Line #47 Headscratchers/ANightmareOnElmStreet1984


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4	* Rod's death by hanging and his neck being broken. You can clearly see the bedsheet went OUT the barred window and WAY above Rod's cell window. How come they didn't suspect any kind of foul play or investigate it whatsoever? There was no way he could have hung himself the way he did. Plus, they had his funeral seemingly the next day and STILL pinned the earlier murders on him.
5	** Everyone seems to have a major case of ScullySyndrome in the film. Keep in mind later in the movie Nancy ''pulls off Freddy's hat and brings it into the real world'' yet they [[FlatEarthAtheist still don't believe anything supernatural is going on.]]
6	** Perhaps the cops did debate that. We just see Nancy's reaction to the events, and they discussed it when she was gone. But both her parents are in denial about Freddy being behind it. Her mother tries to rationalize the hat as Nancy somehow sneaking it into the clinic with her.
7	** If you rewatch the scene again, Rod could have easily reached the barred ceiling quite easily if he had stood on the sink, as evidenced by the positioning when he was cut down by the police. Also, his neck wasn't broken. He was clearly strangled to death because his face and lips were blue rather than the typical signs of someone of a traditional hanging death which involves a broken neck (bulging eyes). The bigger question here is, why did the jail have a barred ceiling?
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9	* Why does Freddy have green blood in the dream world? Is it just an attempt to {{Bowdlerize}}? I doubt it considering they show people bleed normal red blood at other points in the film.
10	** Possibly just an attempt to make him seem more inhuman and otherworldly. Remember, the fact that he's the spirit of a human serial killer was originally something of a twist, not revealed until midway through the movie.
11	** I think it's supposed to be puss or ichor.
12	*** Yeah, this is the reason. When he slices his chest open, his torso is filled with worms. He's supposed to be rotten on the inside.
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14	* Why exactly did Freddy cut off his fingers? Was it just to show Tina how sharp the blades are? I don't really get it... Am I thinking too much into it?
15	** Essentially just to freak her out. He keeps the trend up in later movies of doing horrific stuff to his own body just to scare people.
16	** Also, when he cuts his fingers off, instead of blood then sparks pour out of the stumps. So it's to show her he's far more than a human enemy, and she has no chance to fight him.
17	** He could also be doing these things to distract the teens and catch them off guard (Tina actually stops running and watches when Freddy appeared and cut off his fingers) giving him a chance to kill them before they realize they're dreaming and try to wake themselves up.
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19	* Given the way Freddy died, his entire body should be horribly burned. However, in Nancy's dream in the school, when Freddy pulls his sweater up and cuts his chest, his torso only has very minor scarring on one side, and he even has chest hair. Also, the palm of his right hand is clearly shown several times through the hole in the glove and there's no scarring at all.
20	** It’s possible that the form Freddy takes isn’t exactly how he looked, but an approximation of how his burn scars looked. In his defense, if he tried to look like how he really looked when he died, there wouldn’t be much of Freddy to see.
21	** Considering he cuts his fingers off and regrows them, he can probably heal ''any'' injury while in the dream world, and likely only leaves his face scarred since he looks scarier that way.
22	** They mostly likely didn't have enough in the budget to do the burn makeup on his entire body, so had to settle for the face, where it'd be most prominent. It could also be why Freddy is kept in shadow throughout most of his scenes in the movie; to hide the more "fake" looking aspects of his appearance.
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24	* Two related questions:
25	** Is Tina's "ghost" just Freddy in disguise? Or is it actually Tina's soul that Freddy has trapped?
26	*** It's Freddy messing with Nancy since Tina was Nancy's best friend. At this point in the series Freddy wasn't taking souls, he was just killing the Elm Street children.
27	** What's with that scene where a centipede crawls out of her mouth, and then she disappears and leaves behind a pile of what look like eels or hagfish? Is it even supposed to make sense?
28	*** No it's not. In the Netflix series ''The Movies That Made Us'' which includes interviews with people that worked on the movie, one of the defining points of making the movie is that the viewer is to not realize whether what is on the screen is reality or a dream. Since Tina's appearance is obviously a dream, it's not supposed to make much sense. Besides, Freddy has been using Tina to torment Nancy and he decided to use gross out imagery for this.
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30	* How did they pin Tina's murder on Rob at all? Sure, he makes sense off-the-bat as a suspect, but the police would have had to have gone and investigated the murder scene. Anyone who did analysis on the blood pattern would have found it showed Tina's body moved ''up the wall'' and onto the ''ceiling'', places that no killer no matter how hyped on PCP or whatever could physically move the body to, let alone a teenage boy of about average strength. Why did they still consider him to be the murderer after that?
