227) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Halloween 2025’s rewind of terror ’80s horror movie thread extravaganza - the revenge! (Part five)

"I dreamed about a guy in a dirty red and green sweater." 

Director

Wes Craven 

Cast

Heather Langenkamp - Nancy Thompson
Robert Englund - Freddy Krueger
Johnny Depp - Glen Lantz
Amanda Wyss - Tina Gray
Nick Corri - Rod Lane
John Saxon - Lt. Thompson
Ronee Blakley - Marge Thompson

The 1980s! The Reagan years. Who ya gonna call? Be all you can be! Just say "no!" Where's the beef? The choice of a new generation. 

As I've mentioned a few reviews back, when it comes to horror movies, the 1970s saw a surge of realism in horror specifically, and in movies in general. 

Gone was the atomic era from the 1960s with space invaders and mutant monsters. Movies such as "The Exorcist," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Halloween" gave horror real bone-chilling plausibility. 

Then the 1980s came and gave horror a surreal element though keeping the chill factor right were the 1970s left it. 

It seems 80s horror (generally speaking) has a mixture of, well, horror, plus fantasy and a smidge of comedy. In other words, the horror genre didn't seem to take itself too seriously in the 1980s. But it could still be nightmare-inducing. 

Some great franchises sprang up during this gnarly era. Child's Play. Friday the 13th. The Evil Dead. Poltergeist. Horror went from believability to a rise in gory creature feature stories that really hit what we fear. And in a lot of cases, campiness made a kind of comeback. This time, it was intentional. 

The perfect blend of fantasy and bloody gore is nowhere better depicted than in Wes Craven's 1984 iconic picture, "A Nightmare on Elm Street." Craven's movie added one more monster to the rogue's gallery of horror movie icons - Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund. 

I previously wrote about the sixth installment in "The Nightmare on Elm Street" series, called "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare." It's the first horror movie I ever saw in a theater, which is why I decided to review it before any of the other Elm Street movies which I'll get to later. I guess I was feeling overly nostalgic that day because part six is one of the worst movies in the series. 

Anyways, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" begins as children and teenagers living in the town of Springwood, Ohio are having terrifying nightmares. 

They're all dreaming of a horribly burned man named Fred Krueger who wears a red and green sweater, dirty brown hat, and a glove with razor-sharp knives who's hell-bent on killing each of them. 

And those whom Krueger kills in their sleep actually die. 

Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund in "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

One high school girl named Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) is having nightmares as well with Krueger showing up. She learns that other teenagers at school, including her friends as well as her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp) are all having the same reoccurring dream as she is. 

She presses her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) and especially her dad, Don (John Saxon) who's a police lieutenant, about the man in her dreams. 

Of course, they're reluctant to tell her what they know and would rather she take dream suppressants and forget about these nightmares of hers. Obviously, that's not going to happen. 

Nancy is eventually told about a dark and grim secret the parents of Elm Street/ Springwood share. Years earlier, they hunted down and burned Freddy Krueger alive because he was a child murderer who escaped justice due to a legal technicality. 

His damned spirit has returned and is getting his revenge on those parents who killed him by killing their children in their dreams. That's where the parents can't save them. 

Once Nancy finds this out, she can either stay awake the rest of her life or face off with Freddy and destroy him somehow. 

Freddy Krueger sits on a high rising pedestal amidst classic creatures - Frankenstein, Dracula, and the I'll throw Leatherface up there, too. 

But Freddy Krueger is frightening in ways that other monsters aren't. He utilizes the ultimate vulnerability of his victims. Everyone has to sleep. There's no escape from sleep. And it's as desirable as eating and....other things. 

Sleep is when we're all the most helpless. And there's no escape in our dreams other than the hope of waking up just in time. 

Freddy also blurs the lines of reality. It's all the more nightmarish for the teens of Elm Street since he uses this power of his to psychologically weaken them. 

He's intelligent. He's sadistic. And rather than dawning dark clothes and capes while lurking in the shadows, Freddy has a striking and intense appearance, and an actual personality (albeit an evil one). He makes dark jokes, mocks his victims, and has a twisted sense of humor. 

He's a demon who acts as a sort of punishment for the sins of teenagers. 

As the Elm Street movies progress, the nightmares become sillier and sillier. 

"A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge" is mediocre. It tries to be another story stemming from part one, focusing on a new teenager. "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" sees the return of Nancy and is pretty good for a sequel. It has some of the freakiest scenes and intense visuals in the entire franchise.

The movies go downhill beginning with "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master." It's dumb. "A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child" is dumber. Part six, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare just wants to kill it all off as fast as it can. "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" from 1994 is... interesting. It's not terrible. And I think it was the direction the franchise should have gone immediately after part one. 

"Freddy vs. Jason" is only entertaining when Freddy and Jason are fighting. It's a bit cartoonish but it's actually not bad. I enjoyed, anyways. 

And the remake from 2010 with Jackie Earl Haley was simply bad. I think most audiences saw it out of curiosity. 

The terrible sequel problem originated with Freddy being both scary and adored. When the writing got away from Wes Craven, it seems other writers embraced the adored part of Krueger, and his image suffered for it. The frights were watered down. The campiness was blown up. And we got visions of Freddy sporting sunglasses, rapping, playing Nintendo (with a power glove no less! Remember those?) and trying to get the audience to laugh rather than scream. That's why "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" is much better than the sequels. 

Freddy Krueger comes right in the midst of hacking and slashing maniacal boogeymen movies (for lack of a better term) that sprang up towards the later 70s and spawned sequels through the 1980s. Of course, "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" are the most well-known among other such horror movies like "Black Christmas" for instance. 

With "A Nightmare on Elm Street," the camera work, amazing effects and nightmare inducing imagery, especially when Freddy first appears, are nothing short of renowned in the horror genre. 

The score, though, and Freddy's laugh sound like something from a local outdated Halloween attraction. 

Also, there's real and solid rival chemistry between Nancy and Freddy. Both are fantastic. Their's is as iconic as Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, or Sidney Prescott and Ghostface, or Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector, or even Van Helsing and Dracula. 

Nancy has a strength and fearlessness to her, well performed by Heather Legankamp, that Freddy can't contend with. She does something to Freddy that no one else has done. Arouse fear. There's nothing about her Freddy can take her on. She doesn't show vulnerability which he can use to destroy her. For what it is, the character of Nancy is believable as she goes from nightmare after nightmare, to doctors and sleep specialists, with parents in denial of what they unwittingly wrought. The children suffer the sins of the parents. 

Nancy doesn't succumb to weaknesses but embraces the fight or flight instinct because her friends are dying and she needs to get some friggin' sleep. She's no Ellen Ripley in "Alien" but she's on the same level as strong leading heroines of horror. 

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" doesn't waste time. It knows where it wants to go and has such a well-directed build up. 

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" blends psychological horror with the classic slasher genre. Both elements are equally necessary. The movie uses the blurred line between dreams and reality to its advantage and uses that trope extraordinarily well. That psychological element really laid a foundation in the horror which led to movies like "In the Mouth of Madness" (1994), "Event Horizon" (1997), and "Candyman" (1992). It reshaped the genre with its inventive storytelling and unforgettable villain.