Scary Movie Month 2015 day 9: Freddy's Tricks and Treats

Freddy's Nightmares: A Nightmare on Elm Street the Series: Freddy's Tricks and Treats (Season 1, Episode 4)

I know it's Scary Movie Month and this is a TV show, but it's based on a movie franchise and I don't have enough time for a movie today so GET OFF MY BACK. Freddy's Nightmares had a very odd structure in that it was an hourlong anthology show, but each episode consisted of two loosely connected stories, usually with a minor character from the first story taking the lead in the second (though the episodes weren't actually split, it all played as a single episode. Like I said, odd). In the first half, Mariska Hargitay and her enormous glasses star as a college student trying to study for her anatomy midterm while a Halloween party rages on around her. She goes off to study away from all the noise and finds herself menaced by Freddy, making this one of the rare handful of episodes in which Freddy is a character in the story rather than just the Rod Serling-esque host. 

Surprisingly, there are a few legitimately creepy moments in the first half. At one point Hargitay is trying to claw off a pumpkin mask that she can't remove and the fleshy sound of her nails digging into the mask plus the bloody claw marks she's leaving behind makes for a pretty unnerving combination. There's also a moment where Freddy carves the word "BOO" into a medical school cadaver that could easily have come straight out of one of the Elm Street movies.

The second half, as it always does on Freddy's Nightmares, goes completely off the rails and trades the straightforward scares of the first half for a more surreal approach. While that dreamlike quality may fit the nightmare logic of the show, it still deflates what had otherwise been a fairly tense episode. Mariska is still around for the second half, but the focus shifts to her less interesting classmate who uses her for an experiment that allows him to record her dreams on VHS. Despite the weak second half this is still one of the better episodes of what was a pretty consistently lousy show. Freddy fans will almost certainly find something to like here.