31	** They just simply did not want to acknowledge the obvious truth of Freddy murdering teens in their sleep and preferred to pin it on a patsy to hunt down as a suspect who may vaguely, crudely fit the profile.
32	** Springwood has all the appearance of a small town and there is no way they have a forensic scientist or a crime scene specialist on staff, which would be necessary in this case. As he is the only suspect and has been charged with murder, they can hold him until a forensic specialist can get there which could take months.
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34	* From what I can gather, if Freddy kills a victim in their dreams, real-world witnesses would see it as a natural death (i.e. Tina murdered by Rod since he was in the room at the time, Rod hanging himself, Sheila suffering asthma attack, etc.)...so how could Glen's death (dragged into the bed and shot out in a geyser of blood) be explained as a non-Freddy involvement?
35	** They probably never technically found a body, just a huge amount of blood that matched Glen's blood type. As for how they explained it, that's where the WeirdnessCensor first began to kick in. Since so many of the pillars of Springwood's community played a part in Freddy's death, they really, ''really'' don't want to believe he's somehow come back; even Nancy's dad, who visited the crime scene and had already heard about the dreams from Nancy, still didn't want to believe it. My guess is the police report just got tossed into the back of a filing cabinet and nobody ever brought it up again (especially since her father, who eventually did accept the truth, assumed that Freddy was beaten after the first movie).
36	** To elaborate what the previous troper wrote, and referring to only the original movie, I think that the authorities and witnesses are likely assuming that the deaths (including Glen's) happened in a non-supernatural way, even if they have no idea what else could have caused them. Horror movie characters, particularly in settings like this, aren't smart enough to consider supernatural causes, and the first movie takes place long before the people of Springwood finally realize and accept that Freddy is real. I don't think it's ever stated or implied that real-world witnesses see anything different than what the audience is directly shown.
37	*** Tina's death, in particular, would have looked pretty strange to investigators; it wouldn't take a [[Series/{{Dexter}} blood-spatter analyst]] to see that the blood on the wall and the ceiling included streaks, not just splashes, and if I recall correctly, when Tina was dropped back onto the bed, it caused blood to splash on to Rod (either from hitting a pool of blood or just plain splattering). Nevertheless, as improbable as it may be that Rod made the cuts, made the knife vanish without a trace, ''pushed Tina's bleeding and thrashing body up the wall and onto the ceiling while screaming hysterically,'' and splattered her onto the bed, that's ''still'' a more likely scenario than the idea of a long-dead quasi-corporeal demonic serial killer with dream powers doing it.
38	*** Rod immediately goes on the run, which looks a bit suspicious, no?
39	*** Rod's death would have been pretty easy to explain, under the circumstances.
40	*** The death of Nancy's mom had to have looked pretty crazy. I can only imagine it was explained away as being the result of her falling asleep with a lit cigarette--one that managed to engulf the bed, and ''only'' the bed, in flames, and quickly reduce her body into a meaty skeleton. That scene, in particular, was probably the one that led to Nancy's father later realizing Nancy was right about Freddy Krueger.
41	*** In response to what was previously said about Nancy's mother, the second movie reveals that Nancy supposedly was driven insane by watching Glen's death and her mother was said to have committed suicide. Considering that Nancy's mother was a notorious alcoholic, it probably made sense to the populace of Springwood.
42	*** Nancy's father was Springwood's police chief. He'd lost his wife to "suicide" and his daughter had apparently lost her mind, following the violent deaths of her friends and boyfriend. Any investigation carried out by his officers or the county sheriff would've been pretty discreet, to avoid making a respected fellow cop's miserable situation any more painful.
43	*** As for how Glen's death would be explained...I dare say the event was probably downplayed in the official report and dismissed as unsolvable.
44	*** A scene was deleted of Glen's body rising from the bed either burnt or blood stained,but almost unscathed. Maybe he was found electrocuted and the blood was just an illusion by Freddy. Or he cut an artery.
45	*** But but... that spoils the "coroner puking in the bathroom" joke!
46	** Regarding the sequels, particularly those up to part 5, the series did eventually get to the point where the dream deaths were considerably different than the deaths as they appeared in the real world, especially since the movies turned more and more to elaborate sets, themes and effects for each of the kills, and Freddy was progressively [[{{Flanderization}} Flanderized]] into a wise-cracking, pun-spewing comedian. Even the 80's audiences eventually got to the point where they considered the complete GenreBlindness of Springwood's adults an AssPull, given the repeated reports of Freddy's likeness from friends of the victims during those periods of egregious deaths-by-coincidence that would occasionally plague the town. This is probably the main reason why ''New Nightmare'' used a completely different continuity, and both ''Freddy's Dead'' and ''Freddy Vs. Jason'' (mostly) dropped the adults-in-denial theme.

Context Headscratchers / ANightmareOnElmStreet1984