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Sean Stone
12/10/02

A Nightmare on Elm Street…and Every Other Block

“1, 2 Freddy’s coming for you,

3, 4 Better lock your door,
5,6 Grab your crucifix,
7,8 Better stay up late,
9, 10 Never sleep again.”
- theme song from A Nightmare on Elm Street

At a glance, the kids of Elm Street are a good representation of 1980s teenagers. Indeed,

they’re what Gary Heba calls, “a stereotypical view of white, apparently middle-class teens”, yet

systematically they are hunted down and killed in their sleep (Heba 5). The story of A

Nightmare on Elm Street originates from Los Angeles Times articles pertaining to teenagers who

dreamed they were going to die, and mysteriously did, as they slept. For the real life teenagers

as well as the teens of Elm St., dream and reality blur until they are one, and death within sleep

really kills the body. So what is it that’s killing the Elm Street kids? The past. Killed by a

vindictive, vigilante mob of Elm Street parents for having murdered over twenty kids in the

neighborhood, Fred Krueger comes back to reap his revenge on their children in a realm where

no parent can protect the child: within the mind. Freddy, like the monolithic American system,

is perceived dead, or at least subdued, by the activists of the 1960s and ‘70s turned parents, but

as they sleepwalk past the truth, their children remain haunted by the parents’ deeds. Even

Director Wes Craven’s title A Nightmare on Elm Street, taken from an article referring to

President Kennedy’s assassination, connects the 1980s to tragedies of the 1960s surrounding the

death of Kennedy and the subsequent Vietnam War Era. While Freddy seems far from

representing the American institution, he’s the product of two of its pillars: Church and State.

His mother, a Catholic nun, was raped by a hundred maniacs in a psychiatric institution. The
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product is a sadomasochistic boy with an abusive stepfather and an absent mother who actually

gets acquitted of his crimes because of the flawed system: a bureaucratic error in the search

warrant. A primordial, timeless evil, Freddy the ghost evolves beyond a ruthless killer into a

purveyor of nightmares. Freddy ruthlessly intertwines himself into kids’ minds, mastering the

so-called sanctity and security of their inner-selves just as he tears through them in the physical

world that seems so picturesque and safe. In a world where danger constantly lurks, a teenager

must struggle with the superego, internally and externally, to survive to a harmonized existence

in society, or the established ego.

Freddy bears much resemblance to the Judeo-Christian Devil. He lurks in the

subterranean boiler room amongst hellish flames. His disfigured face seems charred by the very

flames of hell itself. In fact, as Tony Williams points out, the demons that give him his power in

the afterlife “represent the Holy Trinity’s Dark Side – demonic Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”

(Williams 236). If God is an omnipotent, ominpresent, omniconscious force in the world, then

Freddy, as he blasphemously proclaims to Tina when he holds his finger-knives up to his charred

face, is “God” of the dream world (NOES). He has infinite power, it seems, over the lives of the

teenagers in a realm without God the protector, or any protector of the “good”. Freddy can

shape-shift, manipulate elements within the dream world environment, as becomes more evident

as the series goes on, and even defy all scientific laws; for example, he slices off his own fingers

to watch them regenerate. His death is practically impossible, as evidenced by the seven sequels

to the film, yet at the same time, spiritual elements are often invoked to ward off this evil spirit.

In the first film, Nancy, the survivor, is the only character to incur support from the Lord

‘Almighty’ to actively reject the other potential father/God-figure of Freddy; she says her prayers

before she goes into final battle with him and often reaches for a crucifix for comfort. “5, 6
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Grab your crucifix”, sing the child ghosts of Freddy’s earlier victims; indeed, the crucifix is a

powerful weapon, for Freddy must knock it off the wall before he can press through it to watch

Nancy sleeping. On the other hand, Nancy invokes Balinese spiritual dream skills in reabsorbing

any energy she had fed to the bad dream spirit so as to banish him from her world. Something

must be said, however, for the fact that though Freddy’s corpse is even doused with holy water in

the third installment Dream Warriors nothing holy ever seems to kill Freddy, perhaps because

the Christian elements are simply too dogmatic; in effect, what is the Devil if not a parallel of

God of the opposite extreme? Therefore, Freddy, the Devil of the mind, wages a vicious struggle

with the youths, symbolizing a constant external struggle for order and structure in a perceivably

settled and secure environment.

