Directed by Wes CravenReview based upon the Entertainment DVD release
The success that transformed a pizza-faced child molester into the cult anti-hero of the 1980's is a wild unlikelihood that could've only happened in the horror genre. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” may well have been the single most influential horror film of the decade. The film spun a whole series of sequels (seven at current count with a remake in production), and created a unique new bogeyman in the character of Freddy Krueger, who appeared on T-shirts, lunchboxes, model kits, and even became a poster pin-up figure. Furthermore, it inspired a whole genre of horror films that rested in either blurring the dividing line between dream and reality, or featured a bogeyman returned from the grave to slice people up. It also served to make Robert Englund into a cult star. The movie also transformed the career of Wes Craven, who was until then a director who'd made a couple of strong ultra-violent independent horror films like “The Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes”, and was constantly trying to break into the mainstream to become a major name in horror. The spawning of the “Elm Street” films into a franchise gave New Line Cinema the financial clout to move from a minor studio into a major frontline player, culminating in the massive success of “The Lord Of The Rings” trilogy.
Teenager Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) finds that she and a group of friends are all experiencing identical nightmares, where they're pursued by a burn-scarred figure in a hat who wields a razor-tipped glove. However, when the figure starts to mutilate them in their nightmares, they wake up to find cuts and burns on their skin in reality too. Nancy’s friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) is killed in the waking world, savagely dismembered by the figure in her dreams. Haunted by the same figure, Nancy discovers that he is Fred Krueger (Robert Englund), a child molester who was acquitted on a technicality. Their parents dragged away and burnt Krueger alive, and now he's returned to exact revenge on their children. Nancy desperately tries to stay awake with the help of boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp) to find a means of combating Krueger before it's too late...
Wes Craven’s films all resonate with a sense of the tenuousness of reality and the importance of dreams. “The Last House on the Left”, “Deadly Blessing”, and “Deadly Friend” all have striking dream sequences. Subsequent Craven films such as “The Serpent and the Rainbow” and “Shocker” feature villains who inhabit dreams and places of the imagination more so than the real world, while “The People Under the Stairs” features a couple who've transformed an ordinary house into a twisted reality that pops up with trapdoors and slides when least expected. Craven movies of the 1990's such as “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” and “Scream” have become preoccupied with meta-fiction; films where the dividing line between
movie fiction and the audience watching the film is constantly being broken down and blurred. But Craven’s neurological horrors, and the blurring of reality and imagination, receive their most striking and most undiluted airing here in “Elm Street”.At the time, rather than any grandly metaphysical grappling with the nature of dream and reality, Craven was only drawing upon the 1980's bogeyman figure that had been popularized through the success of “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th”, along with numerous sequels and imitations of either. For all that, Craven received a surprising number of problems in trying to find financing for “Elm Street”, with the idea being rejected by all the major studios. It was eventually made on a surprisingly low $1.8 million budget, where it was construed as no more than just another variant on “Halloween”.
The sequels diluted the character of Freddy Krueger until he was no more than an almost comic figure, popping up and dispatching teenage victims with campy one-liners. The sequels seem less directed than they are stage-managed by the effects and makeup people. “Elm Street” by contrast maintains Krueger as an effectively threatening presence, largely by keeping him almost entirely silent throughout. There's almost nothing in the way of novelty effects set pieces here, and those that do turn up tend to be chilling in comparison to those in the sequels. Quite simply, “Elm Street” is a dozen times more effective than almost all of the sequels put together. Craven evinces a genuine wildness to the visions he unleashes; the shadowy figure of Krueger pursuing victims with huge extended six-foot long clawed arms, soon-to-be teen idol Johnny Depp being sucked down into his bed and spat out in a gusher of blood, the wall above Heather Lagenkamp’s head that bulges out with a pair of hands as she sleeps, or the clawed hand that surfaces between her legs as she doses off in the bath only to try and drag her down into a gaping black hole. Special mention must go to the dispatch of Amanda Wyss, who in a moment of sheer terror is slashed to pieces while being dragged around the walls and ceiling of her bedroom.
However, considering the reputation the film holds, it also has an irritating crudeness at times. The dialogue and characters never rise above being the random victims of the average slasher film. Heather Lagenkamp gives an awfully vain and snooty performance, which is a major factor in working against the film’s sympathy. Craven also demonstrates the irritating willingness to throw away the self-c
reated rules of the game he has set up for the purpose of a twist ending which reveals the nightmare isn’t over (although he did later insist that the ending wasn’t his but was forced on him by the studio).The film makes an interesting comparison with “Dreamscape” released only a few months before this, which played the same idea with a Science Fiction angle but to far more banal ends. Two other interesting progenitors are Don Coscarelli’s “Phantasm”, a film which exists in a confidently surreal blurring line between dream and reality, and the little seen “The Sender” about a psychic psychiatric patient who has the ability to insert himself into people’s dreams.
"A Nightmare on Elm Street" is a classic of the 1980's, and one that single handedly created both an icon and a franchise that'll be forever associated with the genre. Containing some brilliant shocks and thrills which arguably look a little dated now but have still lost none of their impact, "Elm Street" is a great example of Wes Craven's talent for horror. Superbly written and directed, this is a picture that will always stand the test of time, and is one of the best horror flicks of the era. A must-see genre movie.
9 out of 10
Despite a few performance issues and some dated effects, this "Elm Street" really is a nightmare worth seeing... one of Wes Craven's best, with a terrifying central concept