1984 was a strange and scary time to be a kid in America, with things like the (false) McMartin preschool Satanic abuse cases here in California and 17-year-old Ricky Kasso’s “Say you love Satan!” killings in Long Island. And although A Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven deliberately changed his soon-to-be-iconic Freddy Krueger from a child molester into a (sort of) more palatable child killer to avoid explicit connections, the resonance was still there: growing up in the Ronald Reagan era-suburbs could be a life-or-death situation. No wonder this film got huge. An evil-for-the-sake-of-evil presence that attacks when you’re most vulnerable—and that no one can stop? That was the 1980s, dude—and if you actually were Ronald Reagan, it was the Soviet... More >>>