Episode written & produced by Ross Sutherland

Voices: Ross Sutherland

Transcribed by Sathya Honey Victoria

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 Imaginary Advice, Episode 25

Hug Freddy

Let me tell you about a dream I had last weekend. 

Last Saturday, I was staying in a budget hotel in Edinburgh, in Scotland. Uh, before going to sleep, I watched the first half of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Stand whilst eating an entire pepperoni pizza, pretty much lying on my back. I’m just trying to set the scene. 

But then I have this dream, right? And in this dream, I’m on the red carpet for a film premiere. And i-i-it’s my premiere, right? I’m the screenwriter of this film. I’m waving to the paparazzi, etc., etc. I look up to the front of the cinema, where the name of my film is written in lights, and the words say…“Ebeneezer Goode.”

[cheerful percussion starts playing]

Who, or rather, what is Ebeneezer Goode? Well, if you don't know, Ebeneezer Goode is a novelty song by the Scottish techno group The Shamen, released in 1992. Uh, ostensibly it’s set up as a song about [loading cassette tape] a kind of affable Dickensian gentleman who spends most of his time entertaining his friends. 

[presses play on stereo - Ebeneezer Goode starts playing]

[stops cassette] While in actual fact, it’s really just a way of smuggling the words “e’s are good” into a British pop song. [presses play: “e’s are good, e’s are good”] 

[stops cassette] Now, when this song came out, uh I was about twelve. Needless to say, I didn't know much about rave music or ecstasy. At the time, I just thought that, you know, like, rave culture was taking a new turn. [percussion starts playing again] I thought to myself, sure, it’s-it’s probably about time that rave music began to explore Victorian values [chuckles] and ideas—retro brings everything back around in the end, doesn’t it? [synth chords added to the percussion] Surely it wouldn't be long before DJ Slipmatt started to sport a stovepipe hat or Humanoid did a concept album about Nicholas Nickleby. [Ebeneezer Goode plays: “naughty, naughty, very naughty”] 

Despite my ignorance [chuckles] the song, it clearly-it stayed with me. And, you know, apparently, in my dream I had managed to adapt that song into a full 90-minute feature drama. 

After waking up, I tried to flesh out the idea a little bit more. What does that actually look like, the film of Ebeneezer Goode? End of Act 2 crisis: “what if e’s aren’t good after all?” And then, end of Act 3 resolution: “the e’s we needed were inside us all along.”  

All this got me thinking about dreams and whether I could dedicate an entire episode to talking about them. I mean, there’s a general rule of etiquette regarding conversations about dreams which is, in short, don't do it. You know, we’re told that dreams are only interesting to the person who had them. Dreams, they’re-they’re psychic excreta—keep them to yourself! And yet, and yet for me, like the place where like my dreams get interesting are those moments where dreams start to intrude on real life. It’s at that border, that threshold, the place where dream life and real life touch. I think like-that-that’s what interests me. 

Sometimes dreams give us ideas, they solve problems for us, they pluck Oscar-worthy screenplay adaptations out of the uh, the ocean of our subconscious and hand them to us at the breakfast table. But they’re also at the whim of our most emotional, most irrational anxieties. Sometimes we pull things through from the real world into our dreams. And yet, sometimes it’s the other way around. 

[joyful synth riff over music]

[IMAGINARY ADVICE]

[music fades]

________________

[eerie reverberating sound, growing]

Robotic female voice:

The Object

The Image

The Reflection

[sound cuts. Lounge music begins]

Age nine, my favourite thing to do in the world was to hang out at my local video rental shop. Uh, it was a little independent shop, owned by the mum of a girl from my school class. This is like a market town in Essex, most of the shops here are antique shops. Like, a video shop opening here? That-that was like a really big deal. Like, you know, it’s the biggest thing to happen in Coggeshall since the duck pond flooded. Now, this video shop it’s uh, it’s only one room, it’s just a handful of shelves. It smells of cigarettes and bleach but to me and my friends, it’s paradise. We spend all our pocket money here, every week. £2 for a new release, £1.50 for an old one. The videos come in these white, unmarked boxes. 

