Adam Pasen
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: something horrific happens in the 1960s on a street called Elm. The murderer is subsequently killed in an act of vigilante justice, but that isn’t the end of it. In a series of bizarre “coincidences,” those involved start to die… gruesomely. Despite the mounting evidence that some sinister force is at play, any challenges to the official narrative are silenced. Those who investigate too deeply and try to warn others are labeled crazy or “conspiracy theorists.” And the deaths continue.
Yes, this is the plot of A Nightmare on Elm Street… the story of homicidal maniac Freddy Krueger who murders twenty kids in the 60s and is killed by a vengeful mob before returning in dreams to continue wreaking havoc. However, it is also an exact description of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who was shot while driving down Elm Street in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Although the Warren Commission concluded there was no conspiracy, independent researchers continue to fight the alleged cover-up to bring the truth to light (cough cough… Nancy Thompson).
From one ill-fated drive down Elm Street… to another.
So, what am I saying? That Wes Craven made A Nightmare on Elm Street as an allegory for JFK’s assassination? I would bet my bladed glove on it. Over the course of 91 minutes, he speedruns each horrific turn in the case like plot points. First, Freddy slays Tina Gray, shattering the innocence of sleepy suburban Springwood and traumatizing Tina’s best friend Nancy (much like JFK’s assassination shattered America’s innocence and traumatized a generation).[i] Although Freddy is the killer, a “patsy” is arrested in Tina’s boyfriend Rod (a stand-in for Lee Harvey Oswald). Rod is then murdered by Freddy while surrounded by cops in the basement of the police station, just as Oswald is murdered by Jack Ruby (allegedly working alone) while surrounded by cops in the basement of the police station. In an additional parallel, Rod tells Nancy in his cell that, “they’re gonna kill me for sure,” just as an increasingly paranoid Jack Ruby said in prison, “I’m a dead man, they’re going to kill me…”
Jack Ruby walking right through Oswald’s police escort and murdering him in the basement of the police station…
…and Rod’s death, also surrounded by cops in the basement of a police station. For JFK buffs who see a direct connection between the powers that killed JFK and Jeffrey Epstein years later, Rod’s “suicide by hanging” takes on additional eerie dimensions…
It’s not just the plot that finds strong parallels, however… Craven drops additional clues in the names of his characters. Take Nightmare on Elm Street’s patsy Rod Lane, for instance. For context… one of the first investigators to truly challenge the Warren Commission was Mark Lane, with his 1966 book Rush to Judgment (considered by many to be the granddaddy of conspiracy literature on the subject). A major point in Lane’s defense of Oswald was his claim that the bag Oswald carried didn’t contain a rifle but rather curtain rods. To wit:
Curtain ROD. Mark LANE. ⇒ Rod Lane
At this point, you might think, “okay, that’s interesting… but easily chalked up to coincidence.” Fair enough. Let’s look at another example: 1967’s Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson. Thompson’s seminal book used additional evidence to suggest multiple shooters, indicating a conspiracy. Incidentally, Josiah has a wife whom he has lived with near San Francisco since 1976. In fact, he dedicated the sequel Last Second in Dallas to her. Josiah Thompson’s wife’s name is Nancy.
⇒ Nancy Thompson
Scream 2 lets Craven revisit his professorial days and give a lecture on names and pattern recognition.
But how can we be sure Wes Craven even paid attention to the names in his film? Because Craven took names so seriously that in Scream 2 he and Kevin Williamson literally pause the action for a discussion at the chalkboard on how to look for patterns in the names from previous murder sprees.
With that in mind, one more Kennedy-adjacent death worth pointing out is Mary Sherman, a doctor with links to alleged Jack Ruby co-conspirator David Ferrie. Sherman was murdered in her bed and her body was horribly burned… with her door locked and no signs of forced entry. Her death is mirrored by Nancy’s mother Marge near the climax of Nightmare on Elm Street when a burning Freddy attacks her in her bed.
Marge’s death burning in bed…and sifting through the ashes of Mary’s similarly burned bed after her murder.
But that’s not all… if you go by Craven’s script, Marge originally shared initials with Mary Sherman and had the unlikely name MARGE SIMSON (strangely, Simpsons fans may recall that Marge herself is named after Kennedy’s wife Jackie O and her full maiden name on the show is Marge Jacqueline Bouvier). **
** (Although seemingly unrelated, it is also interesting to point out that The Simpsons did a Freddy parody as part of their “Treehouse of Horror,” with Groundskeeper Willie in the role. As Bart and Lisa’s classmates succumb one-by-one, Principal Skinner cheerily reassures them: “Let’s not have any more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up).