Crucially, Freddy the Devil dwells within nightmares, and thus within the human mind,

indicating something dark and sinister within. The superego, a repressively dogmatic force like

God or the Devil, may superficially seem to be a correcting and “ordering principle”, but in a

world where the id runs rampant, the superego crushes down upon the psyche in full force

(Markovitz 5). Christopher Lasch explains, “The decline of institutionalized authority in an

ostensibly permissive society….encourages instead the development of a harsh, punitive

superego that derives most of its psychic energy…from the destructive, aggressive impulses

within the id” (Lasch 11-12). Freddy the Devil is a product of the repressive superego in the

1980s, where “aggressive energy, the outward expression of which is prohibited by civilization,

turns inward” (Edmundson 127). Springwood, Ohio, where the nightmare begins, is anywhere,

USA, a small, white, middle-class suburb in the midst of the economic boom of the Reagan

years. “Every town has an Elm Street,” Freddy declares in the 6th installment (Freddy’s Dead).

The social chaos of the 1960s and 1970s has worn off to a state of pristine calm and freedom
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where the kids no longer need to rebel against the institutions and the “benevolent nuclear father

imagery [is] resurrected with great vigor” (Caputi 3). The culture of narcissism, so termed by

Christopher Lasch, at the end of the 1970s, creates parents overly focused on the protection and

security of the family, symbolized in “Reagan’s proposed space-based nuclear ‘defense’ system”

to defend the country from threats abroad, disregarding internal struggles (Caputi 3). Since

Mark Edmundson argues regarding Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents that society

“exists within us” in the guise of the superego, “civilization’s internal agent”, then overtly in

society, as demonstrated by the American peoples capitulation to the system, seems to have

merely concluded that “No more Vietnams”, no more racism, no more sexism, etc. will happen

again (Edmundson 127). The surface seems calm, for the rebelliousness of the counter culture

has been stymied; in truth the issues never go away, they just get swept under the carpet. So

while the grown-ups revert to the comfort of their homes, they leave their faith in the father (or,

for the youth, the benevolent grandfather) figure of Ronald Reagan in charge. Meanwhile, his

government allows for the discreet degeneration of the country, as the economic gap between

rich and poor widens, drugs sweep through the inner-cities, and the government continues to

carry out secret wars in Latin America and Africa. Freddy has not gone away, and nightmares, it

has been suggested by some doctors, are crucial to “awaken[ing] the organism and thus adapt it

to danger” (Mack 17). The teenagers must wake up, even if their parents would numb them to

sleep.

Freddy is superego, or, as he jokes in Freddy’s Dead, “Super Freddy”, for he hunts down

the pre-societal innocents and drains the fight out of them, symbolically, by killing them; as

Edmundson describes, “Freddy wants to do to you, if you’re an adolescent, quickly and

agonizingly what the institutional world wants to do to you slowly, painlessly, numbingly”
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(Edmundson 56). Freddy, in fact, serves to balance those teenagers who actually engage and

defeat him, for the struggle being waged is one over control. Douglas Rathgeb, on the other

hand, argues that Freddy, rather than being a force of the superego, represents “the id assaulting

the superego” (Rathgeb 36). While this argument could do well against Freddy of the six

sequels, the Freddy of the original Nightmare on Elm Street is too exacting and mute to be an

element of man’s Dionysian, urge-driven nature. Freddy evolves over the course of the films

into a never-satisfied killing machine, but in the first one, his targets are specific, and his murder

scheme exemplifies the repressiveness of a berserk superego. When Freddy taunts Nancy by

emerging his claw from the water between her legs during a bubble bath, he’s imitating the

nature of the id, but mocking it all the same, for the next moment he attempts to drown her; in

fact, the subliminal message of Nancy’s mother warning her not to fall asleep and drown in the

bath strikes her unconscious, illustrating the “unconscious elements of the ego and superego”