One weekend, I’m at the video shop, as usual. This time with another kid who lived on my street called Simon Lappage. Simon and I, we spend ages looking at all the new releases, trying to work out which one we want. It’s 1989, so I don't know, we were probably looking at Naked Gun, Innerspace, Honey I Shrunk the Kids…Eventually, we make our decision. We decide to rent Labyrinth. [riff from “Within You” from the Labyrinth OST] 

Jim Henson’s fantasy masterpiece, starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie. A world where dreams become reality, and reality starts to feel like a dream. [Labyrinth riff]

We pick up the empty Labyrinth box, we hand it to Debbie Hookins’ mum behind the counter. She takes the box, disappears into the back room, re-emerges with a white, unmarked box. Simon and I take the box and we head back up the road. 

And that…is the story of how you rent a videotape in 1989. The end. 

[Labyrinth riff]

[beat]

That’s-that’s not the end. 

We get back to Simon Lappage’s house. We put the video in Simon’s VCR. But instead of Labyrinth, we see…

[mysterious music]

[white noise - unintelligible dialogue]

 …some kids in a hospital. 

[unintelligible dialogue continues] 

Now, I’ve seen Labyrinth before, right? This is not my first rodeo. So, I know that what I’m seeing onscreen, this isn’t Labyrinth. You know? Like, I’m here waiting for the Bog of Eternal Stench [farting noises], for the goblin kingdom [goblin party sounds], uh, for those pink calypso foxes that can swap heads [foxes doing a musical number]. But…this is something else.

[mysterious music, half-heard dialogue from VHS tape:] 

Girl: “…the only reason I’m in here is cos…[unintelligible]…Also, cos I’m going through some very strange shit.” 

Woman: “…your dreams?”

I decide that it must be a trailer, so I start to fast-forward the video [click - whizz] Still with the picture, mind you. But still, it goes on…these kids in a hospital, wandering around, looking scared. [music turns darker] And now the kids are dying. There’s man in a stripy sweater. He’s chasing them through a boiler room…with a special glove…with stabby knife fingers…[and darker] Still, we keep fast-forwarding, like it must be a trailer, must be just a trailer before the main event. Just keep going, keep going, keep going…[clunk - VHS tape stops rolling]

[clears throat nervously] OK, so we watch all of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors on fast-forward.

[percussive dance beat from beginning starts again]

It’s only when the tape actually runs out that I realise what we’ve done. And by then, it’s too late. As for the labyrinth…well, it turns out that the labyrinth runs far, far deeper than we realised. The old labyrinth, that’s a fucking cake walk in comparison. [in mock fear:] Oh, what’s going to happen to me? I might end up in a stinky bog or chased by a muppet! Or David Bowie might make me his wife! [dismissive:] Oh, boo-hoo! Do you know, I would do [laughs] I would do anything to go back there if I could. I would do anything to be scared of marrying David Bowie again. Because, because David Bowie doesn’t have massive knives for hands. 

No, this is-this is the new world. From now on, Ross, everything you know in your little nine-year old world will be reflected back onto a single co-ordinate: Nightmare on Elm Street 3. [unsettling music starts back up under the dance beat] A world where dreams become reality, and reality starts to feel like a dream. [eerie buzzing, getting louder] 

And that’s exactly what happens for the next three years. Every night, all I dream is Freddy Krueger. Freddy Krueger. Freddy Krueger. 

[droning music continues to rise]

Robotic female voice:

The Prognosis

The Silhouette

The Touch

[music cuts out]

This is going to sound like a lie but it’s true. I-I-I swear. Because my only experience of Freddy Krueger had been in fast forward, whenever he appeared in my dreams it was like, it was like he moved super-fast. [sound of tape on fast forward] He even had those blurry VHS tracking lines around him. [dark synth music starts] You see, when I watched that VHS like the action all went by so quickly, it was like 4:45 pm on a weekday and Freddy was eager to clock off on time. You know, just run into the room, murder these kids: 1, 2, 3,[stab, stab, stab] aaand I’m out of here. Roll credits. 

