A Nightmare on Elm Street may not be the best horror movie of the 80’s, but it’s probably the most fun. This marks the high point of Wes Craven’s career, and it is as scary as it is innovative. The whole movie feels like it shouldn’t really work. Some of the performances are a little creaky and campy, and there are a handful of purely dramatic scenes that feel a tad amateurish. However, Craven truly delivers when it comes to the scares, and he makes good on the promise of the genuinely terrifying premise.  And the villain is one for the ages. 

Released during the early 80’s surge of teenage horror movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street soon became one that stood out from the crowd. While horror has always remained a financially successful genre, it has had its ups and downs in popularity throughout the decades, and there are definite trends that come out of movies that strike gold. For example, when Wes Craven’s Scream opened in 1996 and went on to make over 100 million dollars, we saw a new five-year span of the same kind of horror movie. While 80’s horror was all about blood and guts and boobies, 90’s horror became more about in jokes and loud musical cues. They were fun while they lasted, but movies like Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and, well, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer don’t work as well today because they were just scraping off of the Scream phenomenon. The trend can even have negative affects on movies that could’ve been something better, the best example being Halloween: H20, a movie that feels closer to Scream than the original Halloween.

Speaking of Halloween, that film started the new craze of the teenage serial killer horror genre in the late 70’s, which was followed soon after by Friday the 13th and a slew of similarly themed films. By the mid 80’s, most of these movies followed the trend of Friday the 13th by having lots of gore and little in the ways of scares, and by 1984, audiences were looking for something new, something fresh. It can be difficult for filmmakers to come up with a different spin on the horror genre, and Craven successfully re-booted the genre with this, his sixth film, in the most deliciously malicious of ways.

The film stars a quartet of attractive actors, three of whom have long been forgotten, and the other of whom being Johnny Depp, in his film debut. Heather Langenkamp plays Nancy, the “virgin” teenager who likes to play it safe, while her best friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) is a little bit of a party animal. Their boyfriends Glen (Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia) have their own wild sides, but there is something they all have in common. They all are nightmares about the same psychotic killer, a man with a burned face, a sweater of red and green, and a glove with long finger knives. The twist is that if he kills the victim in his or her dream, the person dies for real. As Nancy’s friends start dying, she has to find a way to bring Krueger into the real world and kill him once and for all.

First and foremost, A Nightmare on Elm Street should be commended for the innovation of the special effects. A movie that takes place a lot in dreams could get dreary and dull real fast, but Craven allows for subtlety to play into the scary nightmares the teenagers have. Take Tina’s second dream, for instance. After having sex with her boyfriend, she hears her name being whispered from outside, and she takes a little walk toward the voice. We are introduced to the mania of Fred Krueger, and over the next few minutes, we are treated to various effective effects. Krueger jumps out from behind a tree and cuts his skin open, revealing green blood. He extends his arms, reaching out three times as far as any normal human could reach. His face comes off to reveal a skeleton. And then Tina gets tossed around the ceiling, all before her gruesome death (the only real gory bit in the movie). The best special effect of all in this sequence occurs right before Tina’s escapade, with Nancy sleeping in her bed as a ghostly figure peers in and looks down at her. All of these effects work beautifully, and they never detract from the narrative. 

The narrative is pretty interesting, and it may be the best storyline of all the dead teenager horror movies of the 80’s. The idea of a man who can kill someone in his or her sleep is a good one. The premise could easily make way for a terrible movie in the wrong hands, but Craven never falters in bringing that idea to a feature-length narrative. The narrative works extremely well because dreams in and of themselves call for great visuals, while at the same time offering ambiguous images that can be imaginative and different. We aren’t required to have someone like Jason of the Friday the 13th series to slash his victims in the same old way, every single time, for ten films. Because of the nature of Krueger’s situation, there is much more to be played with in his death scenes, and there is more imagination to look forward to with each and every kill. The idea of not knowing at any given moment if we are in a dream or not can be a little frustrating, but it also keeps audiences on their toes, with nobody ever being truly safe. When people can die in their sleep, the stakes are raised, and there is no comfort at all from support of friends and family. In essence, nobody can help these kids.

The performances range from the good to the, well, not too distracting. Langenkamp and Depp come off the best, playing good-natured teenagers as effortlessly as Jamie Lee Curtis played Laurie Strode in the original Halloween. Langenkamp can be a little annoying at times, but we come to care for her by the third act, and we want her to beat the villain. Wyss and Garcia are much more marginal, with Garcia coming off the worst. Both of them aren’t in it for too long, so the quality of their performances aren’t really of the utmost importance. The more campy performances come from John Saxon as Nancy’s dad and Ronee Blakley as Nancy’s mom, both probably fully aware of the kind of movie they’re in. This is not to say that their performances are poor but actually gleefully cheesy in a positive way. Saxon is pure class, even when he looks over his wife’s dead skeleton disappearing from her bed as if he’s watching a chef prepare a sandwich not to his liking. Blakley has the same dead look on her face the whole time, always looking a little bit drunk (probably appropriate for her character).

And then there’s Robert England as Freddy Krueger. Marginalized to a wise-cracking clown in the sequels, he is a source of pure evil in the first installment. There are moments when he tries to be funny (in a sick way) and serious (also in a sick way). When Nancy stands up to him in the end, he is completely taken aback, because he knows nothing other than these teenagers being absolutely terrified by him. It’s easy to see why. He can appear out of nowhere, stick his victims from any which way, and his face resembles a burned victim in the most grotesque of circumstances. When we find out the backstory of how the real Fred Krueger died, he becomes even more of a monster, possibly scarier when he was alive than how he is in his dreams. Craven was thinking of going with a large man to play the villain, but England’s smaller stature makes the man much more effective. Krueger is scary because of his intelligence more so than his physical bravado. The guy can kill his victims in any way he imagines, unlike some big guy like Jason who can be easily outrun. England completely disappears into the role, creating one of the most memorable villain roles of the horror movies of the last century. 

Like most terrific original horror movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street was followed by a slew of terrible sequels, only one of which being any good. Parts two through six have their decent moments, but nothing in any of these films comes close to the magic of the first installment. Wes Craven himself came back for the seventh installment, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and that film may be the most intriguing and fascinating horror films ever made. It’s hard to really consider it a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, since it exists within an entirely different world. New Nightmare is the only good sequel, mostly, however, because Craven makes Freddy Krueger scary again. By the sixth movie, Krueger was riding broomsticks, running through a video game, and screaming in 3D. Today he is still remembered by many as one of the funnier horror villains. He was never mean to be like that, and was instead meant to be a terrifying, menacing psycho. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street is nothing short of a classic of the horror genre. It endures over twenty years since it was first released because it has all the elements required for a successful horror movie, plus additions that make it all the more unique and chilling. Wes Craven has made a lot of good movies, including Last House on the Left, the original The Hills Have Eyes, Scream, Scream 2, and Red Eye. One of the enduring lines of the terrific opening sequence from Scream has Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) talking to a strange man on the phone, telling him one of her favorite horror movies is A Nightmare on Elm Street. The killer comments that he thought those movies were scary. Casey replies, “Well, the first one was, but the rest sucked!” It can’t be said any clearer than that. A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of those horror movies that can be watched over and over again, and the viewer can feel good about it when he gets up the next morning. If he wakes up the next morning, that is. Long live Freddy!