(Lasch 32). The warnings and rebuffs of parents to their children are a lasting contribution to the

superego, or what a person is and is not expected to do. In this case, Rathgeb correctly observes

that “Nancy’s nightmares are being fed by more than a single source”, those sources being id and

superego, and Freddy remains a facet of her own mind as superego (Rathgeb 42). In another

revealing instance, Freddy sticks his tongue through the phone Nancy clutches to her ear and

exclaims with sarcastic perversion, “I’m your boyfriend, now” (NOES). The superego is

mocking and even taunting the elements of the id’s pleasure systems. The id compliments the

superego early on in the film, when Rod jokingly scrapes a rake to scare Nancy and Tina by

imitating the sound of Freddy’s claw. In Christopher Lasch’s reading of Freud, Freud recognizes

“the alliance between superego and id, superego and aggression”, so though the superego and id

are clearly defined, they still need each other, and in a way, necessitate the other (Lasch 32).
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One could contend that Freddy depicts the sadomasochism of the superego that finds itself

slightly attracted to the id for being what the superego is not, in Nancy’s case young and

beautiful, while Freddy has no choice but to commit himself to the ids’ destruction. In the same

vain, Freddy is gradually destroying himself, though unconsciously, for once he has completely

cleansed the system of the id, he will have no further purpose, with nothing left to repress.

Actually, the children, through their innocence, represent Freud’s id, “the right of our

instincts” (Edmundson 126). Furthermore, the world preempts more and more the necessity of a

survivor instinct; Lasch argues that “social conditions today [the late 1970s] encourage a survival

mentality” (Lasch 49). Survival of the fittest exists in this world, but Craven’s fitness

encompasses courage and adaptability. All the teenagers of the Elm Street films in general have

some sort of vice or troubles, yet those who survive manage to overcome their situation.

Sticking with the 1st Nightmare, Tina exudes both innocence and sexuality, initially appearing in

front of bright white light, dressed in a white nightgown, before a lamb unexpectedly crosses her

path. Conceivably adapted from the Bible, “this lamb [is] Tina’s metaphorical double…as

sacrificial lamb”, for Tina’s death leads to Nancy’s suspicions that Freddy’s powers are real

(Markovitz 5). Tina subsequently abandons her innocence and makes love to her ‘troubled-

youth’ archetype boyfriend Rod, in her mother’s bedroom to say the least, after having fought

with him repeatedly, characterizing the sex and violence compatible with the id. Rather than

dealing with the monster she faces, or trying to understand it, she resorts to pleasure and pays. In

her subsequent dream, she comes when Freddy beckons her in the night, yet she is only prepared

for love, not fighting. Her death scene is most shocking, for she’s dragged up a wall of the

bedroom and onto the ceiling as Freddy cuts her apart, sadistically reprimanding her in a sex-like

whirlwind of destruction. She has forsaken her Catholic roots, one night clutching the cross for
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protection, and the next abandoning it for the embrace of her lover who can do nothing to save

her from Freddy.

Rod, on the other hand, exemplifies the rebel without a cause, labeled as a juvenile

delinquent for drug use and brawling, a pure adherent to his id. When Tina tries to explain

Freddy to Nancy, Rod exclaims that he woke up that morning with a hard-on that “had [Tina’s]

name written all over it” (NOES). His id is so powerful that society naturally wrongly

imprisons him for Tina’s murder, so Freddy gets to him, too, by hanging him. To the rational

adults of the ego world, Rod just could not fit into society, so he takes his own life through an all

too common and tragic phenomenon, teenage suicide. In truth, Rod is too defiant to survive in

the societal world, and he makes no effort to adapt, in any case, so the superego masters him.

Glen’s death is far more revealing, for Glen is a “jock” with preppy sweaters and pants,

and an all-American boy gleam. He would not overtly appear to be a victim of the deranged

superego, yet “the superego, [Freud] observes, punishes us not only for the transgressions we

commit, but also for those that we merely conceive” (Edmundson 128). In a telling moment,

Glen listens to the noises of Rod and Tina having sex in the other room while muttering to

himself, “Morality sucks” (NOES). At spirit still a teenager, Glen possesses the desires that

society has deemed immoral; he constantly tries to kiss Nancy whose attentiveness to her own

struggle prevents them from going any further. When Glen dies, his superego explodes more

violently than anyone’s; he gets pulled into his bed by Freddy’s claw, while sleeping through

