A Nightmare On Elm Street Film Analysis

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven in 1984. It was a critical success and went on to earn twenty-five-point-five million dollars and spawned several sequels, a remake, a television series, and comic books. With this paper I will look to answer four questions pertaining to my experience while watching this film. The first question involves how I distinguished between whether I was feeling fear or whether I was feeling anxiety. I explained that since the scenes I considered fearful involved an actual present danger this they would be categorized as fear. However, I do argue that each fear response is also an anxiety response it's just the matter of whether the danger is shown to be real or not. With the second question I describe what three scenes I found the most fearful and my physiological and emotional response to them. These scenes included the opening scene with Freddy and Tina, the scene where Freddy is brought into the real world, and the ending scene with Freddy and Nancy. I also discuss how Darwin, Schachter and Singer

The first moment happened at the beginning of the movie after the title sequence. The viewer watches as a young woman, who we will come to learn is named Tina, runs through a deserted hallway looking at every opened door to make sure something or someone is not following her. She continues to run and ends up in a boiler room where we see sneak peeks of what she is running from. She soon becomes trapped in an area in the boiler room and, while looking to see if the coast is clear, Freddy pops up behind her and grabs her. During this scene, I began to feel the common symptoms of fear and anxiety including my heart beat accelerating, discomfort, shortness of breath, a fear of dying or injury, and jumping when Freddy popped up. I may have also said a cuss word or