RIP John Saxon

I'll leave biographical notes, and praise for John Saxon's seminal role in Enter the Dragon, to others: I'm just here to lament the passing of Nancy Thompson's dad and reminisce about A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Like any kid born on a cultural cusp, I didn't get to see the cultural touchstones that were the A Nightmare on Elm Street films in sequential order. I saw Dream Warriors first, in 1989 or 1990, at a friend's house in Miami during a sleepover, but I knew about them before then. In '87, or more likely '88, during another sleepover in northern Virginia at my mom's friend's family's place, one of the older girls sang, against the backdrop of Kid Icarus and Deadly Towers and forgotten toothbrushes, the haunting snippet of what it would take over a decade for me to fully identify and, courtesy of Diamond Head Records in Spring, Texas, acquire on vinyl: Dokken's "Dream Warriors." Having this sort of fragmentary info in hand when I finally saw the eponymous film seems, in retrospect, representative of my overall approach to knowledge and appreciation of art, but that's a tangent I'll go off on some other time.

As invested as I was in the fate of those kids in Dream Warriors—and I'll be damned if I still ain't every time I watch it—the tension between Nancy and her old man, played out under neon bar signs amidst the reek of Michelob and Marlboro Reds, always stood out to me as well. Eventually I learned he was the hard-headed asshole cop who didn't listen to his daughter when it mattered most, which made his bummer days as a drunk destined to get multi-knifed by a Harryhausen skeleton even more poignant, and Nancy's demise even more appalling.

I got lucky in the birth karma department and had good parents, unlike Nancy Thompson and the rest of the Elm Street kids, so I never had to find out the hard way that my folks were hiding lynchings from me. Still, John Saxon did a great job of playing the father burdened not just by his duties as a cop, but the weight of being part of a murderous mob, and I will always appreciate him for that. A Nightmare on Elm Street wouldn't have been the same without him, and I wouldn't have learned to appreciate the family I have otherwise.

Thanks, John. Rest in power, on this damp, dark summer night.