‘Miss Nude America’, and a volcano of blood gushes up to the ceiling. Glen’s superego has

repressed his id so violently that only absolute devastation can follow, leaving not even a corpse

in its wake.
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The differentiating factor between characters such as Glen, Tina, and Rod are the

influences of the familial structures that play such an integral role in forming the boundaries of

the superego. If on the grander scale the “‘American people’ are children in need of the loving

protection of the all-powerful father/president” in the 1980s, then the American home is an

empirical demonstration of that mentality (Caputi 5). Rod’s parents are neither seen nor heard

from in the film, implying that he has no balanced home life to dampen or incite his rebellious

nature; Freddy assumes the parental role by exaggerating it, as the berserk superego would.

Glen, at the other extreme, has two caring but over-bearing parents that seem to convey order

and structure in his life but prevent Nancy from relaying a crucial wake-up call that would save

his life. His parents’ authority can be seen by the way he must lie to them about sleeping over at

Tina’s house because he’s not allowed to stay over at a girl’s house. Tina’s family structure, on

the other hand, fits in between the two boys’, for Tina’s father has abandoned the family years

before, and now an uncaring stranger serves as the only father figure left to her. Her mother, on

the other hand, remains sweet but relatively oblivious. The same could be said for Nancy whose

mother is caring but an alcoholic, while her father is a workaholic, both obviously shoring up

past grief, probably linked with the crime of murdering Freddy and turning their backs on the

repercussions.

Nancy, ‘the final girl’ (“Carol Clover’s term for the women who fight the monsters and

survive”), appears to be the all-American girl next door (Markovitz 2); yet she is best-suited for

a confrontation with Freddy, for her ego is relatively well-balanced while she acts as a

compassionate friend and protector. Her greatest battle comes against an oppositional and

unbelieving adult world, wherein the youth have to clash with their elders if they are to

successfully take control of the world being handed to them. Christopher Lasch points out that
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“each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood…in its own way…[that] produces a

characteristic form of personality.…by means of which the individual reconciles himself to

instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence” (Lasch 34). Nancy

must survive the assaults of the superego until she can uncover her true-self and end the

nightmare of becoming that shapes a child into an adult. In the drama of a dream, one assumes

oneself to be “everything, that is, the author, director, actors, and prompter”, but as in life, one

soon realizes how little control there is to be had, particularly with Freddy the Dream-God

controlling things (Von Franz 3). Thus, part of confronting Freddy correlates to facing one’s

own powerlessness against predominant forces. This reconciliation must take place between the

id and superego for the healthy development of the ego, which could also be termed the ‘self’.

Carl Jung, in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, presented by Marie-Louise Von Franz, speaks

of a spirit within everyone’s dream, distinct in his “timelessness”, reminiscent of Craven’s words

regarding Freddy as “this entity…it’s existed in different forms in different forms, in different

times” (Von Franz 6, New Nightmare). Craven’s creation seems at odds with Jung’s “collective

unconscious”, which helps to illuminate one’s true “Self”, but Freddy is still “as Carol Clover

says, a ‘collective nightmare’ ” (Von Franz 6, 7, Markovitz 5). Actor John Saxon, who plays

Nancy’s father, remarks of the film that “in sleep there is truth”, or, interpreting Jung, “the truth

of one’s being [is] reflected there, in the innermost core of the soul-from there come our dreams”

(NOES, Von Franz 18). Freddy, the dark god, reveals the concealment of truth heaped upon the

young by the elderly world, exemplified by the hidden truth of the parents’ vigilantism years

before. Furthermore, in a way, Freddy aids the teenagers who successfully battle him in

surviving to adulthood by confronting them with the heartlessness and cruelty of life; however,

as revealed in the 3rd installment Dream Warriors, he steals the souls of those who cannot survive
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him, thriving off of their energy. This dynamic between predator and survivor for possession of

the self, or soul, must occur, or, as the ghosts say, “9, 10 Never Sleep Again” (NOES). This is

physically impossible, but psychologically it warns the adolescent not to become a sleeping adult

who loses touch with the collective unconscious of the world.