Now, this gave my nightmares of Freddy this kind of extra terrifying dimension. He was something from…another place that seemed to move in a totally different time signature. I know it sounds comical, but it made Freddy more elusive, more mysterious. In the films, like, you get to meet Freddy. He has dialogue, he has close-ups. Like, my Freddy didn’t have that. He was just this…terrifying blur that ran into your bedroom and high-fived you to death. 

Robotic female voice:

The Debt

The Guilt

The Instruction

The Silence

[creepy music continues]

Years of nightmares followed. Years of incessantly talking about Freddy Krueger to anyone who would listen. Swapping stories with other kids on the playground. Our primary school had a log cabin at the top of the school field where you could sit to eat your lunch and I remember sitting in that dark room one day as Carl Hartshorne told me that Freddy was in fact a child murderer returned from hell to kill children in their dreams. A quivering ham sandwich in my hands. 

[trying to convey the depth of horror:] The concept is just unimaginably scary! Like, Freddy isn't lurking in your garden or under your bed. He’s in your head! He kills you from the inside out. 

Now, apparently, lots of the design for Freddy Krueger was lifted from real-life reports of sleep paralysis. Many people have described auditory hallucinations that sound like scraping metal whilst paralysed. 

Now, I’m not saying Freddy is real. I know he’s not real, alright? I know that! But the concept of the guy…he’s so masterfully crafted from existing mysteries of the mind. He gives a face to the things we can’t understand. And that’s so dangerous! Because personality is just much, much more seductive than science, and say what you like about Freddy, that man, he-he definitely has a personality. [“Bon appétit, bitch!”] 

Now, no matter how campy and ridiculous the Nightmare on Elm Street films became they still all sounded terrifying when relayed through the interpretations of my classmates. 

[clears throat, inhabiting nervous child-self] “So-so, what, you’re telling me that there’s a girl and she’s like dreaming on a beach but then Freddy is in the water using his claw like a shark’s fin? You know, like the Jaws shark fin? And then Freddy eats a pizza with lots of tiny faces on it? I mean, that doesn't make any sense! How-how do you defeat a monster that eccentric? Like, you can’t. This man-his jokes, they’re just too surreal to anticipate—He’s gonna kill all of us. He’s gonna kill every single one of us.”  

[film projector - adventure music starts]

I’d had a similar problem with Ghostbusters. My granddad took me to see Ghostbusters at the cinema when I was only four years old. And, as you might imagine Ghostbusters is not a comedy when you’re four. You don't understand any of the jokes or Bill Murray’s playfulness with the role—like, you’re four. You don't even know what a Bill Murray is. No, you’re-you’re just a tiny child sitting in the dark waiting for ghosts to come screaming at your face. [“Don’t move! It won’t hurt you” - a roar - a scream]

However, [projector slowing down] I was able to conquer my fear of Ghostbusters through repetition. [projector stopping] I went back to see the film again [“It won’t hurt you-roar-arghh”] and again [“It won’t hurt you-roar-arghh”] I actually saw it five times in the cinema. About another 20 times on VHS [“It won’t hurt you-roar-arghh”] 

As I grew older, I learnt the shape of the film. I memorised every scene until eventually I could begin to understand how it was made. It stopped being real, and it became a piece of craft. [projector stops] 

Now, with Freddy Krueger, I couldn't do this because I had no access to the source. Like, maybe if I could have rented it again, watched it through properly, I could have conquered it. But instead, I was just stuck with him. I couldn't compartmentalise him off into the part of my brain responsible for processing fiction. The fact that he moved in fast-forward should’ve done that, right? But it didn’t. [mysterious music starts] It didn’t make him feel mediated, it actually made him feel more authentically supernatural. I couldn't process him as a real-life fear, nor as a fictional fear: he was just…other. 