The Simpsons has long been noted for seemingly foreseeing events such as 9/11. Groundskeeper Willie out for revenge in “Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace” after the “bizarre cover-up” of his death.
If all of this fails to convince, I would like to end with a close analysis of one scene in particular from Nightmare on Elm Street: Nancy’s school nightmare. Independent researchers often point to the esoteric symbolism surrounding Kennedy’s death, and so I find the Jewish mystical interpretive method of PaRDeS useful here. In the scene, Lin Shaye’s teacher lectures about Hamlet “probing and digging, always trying to get beneath the surface” (which is what PaRDeS does and what I suggest Craven is inviting his audience to do, just as Freddy’s Dead will later notoriously invite the viewer to put on their 3-D glasses).
The posters behind Tina’s dead body have a numerical value of “63,” directly preceding Nancy’s first onscreen encounter with Freddy.
Just before her first real encounter with Freddy, Nancy falls asleep while her class is reading Shakespeare (Peshat or the literal meaning of the scene). Seeing Tina’s corpse in the hallway, she sneaks out and passes two posters: the first a picture of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the second of a triceratops. This might seem insignificant, but numbers are paramount in Kabbalah: Europa is the SIXTH moon of Jupiter, and a triceratops has THREE horns. So, the numerical value of the juxtaposed posters is 63 (Remez or HINTS, often revealed through numbers with hidden meaning). Combine this with the students reading Julius Caesar aloud in class… a play about a coup from within to kill the emperor (Derash, dealing in comparisons of similar occurrences).
Now put it all together… an assassination to kill a leader and plotted from within that happened in 1963. We now arrive at Sod or the hidden meaning: Kennedy was assassinated in an internal coup! The calls were “coming from inside the house,” as it were! Here is our revealed meaning. And if I seem to imply that the esoteric references to JFK stop with the Nightmare on Elm Street series, let me point out quickly that in John Carpenter’s Halloween Michael Myers’s first murder takes place on October 31, 1963, mere weeks before the JFK assassination. Halloween as JFK allegory would also provide a satisfying explanation for the “Rabbit in Red Lounge” matchbook Dr. Loomis finds: for JFK theorists, all roads in the murder seem to lead back to Jack Ruby’s “Carousel Club,” just as Dr. Loomis is able to track Michael’s path of destruction through the Rabbit in Red matchbook…
RABBIT in RED ⇒ JACK rabbit RUBY red ⇒ JACK RUBY
Halloween’s Rabbit in Red Lounge as a veiled reference to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club?
My argument, then, is that, in Nightmae on Elm Street, the ossified slasher trope of “something bad happening in the past” and the heroes have to confront it in the present originally referred to ONE bad thing in particular: the murder of JFK… and if this is the case then he would kick off the Golden Age of Slashers fifteen years later. Or, if I’m wrong, then as Nancy Thompson says: “You can all relax because it’s just a case of me being nuts.”
…
I believe you, Nancy.
[i] “In author Wayne Byrne’s 2022 book ‘Welcome to Elm Street: Inside the Film and Television Nightmares,’ [Robert] Englund notes that ‘Elm Street’ has ‘many’ connotations . . . It’s also, he adds, the place in Dallas, Texas where U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963, which represents the darkness symbolized by Freddy.”
Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/1577084/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-horror-name-kennedy-assassination/
References
Belzer, R., & Wayne, D. Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse, 2013.
Downard, J.S., & Hoffman, M. King Kill 33. Independent History & Research, 1976.
Haslam, Edward T. Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and the Emerging Global Epidemics. TrineDay, 2014.
Lane, Mark. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.
Thompson, Josiah. Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. B. Geis Associates, 1967.
Adam Pasen is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles who wrote on the last two seasons of Power Book IV: Force for STARZ. He is also an award-winning playwright published in the Best American series from Applause Books and received his PhD in English from Western Michigan University. He is an avid slasher fan and is currently in post-production for a horror short he and his partner wrote directed by Cory DeMeyers (Halloween 2018) and starring Tait Fletcher (The Mandalorian) and Sari Sanchez (Kill Game). You can find Adam on Instagram and IMDb.