Freddy stalks children in the home because their homes are fundamentally flawed, as

already demonstrated, yet furthermore because the parents do not understand the world they’re

leaving to their children. In the first film, Nancy’s mother responds to Nancy’s cries for help by

taking her to an institute for sleep disorders, as though Nancy’s dreams were unordered. As

Jonathan Markovitz brings up, “as long as the problem is seen as a lack of order, it is impossible

to understand Freddy”, which the parents obviously do not (Markovitz 7). When Nancy actually

brings Freddy’s hat out of the dream before her mother’s eyes, she replies that Nancy is playing

games and must be “sick”, or “imagining things” (NOES). Likewise, all the remaining Elm St.

kids in Dream Warriors are deemed crazy or on drugs and subsequently institutionalized in a

mental hospital. Lasch points out that “therapy has established itself as the successor both to

rugged individualism and to religion”, and thus becomes another dogmatic force that fosters the

superego (Lasch 13). Craven’s point is that “parents [] either don’t know about the terrible

things going on in the world, won’t admit what’s going on, or else are contributing to the

problems” (Banka, Craven int.). “3, 4 Better Lock Your Door”, warn the ghosts of Freddy’s

victims; how, then, can one see from behind high walls and closed windows? This riddle of

security is put to the audience directly when Nancy’s mother ignorantly places bars on the

windows and locks the doors, only serving to lock Nancy in with Freddy. Freddy, indeed, lives

within the household, his glove hiding in the family’s basement boiler, submerged with all the

other past deeds; yet, as Gerhard Dorn argues regarding dreams in his Philosophia meditativa,
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“no man can truly know himself unless first he see and know by zealous meditation…to what

end he was made and created, and by whom and through whom” (Von Franz 6). The past must

be brought to light.

In effect, “7, 8 Better Stay Up Late” indicates the right of passage of teenagers in

accepting responsibility for themselves, staying up past curfew and defying their parents’ natal

coaxing of sleep. Nancy, like numerous other female survivors in the Nightmare series, survives

by first defying the authority figures and developing her id to combat the overactive superego.

She initially turns to them for help, particularly her mother and father, a lieutenant in the police

force. Unfortunately, her parent’s stubborn rationalization of the situation prevents them from

doing any good, and in fact, they help by suppressing Nancy from saving both Rod and Glen.

Ultimately, though, Nancy inherits the power of the youth of generations before her that had to

go to war, in one form or another, to define their characters; however, in line with the recent

counter-culture generation before her Nancy defies the system that would discard her to die, so

she fights her mother, yelling, “Screw sleep” and “Screw your pass” at the hall monitor, Freddy

in disguise, before she continues to run down the hall (NOES). By the end, Nancy has grown up

to the extent that she can tuck her own mother into bed.

Affectionate parents love to reenact putting their children to sleep each night, tucking

them in, as though the child can be hidden from demons; yet when the monsters are ubiquitous,

there is no place to hide. Even the institutions become shams and threats. The teacher warns the

children that “what is seen is not always what is real”, but she cannot force the children to listen,

as Nancy symbolically falls asleep in class to find Freddy stalking her (NOES). The police

station cannot protect against Freddy either, as he comes to take Rod’s life within it’s walls.

Indeed, the line between reality and fiction in the film are difficult to decipher, for the security
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and tranquillity of a scene are quickly interrupted, as Craven weaves the film through dream and

reality sequences without distinguishing between the two until Freddy actually appears, “to make

the nightmare state coexistent with reality” (Rathgeb 40). The lines between fantasy and fact are

constantly being reshaped, in life as well as in the film, so one must constantly keep vigilant and

remember that “1, 2 Freddy’s Coming for You”. He never goes away, for the whole film is

indeed an ongoing nightmare, as is each individual life; the last scene, Freddy trapping his prey

inside his world, replays one of the opening images of Freddy’s previous ghostly victims in soft

focus as they skip rope singing the warped nursery song “1,2”, indicating that the entire film is

“a nightmare on Elm Street, not eight separate nightmares intruding into a single reality”

