FredHeads: The Documentary (2023)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
FredHeads: The Documentary is precisely that: a documentary about the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and more specifically their fans, and how they credit the series with changing their lives. It is an extremely scattershot documentary that, in my honest opinion, ran about thirty minutes too long, as though its directors Paige Troxell and Kim Gunzinger wanted to cram as many of the fan-submitted videos they solicited into the movie as possible even if it meant a runtime of over two hours. The result is a movie that very much feels like it was made for fans, by fans, for better and for worse. While watching so many people discussing their love of the series was interesting as somebody who also loves the Nightmare series, eventually it just started to feel like the movie was rambling, like a group of friends shooting the shit at one guy's place where you're having fun but eventually you wanna do something different. There were some segments that I would've easily kept, like the guy who does a highly detailed Freddy Krueger cosplay for conventions, or the father who said that he'd rather show his young daughter horror movies where the final girl triumphs over the villain through her own grit and gumption versus Disney movies where Prince Charming does the hard work of saving her. Others, however, got repetitive, and there was one particularly weird one featuring a young lady who was frankly obsessed with Nancy Thompson in ways that gave me Annie Wilkes vibes.
It's when the film is narrowing its focus to Troxell and Gunzinger themselves, as well as their friends Anthony Brownlee, Jeremy Todd Moorehead, and Diandra Lazor, as they sit down for just that -- a roundtable discussion of the series and what it means to them -- that the film actually starts to pick up, especially towards the back half where they became the main focus. They all have interesting, and sometimes dark, stories to tell about the movies, whether they were sneaking off to watch violent horror movies that their mothers desperately tried to keep them away from (but their fathers weren't so concerned!), using the movies as an escape from bullying, or deciding not to go through with a suicide attempt because that's not what her hero, the all-time GOAT final girl Nancy Thompson, would have done. It's these stories that stuck with me, stories about how horror fandom, despite being built around movies that haven't gotten much respect until very recently, can have an uplifting effect on people going through rough spots in their lives. The movie that had that impact on me wasn't Nightmare but Carrie, the one piece of media that convinced me to cave and buy a damn Funko Pop! figurine (hey, when you're being mercilessly bullied in middle school, it's hard not to connect with a girl who uses freaky mind powers to get revenge on her bullies), but I still saw a lot of myself in the people profiled in this movie. When it got rolling towards the end, I was reminded why I love horror movies and why I'm proud to do so.
The Bottom Line
If you're not much of a horror fan already, there's probably not a lot in this movie that will hold your attention. That said, if you are, then there's a lot here that you'll enjoy. It's not really about Nightmare so much as it is about horror fandom in general, and there's a lot of material that I think would've been better saved for special features on the DVD, but overall, this film, while unwieldy, has its charms.
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