And that’s why think I couldn't let him go. I just could not shake the fear that Freddy was out there and coming for me. And what’s worse, he wasn't going to drag it out. 

Robotic female voice:

The Glitch

The Mistake

The Product

The Concept

When Wes Craven died last year I uh, bought the box set and made myself watch all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies again. It was odd to see them as an adult, to see how different they were from [chuckles] the stories that had been spun to me in playgrounds as a child. I was surprised to discover that you’re-you’re pretty much meant to be rooting for Freddy by the fourth one as he slays awful precocious valley kids, each one more annoying than the last. Freddy himself he’s-he’s neutered by repetition. I mean, anyone who does a job too long starts to feel absurd, and it turns out that rule applies to child-murdering, too. Freddy, he’s just got so bored of killing people, he has to come up with a special costume for every kill. He’s got wigs! 

[film projector starts whirring - music stops]

How do you kill Freddy Krueger? Well, turns out the approach is pretty much the same in every one of the films. [ethereal music starts] You kill Freddy by grabbing him in a dream and then holding on to him tight, and then waking up. Which brings him from the dream world into the real world; it makes him mortal. And then you can blow him up, or chop his head off, or set him on fire, it doesn’t matter—dealer’s choice. Now, reviewing the films again this year, it’s-it’s these sequences that kind of quickly established themselves as my favourites. You know, the part where the hero has to grab Freddy in their dream. [music turns heavenly] Or as I came to know it: The Freddy Hug. 

[from A Nightmare on Elm Street]

Girl: “I grab the guy in my dream. You see me struggling, so you wake me up. We both come out, you whack the fucker and we’ve got him.”

Boy: “Are you crazy? Hit him with what?”

Girl [quiet:] “You’re the jock. Get a baseball bat or something.”

You can understand why they do it as a hug. Like, they’re grabbing a guy with a terrifying glove of knives: you need to keep his arms from flailing about all over the place, don’t you? I get it. 

But it can’t help but look like a moment of…a kind of bizarre reconciliation. [heavenly music soars] It’s like, you have to forgive this guy. You’ve got to let him into your heart. Sure, he’s trying to murder you in your sleep but he’s still a human being, you know? Freddy, he’s got needs. And what we perceive as just, you know, a murderous finger monster from hell is, in fact, just a person, with their own complex emotional ecology. 

Now, is that the subtext of the Freddy films? That the answer is…love? That by loving our enemies we can finally pull them out of our fantasies and bring them into our reality. Is it like [music cuts out - weird buzzing]—

—[sound of crowd chatting] that time, a few years ago when I was visiting my parents, and I went to the village pub and I saw, sitting at the bar Chris Jolin, [creepy music begins] the guy who had bullied me through most of secondary school, the guy who had once waved a hypodermic needle in my face and threatened to stab me in the neck with it for the entertainment of his friends, who I’d thought about almost every single day that I went to school, angry and powerless, then spent the fifteen years since school fantasising about murdering if I had an opportunity, and dumping him in a shallow Essex grave—probably the farmland behind our village, his body forever guarded by Scots pine and diseased badgers, his ragged helter-skelter bomber jacket, now a black flag rippling in the treetops while his ford fiesta rusted away at the bottom of a pond, ducks laughing outrageously upon the surface of the water, as if my vengeance was a hilarious joke that they couldn't get enough of.