(Rathgeb 43). Nancy has finally learned that the Japanese proverb, “Life is but a dream within a

dream”, may indeed be accurate. In life, like in a dream, one lives out one’s existence in the

absence of complete control of external forces manipulating the environment. One can hardly

distinguish between the horrific and pleasant, moment by moment, until it actually occurs,

shaking the world to its core. All that one can do is try to stay awake and conscious, figuratively,

but interestingly, the film ultimately propounds a course of non-engagement to win the day. In

the insightful final scene between Nancy and her mother, the mother offers her greatest words of

wisdom, acknowledging Nancy’s gift by telling her, “You face things”, as the survivor must,

“but sometimes you have to turn away, too” (NOES). Nancy’s mother may finally have learned

from her mistakes, for the violence she helped inflict upon Fred Krueger only perpetuated the

cycle of violence. This same cycle is again reciprocated when Nancy tries to force Freddy into

reality to kill him, only to watch as he burns her mother to death instead, reaping more revenge.

The Eastern philosophy of arresting control of the dream from the monster through

pacifism, brought up in the context of Balinese dream skills to “turn [one’s] back on it, take
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away its energy, and it disappears”, echoes a Freudian resolution to the dichotomy of the id-

superego conflict (NOES). One must find a harmony between them in the realm of the ego, and

one must have the courage to look into the darkness before hoping to have the strength to turn

away.. Thus, by disengaging from aggressively combating the superego, one can turn one’s

attention onto nurturing one’s own ego within the parameters of society, which will always exist.

As evidenced by the deaths of the films’ teens, the clashing of the superego and id can only lead

to the demise of a person, for the two are inseparable components of oneself. By destroying the

devil, in a sense, God would die with him, for evil could no longer have any sense or source of

blame, and God’s dogma would lose its value. Nancy remedies this dogma, of Freddy’s laws as

well as her parent’s artificial world, by developing her own individual spirituality and rejecting

the negativity in the world from her own internal system. She survives to see a bright morning,

seeming to have resolved her issues with her mother who promises to turn over a new leaf and to

have convinced her disbelieving father of the reality of her nightmare, when he sees Freddy

burning her mother in bed. Yet the nightmare has yet to end, and Nancy must walk off into the

fog of the world beyond her home; her mother and friends still end up dead. The nightmare

never goes away, for indeed, the crimes of the past can never be remedied, past on from

generation to generation; instead, one is left to resolve what one can of the past. This aspect of

Nancy begins to coalesce when she appears as a guidance counselor for other Elm Street kids in

Dream Warriors. Her growth finally resolves itself by the New Nightmare, when she actively

protects her son, righting the wrongs of past Elm Street parents and vanquishing Freddy once and

for all…or, at least until the next installment because, as Producer Robert Shaye rhetorically

asks, “Evil never dies, right?” (New Nightmare).

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Works Cited

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dir. Wes Craven. Perf. Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund,
John Saxon. New Line Cinema, 1984. Commentary featured.

Caputi, Jane. “Unthinkable fathering: Connecting incest and nuclearism”. Hypatia 9.2 (Spring
1994).

Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Dir. Rachel Talalay. Perf. Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt,
Lezlie Deane & Robert Englund. New Line Cinema, 1991.

Heba, Gary. “Everyday Nightmares: The rhetoric of social horror in Nightmare on Elm Street
series”. Journal of Popular Film & Television 23.3 (Fall 1995).

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979.

Mack, John E, MD. Nightmares and Human Conflict. Brown: Little, Brown and Company,
1970.

Markovitz, Jonathan. “Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in ‘A Nightmare

on Elm Street?’”. Quarterly Review of Film & Video 17.3 (Oct 2000).

Rathgeb, Douglas L. “Bogeyman From the Id”. Journal of Popular Film & Television.

Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Dreams. Trans. Emmanuel Xipolitas Kennedy and Vernon Brooks.
Boston: Shambhala Press, 1991.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Dir. Wes Craven. Perf. Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund,
Miko Hughes & John Saxon. New Line Cinema, 1995.

Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness. London: Associated University Press, 1996.

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Works Consulted

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Dir. Chuck Russell. Perf. Heather
Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Larry Fishburne, and Craig Wasson. New Line Cinema,
1987.

Dika, Vera. Games of Terror. Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1990.

Hanke, Ken. A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1991.

Iaccino, James F. Psychological Reflections on Cinematic Terror. Connecticut: Praeger Books,

1994.

Rockett, Will H. Devouring Whirlwind. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.