Nightmare on Elm Street is a film that -unlike Friday the 13th- received both good reviews from critics and a great turnout at the box office. The movie (and sequels) center around the character of Freddy Krueger, a serial killer who had murdered at least twenty children and was sent to prison. He was however, released on a technicality and subsequently hunted down by the angry and upset parents of the children whose lives he had taken. They trapped him in a boiler room and burned him alive. In the film he is exacting revenge on those parents by terrorizing their remaining children with nightmares.

A girl named Tina is the first to have these nightmares. In her dream she is being followed through a boiler room by a man with knives attached to his fingers, he claws her just before she wakes up. After she wakes though, she realizes that the place where he clawed her is bleeding. The following day when talking to her friend she realizes that this other girl had a dream very similar to her own. The two girls and their boyfriends spend the night in the same place, but while upstairs one couple experiences something terrible. The girl is caught by Freddy in her dream and killed, while in reality the boy watches as girlfriend is cut open with invisible knives and then dragged up and across the ceiling never seeing the guy in a Freddy Krueger costume. He is sent to prison for the assumed murder of the girl.

As the movie progresses the line between dreams and reality gets even harder to find, and characters one by one are killed. Eventually the remaining girl manages to drag Freddy from the dream world that he resides in, our to the real world and attempts to do away with him.

If everything that happened to you in your dreams had repercussions on your life, would you ever want to sleep again?

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow

When you think of a guy in an executioner costume, what image comes to mind? For most of us it is the image of a large man wearing a black hood with eyeholes cut in, standing on a platform with a sharpened axe in his hand. But generally executioners were either military men, or simply a person whose job it was to carry out what the law had decreed. An executioner was generally given a warrant that authorized him to carry out the sentence without becoming a murderer himself, and traveled around an area to perform executions when needed (which was not very often). He would specialize in the task of executing, but if they should need him for torture or other non-lethal punishments he wasn’t too far away.

During the French revolution, the guillotine was heavily used, and the job of executioner was taken up by a few men. Usually the job was handed off to a close friend, relative or a son when the executioner chose or was told to step down from his post. The executioner was not one that was shunned by the public, he was more of a popular figure. At one point in time there were postcards made featuring the current executioner carrying out the task via guillotine. (This is how one little boy found out that one of his relations was the current executioner of France. That must have been a confusing day for him.) Until 1977 executions continued in France, but they were formally abolished in 1981.

Enabling the cold sharp steel of an axe or guillotine blade to slice through a person’s flesh, spine and throat; that is what these men made a living off of. With a job description so gruesome though, they still managed to live fairly normal lives. They married, raised children and grew old. But who knows what type of a person it takes to complete these tasks over and over again and live the rest of their lives peacefully afterward. Or were they tormented by the grim truth of what they had done? Nobody can say.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow

Jason Voorhees is the main baddie (or co-baddie) in twelve films. The first was sent to theaters in 1980 and the most recent in 2009, proving that the Friday the 13th movies, like Jason himself, might never die.

In the first Friday the 13th movie though, it wasn’t Jason that was doing the majority of the killing. His mother, was the one cutting down camp counselors. She wanted to be sure that the camp did not reopen after what had happened to her son. Her son, Jason, had drown at the camp because the two teenagers who worked there (that should have been supervising him in the water) were off somewhere doing the dirty deed. At the end of the film however, she’s decapitated. So, at the beginning of the next we see that Jason isn’t dead, and is also a fully grown man. He kills the person who killed his mother and returns to the camp to guard it against …. anyone really. A group of teenagers go for a visit and nearly all of them are killed. In the third movie, he returns to his hometown and hides in a barn. Even more teenagers fall victim to him, and he acquires the hockey mask that is now synonymous with his character.

Similar events happen in each sequel that is made, and Jason appears to be killed at the end of almost all of them, only to come back again in the next and begin the horror all over again. Some of the movies get creative though. One features Jason aboard a spaceship in the future killing astronauts, and another fighting Freddy Krueger in a crossover film that stays true to both the old Friday the 13th movies and the old Nightmare on Elm Street films as well.

This Halloween, grab a hockey mask and machete to complete your Jason costume. Then have fun scaring the bejeezus out of little kids.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow