A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES), David Wise, 1989
Before developer Rare became one of gaming’s powerhouses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it spent several years toiling away as one of many companies churning out NES titles for various distributors. One of those distributors was LJN, infamous for the usually poor quality of the products it peddled. Rare developed more than a few of its games, and almost all of them have been justifiably forgotten.
One of the stronger results of the collaboration between LJN and Rare was A Nightmare on Elm Street, based on one of the most popular horror franchises of the 1980s. “Stronger” does not mean that the game was an unqualified success: according to critics, it was merely better than most other LJN titles and amounted to a passable platformer. The game might well have been more distinctive had Rare stuck with its original concept, in which players controlled Freddy as he hunted down teenagers. It is not hard to see why that initial draft was abandoned, particularly on a Nintendo console.
David Wise had provided the music for every Rare NES and Game Boy title since joining the company in 1986. His move into game composition came about through a chance encounter with Rare founders Tim and Chris Stamper in the Leicester music shop where he worked. After demonstrating a Yamaha CX5 sequencer, the company’s first music computer, with his own MIDI compositions, Wise was offered a job at Rare by the Stampers. While it would be the Battletoads franchise that brought Wise’s name to the attention of game music fans, the A Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack stands as his first great score.
Writing horror music for a console as technologically restricted as the NES poses a particular challenge. NES soundtracks often overcome their inherent limitations by focusing on memorable melodies or intricate, inventive rhythms. As Wise himself put it in an interview: “In the early days of video game music, with the limited resources we had at our disposal, the melody was incredibly important.” Much contemporary horror scoring, however, achieves its effect through other means: unsettling textures and extended dissonance. These approaches do not translate easily to the NES, at least not without becoming grating in the hands of a lesser composer.
Wise achieves more than a workable compromise on the A Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack. His score is more melodic than many horror film and game soundtracks, yet it still sustains an almost constant sense of dread, if never outright terror. Take “Town of Elm Street”, whose opening feels almost adventurous. Its lead melody may be the most complex Wise wrote for a chiptune score, cascading forward with a sense of excited momentum before resolving each phrase with an unexpectedly upbeat turn.
Expert harmonisation between the two pulse-wave leads introduces an otherworldly quality — and then the music suddenly falls into a black pit inhabited only by a mechanical pulse and eerie background drones that rise uneasily in pitch. It is not a subtle shift in mood. Yet it is hugely effective, especially because those encroaching drones never disappear, even when the track returns to the relatively upbeat atmosphere of its opening.
Wise’s use of a nagging bass pulse to underscore evil returns on several other tracks, and it is difficult not to suspect the influence of John Carpenter’s horror scores here. Still, what works on Carpenter’s soundtracks works here too. Mechanical and relentless, the bass ostinato and the menace it signifies remain elusive, faceless, and impossible to pin down, hunting their victims with single-minded intent.
Other tracks find different ways of infusing horror-scoring tropes with melodic content. Initially, “Inside House 2” dabbles in well-executed stereotypes: high-pitched, discordant melodies and swelling drones alternate with a forward-tumbling, almost panicked bass figure. Then Wise seamlessly pivots into a wistful, genuinely beautiful melody that arrives from nowhere, far more moving than one would expect from an NES horror game. “Inside House 3” likewise turns surprisingly expressive. Despite their fragmented nature, its melodies are almost heroic in their fanfare-like progressions. Victory seems plausible, and the track’s second half strengthens that impression with insistent, catchy chord progressions that lend the score a faint pop sensibility. Wise’s most interesting composition here, however, is “Elm Street Cemetary”. The cue pits its propulsive forward motion against an indecipherable shower of dissonant notes on both pulse-wave channels, while also featuring the soundtrack’s most intriguing and experimental melodic writing.
Given Wise’s obvious gifts, it is hardly surprising that the A Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack also excels when it commits to straight horror scoring. “Title Screen” immediately establishes the necessary atmosphere through its slowly advancing bass pulse and drones, working in tandem with spine-tingling, almost shrill melodic fragments. The skeletal yet highly effective instrumentation and shards of melody recall Hirokazu Tanaka’s Metroid soundtrack, while the slow tempo creates a quietly suffocating mood. “Junkyard” is more aggressively dissonant still. It returns the bass pulse in its most unsettling form, underpinning creepily harmonised arpeggios with a disconcerting stutter. As a game, A Nightmare on Elm Street may have exceeded expectations simply by not being terrible. Wise’s ambitious and inventive soundtrack, however, goes well beyond that, yielding an outstanding NES score where few would have expected one.
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