But [music cuts - crowd chattering] instead, you know, when I came face to face with my tormentor…to suddenly be trapped in the same room as this fellow human being, who had woken up in the same village as me this morning, who had dressed themselves and chosen a form of breakfast, a man who had a name and a height and a star sign, who could be described (five ten, short blond hair, nice lips). Like, seeing him face to face I-I-I found my hatred slowly draining away. As if his file was being transferred to a different part of my brain. No longer being used by the emotional, creative right side responsible for making all my nightmares, the file was now being used by the logical, rational left side of my brain, the part responsible for critical thinking and making small talk. I pulled Chris Jolin out of my dreams [beeping starts] and into the real world, awarding him the same kind of disinterested ambivalence that I give all people in the real world. I nodded and smiled and asked him how he was doing and felt the familiar boredom that accompanies all human interactions. Once upon a time, this man had scared me almost as much as Freddy Krueger. [piano starts playing over beeping rhythm] But all that had been a dream. 

And I could see that now. Is this little anecdote proof that I learnt something from A Nightmare on Elm Street? Perhaps it’s the closest thing I’ll ever get to a third act resolution. A way to take a lesson, any lesson, from the nightmares of childhood. Perhaps the moral of this story is that fear is irrational, and that love is the solution, no matter how stabby the subject. 

But…that doesn't work, does it? No, that’s not right. [buzz of dread overtaking the music]

Even within the world of A Nightmare on Elm Street, that’s not an accurate reading. [buzzing builds] Because the thing is, Freddy always comes back. You think you’ve brought him into the real world, but the boundary always slips away. 

Newscaster: “…Presley’s first million-selling single “Heartbreak Hotel,” the strains of which can be heard here on BBC One in West Beach, where The King lives on.”

[creepy music]

When I was 13, I finally found a way back to Elm Street. I was babysitting one night, when I saw that the first film was scheduled to be on telly at midnight. I decided to stay up and watch it, knowing that this would be the best way to overcome my fear. I would face Freddy, I would see him die, then I would no longer be afraid. 

Sure enough, the plot went through its cycle. [girl whimpering] Lead girl Nancy makes a plan. She goes to sleep, she finds Freddy, [shrill scary music] she hugs him, wakes up, brings him into the real world, where she runs him through a series of Home Alone-style booby traps. I remember forcing myself to laugh so hard at that sequence. It’s not funny but it had to be funny. I knew that. I had to believe that. I had to make Freddy silly. Otherwise, this whole confrontation would all be for nothing. 

[from A Nightmare on Elm Street]

Girl: “Where are you!?”

Man: “Everything’s gonna be alright! Everything’s under control.”

Girl: [unintelligible] …you asshole!”

It gets to the end. Freddy is set on fire. He’s defeated. Happy ending. Everyone Freddy has killed magically comes back to life. And I think to myself, [deep breath] phew. It’s over. 

And then [explosion - scream echoing - eerie lullaby] just as Nancy’s resurrected mother is waving her daughter goodbye on the porch of her house…[explosion - scream] Freddy’s hand appears [chuckles] and pulls her back through the window, and that’s the end. 

Oh, my God, it’s executed so badly in the film. The mother clearly turns into a mannequin in a wig and the window she’s pulled through is weirdly small. You watch it now as an adult, and it is funny, it’s funny. It’s like: fake legs. Zip! There, straight through the window. Like, you-if you watched it, like, you will laugh out loud. 

When I watched it age thirteen [creepy music] I did not laugh out loud. I just sat there, frozen, staring at the TV, all the way to the end of the credits. Like, I should have seen it coming. I knew there were sequels! All the same, I couldn't work it out: like, both me and Nancy, we’d both confronted Freddy. We’d pulled him into the real world. Why had the plan failed?  

Well, perhaps it didn't fail entirely. That still was the night that I could finally reconcile Freddy Krueger as a piece of fiction. Like, I couldn't do that before—you can’t hug something in fast forward but now I could finally bring him into my world. That much was true. 

