, stay for the gay awakenings. My Patreon is down below if you’d like to support my work and get monthly perks like reaction videos and polls for future topics. Any engagement at all, even just a like, is helping me to start a program of book clubs and educational mentorship services for teens, to hopefully create a space where young people are actually listened to. So thank you so much for watching and helping me pursue that goal. I’ll have more on that topic very shortly. Until then, take care, and I’ll see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

  • IT and IT: Chapter Two, dir. by Andy Muschietti (2017, 2019)
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. by Wes Craven (1984)

References:

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