I have been enjoying Amazon Prime live channels lately. One of them is called Horror Stories and they like to play the 1988–1990 series Freddy's Nightmares. This is a spinoff anthology television show featuring the iconic dream stalker as your host. Each episode deals with some situation involving dreams and terror.
As I watch this all I can think about is the quality of television in that time period. These shows didn't have CGI or digital effects, everything was done with practical effects. That is what makes them so much fun. You can tell they are filming on a set. Sometimes the lighting is weird, the fog is a little much and you can pretty much tell how they did an effect. But I don't care. In fact, I think that is part of why I like watching it.
There is also a lot of nostalgia here for me.
I was 12 to 14 years old when this show was on. That was right around the time I was getting over my fear of horror movies and starting to actually love them. I remember when Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers were scary to me. I knew they weren't real of course, but that doesn't matter much when you're a kid. Your imagination takes care of the rest.
I was also at that age where I started wanting to see this stuff instead of avoiding it. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to see the monster. I wanted to see the special effects. I started realizing that there was somebody under all that makeup and people behind the camera figuring out ways to scare the hell out of you.
And instead of ruining it, that made me like it even more.
I think watching Freddy's Nightmares now takes me back to that time more than I realized at first. It isn't just Freddy. It's everything. The clothes, hairstyles, cars, music, houses and the way everything looks on film. Even stupid little things in the background will catch my attention. That was the world I knew when I was 12 or 13 years old.
There was no internet sitting in your pocket. If you wanted to know about a horror movie, you might see something about it in a magazine or hear about it from somebody at school. Going into a video store and walking through the horror section was an experience by itself. Half of those VHS covers were probably better than the movies inside, but you didn't know that yet. You picked one up, looked at the pictures on the back and wondered if you were brave enough to watch the damn thing.
That was part of the fun.
I think there was also something about being that age. I was old enough to understand that Freddy wasn't going to come get me, but still young enough for there to be a tiny part of my brain that wasn't completely convinced of it. Horror still had that little bit of danger to it.
You don't get that back as an adult.
Now I can watch something that would have scared the shit out of me back then and I'm looking at the makeup or wondering how they pulled off an effect. I still love horror, but I love it differently.
Not to crap on what is being put out today, but the market is so saturated with content that so much of it just blends together. Everything looks perfect. The effects are perfect. The picture is perfect. They can create anything they want on a computer and make it look real.
But real doesn't always mean better.
Give me the rubber monster sometimes.
Give me the fake wall with somebody standing behind it. Give me the fog machine working overtime. Give me the gallon of fake blood that obviously came out of a hose somewhere off camera. There is something fun about knowing that a bunch of people had to sit around and figure out, "Okay, how the hell are we going to make this work?"
Maybe some of this is just me getting older. Every generation probably reaches a point where they look back at what they grew up with and think it was better. I'm sure nostalgia is doing some heavy lifting here.
But that's okay too.
Because when I sit down and Freddy's Nightmares happens to be playing, I'm not judging it against whatever new horror series came out this year. I'm just enjoying it.
For a little while I'm remembering what it was like to be 12 or 13 years old and discovering this stuff for the first time. Back when horror was still scary enough to make me nervous, but I was finally brave enough to keep watching.
I think that's the part I miss.
Not being a kid necessarily. Not 1988 or 1989.
I miss discovering it.
There was a point where horror went from something I was afraid of to something I loved, and I didn't know at the time that I was going to carry that love with me for the rest of my life.
Sometimes an old cheesy television show is all it takes to remind me of that.