But there’s a caveat to that breakthrough, [gentle music starts] a little extra sentence added onto the end: “Fear always comes back. Freddy always comes back.” And sure, that sentence is probably just producer Robert Shay of New Line Cinema just trying to make sure that things are set up for a sequel. But in doing so, Robert Shay might have accidentally hit upon something important. The rules we use to defeat fear never ever work. That irrational fear that we tried to confront and rationalise, it always returns. We believed that by confronting these fears we were bringing them into the real world. When in actual fact, there is no real world. The real world is just another part of the dream. You can’t separate the left brain and the right brain, that’s a scientific fallacy. We are always dreaming, trapped between what’s real and what isn't. The dream is everything. The best we can hope for are moments of lucidity. There is no way to fully wake up, to escape it. But we can control it. [music rises, heavenly]

Robotic female voice:

The Pattern

The Formality

The Inevitability

In the horror film Halloween, the monster, he’s called Michael Myers, right? Uh, and over time, the character, he gets a whole backstory to explain like how he becomes who he is. But in the stage directions of the original script, he’s not mentioned by name. He’s just called “The Shape.” [music ends]

Robotic female voice:

The Shape

I think there’s something deeply scary about that. It’s great. We’re-we’re-we’re familiar with horror movies describing their monster as “a thing.” [music returns, continues] But a shape? A shape is that one extra degree removed from being a person. As such, I think the word ‘shape’ just gets a lot closer to that abstracted irrational aspect of fear. Recently I put the question on Facebook, asking people for more monster abstractions. And we ended up with about 100 responses which is, actually that’s what we’ve been hearing in the background throughout this entire episode. 

Robotic female voice:

The Glimmer

The Question 

Thanks to everyone who sent me one of those. I really can imagine every single one of them coming to kill me.

[heavenly music continues]

Robotic female voice:

The Absence

Oh, I like that one. The absence! The hole! The gap! Rather than “there's something there” you’re shouting, “there's something…missing!” “There's something…NOT THERE!” 

Robotic female voice:

The Outline

The Form

The Future

[music fades out]

Robotic female voice:

The End

[David Bowie’s Within You plays]

[from A Nightmare on Elm Street]

Girl: Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.

________________

[percussive dance music from beginning of episode]

[IMAGINARY ADVICE]

So, that’s the end of this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If uh, if you wanna help me make more episodes, uh I’ve got a Patreon page (that’s p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com). I’ll put-I’ll put the link to it in the liner notes of the episode. Basically, Patreon allows you to pledge small monthly donations to keep the podcast going. Thanks to everybody who is continuing to support the podcast in that way. I can’t stress enough just how much difference that makes. Making new episodes, it takes a lot of time and-and-and your support really helps. Special thanks to our new supporters Joe T and Aaron. May a lucrative Christmas song come to you in a dream. 

There’s one other thing which I wanted to quickly mention, which is that uh, a previous episode of Imaginary Advice—I think it’s episode nine?—it’s the Wash Club episode. Uh, if you-if you don’t know that one, it’s-it’s the true story of how when I was at university, I tried to investigate a uh secret society of kids that were meeting up at the campus launderette and uh, testing their endurance by getting inside the tumble driers. And over the course of trying to investigate this group I ended up accidentally becoming the ringleader of it. Um, that-that story is now being turned into a short film. I’ve been working on the script of it over the last couple of months. It’s set to start filming hopefully before the end of summer. We’ve had some support from Creative England, which is helping us get off the ground but um, we’re still-we still don’t have enough money to finish this film. So, if you’d like to support the uh, the-the film of Wash Club, then I-I-I’ll put the link to that as well in the liner notes.

There’s lots of great perks you can get uh, in return for supporting at different amounts, including being able to commission your own poem off me, and there’s a whole bunch of kind of launderette-related paraphernalia as well. Even if you couldn’t afford to support it, if you were willing to mention it on Facebook or repost that link, you-you know, you’d be doing us a-a-a solid.

[pained:] Right, OK, well that’s…that’s enough hand-wringing requests for money. OK, that’s it-that’s it from me! Uh, and from my cat. Can you hear him? [cat purring]

[smiling:] There he is.

That’s the end of Imaginary Advice. Thanks for listening.