Saturday Night Special

The thin veneer of beauty covers a deep and bloody pool of despair. The desire to be the Unobtainable Object of Desire sends deep tendrils beneath the soil of our being. It's a good thing that a razor-fingered dream demon is there to remind us that Fate, cruel Fate, will gobble up the fantasies that fuel us, leaving us withered and decaying husks of expectation, humiliation, and human want.

In the "Saturday Night Special" episode of forgotten cult television gem "Freddy's Nightmares: A Nightmare on Elm Street the Series" (quite possibly one of the unwieldiest titles ever tacked onto a syndicated series—or perhaps just a little lopsided), we get two men in a seemingly interminable conversation at, of all places, an ice skating rink, discussing the relative physical merits of the skater—literally, a "woman on ice," with all that implies (a frigid, if not-quite-alive, symbolically, object of desire). The next thing we know, one of them, Gordon (Scott Burkholder), is seeing some sort of weird, quasi-dreamlike "Twilight Zone" dating service wherein he gets to be the guy with the money, hot car, women, wine, and song.

Or something along those lines.

To that end, he gets himself a date with a blonde hotsy-totsy. We are treated to a scene in a fancy French restaurant that is simply to die for: waitresses are speared and have their faces popped open—but is it all just a dream? That was the beauty of this particular format, wherein the red-and-green sweater- and fedora-wearing mad slasher of Springwood, whose tasteless sense of humor and cringey one-liners never quit, hosts each episode, making the occasional appearance as a comic-foil bumper against the commercial breaks.

But the shows themselves rarely had solid plotlines—the dizzying dream format meant that nothing could be trusted, nothing could be strictly adhered to. Every scene could be a fake-out, including a woman whose skull is penetrated by a champagne cork.

Many of these scenes skirt the line between horror and humor. Freddy appears, huge, looming over a building right before he ingests it all like a plate of spaghetti noodles. Verily, there really was no other syndicated horror show from the Eighties quite like "Freddy's Nightmares."

The episode switches, midway, to reflect the "two-tier" aspect of each plot, wherein, dream-like, the show suddenly shifts focus to a somewhat related "story" or theme in which a minor character from the first segment is singled out and focused on. Lana (Shari Shattuck) is a frumpy, dumpy roommate to the smokin’ hot blonde from the first segment. She works, apparently, for a real estate agency. I never quite caught on to why they kept discussing tearing down old buildings to replace them with a shiny new façade, but some might compare this to a social allegory for the façade of bourgeois normality and even affluence over what could be considered a submerged sewer of social malaise. The episode is about false fronts, appearances, the "truth," arguably, ripped away to reveal the rotten ugliness beneath.

Lana goes to a plastic surgeon, whose waiting room is festooned with images of perfect lips, noses, eyes, and other body parts, if I remember correctly. After undergoing "plastic surgery" requiring the use of a number of painful and painfully absurd instruments, including a chisel, to sculpt her formerly lackluster exterior into one of beauty, she attracts a man for a bedroom assignation—but oh my! A quick glance in the mirror reveals the ugly truth beneath the surface.

Decay. Physical decay, mental decay, and social decay. One is an allegory for the rest. All of them expose the rot beneath the thin veneer.

Freddy ends on a pseudo-comic horror mic drop. And we remember why this series is so great—and so forgotten.

C'est la vie.

Freddy's Nightmares Season 1 Episode 6 Promo

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