A Nightmare on Elm Street and Audition both dive into the idea of nightmares and the fine line between our reality and our dreams. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, and demonized pedophile haunts the dreams of a multitude of teenagers and eventually is able to kill them within their sleep which kills them as well in the real-life, and in Audition, a man has nightmares about a girl he has fallen in love with and the potential bad that she has committed and all the horrors she could be capable of.
Freud believes that dreams can represent themselves as memories from the past and that imagery that is seen within dreams is a symbol for something that has happened in the past (5). Personally, I believe that this can be seen within A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is mentioned by Nancy’s mom that Freddy Krueger was a pedophile and that the parents burned him. It is entirely plausible that Nancy may have been one of the children that he molested and that her nightmare of him may represent the psychological drama she is left with in the aftermath. Additionally, Nancy’s mother’s drinking problem may be tied to the guilt of knowing that her daughter was being molested. This could also be seen in an Audition. The audience does not know Shigeharu Aoyama’s relationship with his late wife. However, if she was controlling and abusive toward him, then he might be projecting them onto a future relationship with Asami and see her as a monster as his wife might have been toward him. Noel Carroll writes about the idea of a collective figure that is “dream condensation of uniting factors,” which can be seen in both films (44). In the dreams that the protagonists have, their past drama fuses with these monsters that is created inside their heads. Therefore, these monsters are more believable and make it all the scarier.
Both of the movies leave an open ending on whether it was just a dream or if both protagonists are stuck in this never-ending cycle of horror. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the audience is led to believe that Nancy defeated Freddy, but the car sequence at the end of the movie leads the audience to believe that she is still trapped in a nightmare and is being toyed with by Freddy. In Audition, the audience doesn’t truly know if the scene where Asami is chasing the son around with the pepper spray is actuality or if Shigeharu is still just dreaming. In relation to the aforementioned point, this open ending could give rise to the notion that trauma is never-ending, and it is not just something that someone can wake up from. Since their trauma is constant, even when they believe that have beaten it or have become healed from their experience, there is always something that brings back the memories and the pain. Instead, it is essentially a nightmare that someone has to live every day of their life.