A Nightmare On Elm Street
(1984) 91 Min.
Rated: R (gore)
Country: USA
Director: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund, John Saxon
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★★
A teen girl and her friends are terrorized by a man who seems to appear and kill them only in their dreams.
Synopsis:
Teen Tina Gray awakens from a nightmare where she is chased around by a man with burn scarring on his face and he wears blades affixed to his glove. She has slashes on her nightgown in real life where the man attacked her in the dream.
She talks to her best friend Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp) and Nancy’s boyfriend Glen Lantz (Depp). The trio decide to stay at Tina’s house and are interrupted when Tina’s boyfriend Rod Lane shows up. Tina and Rod have sex and fall asleep. Tina then wakes up in the dream world and encounters Freddy Krueger (Englund), the same man who had chased her in her earlier dream. Rod wakes to find Tina struggling under the sheets and watches on in horror as Tina gets sliced open and dragged across the ceiling of the bedroom. Tina dies. Glen and Nancy enter the room to see a shaken Rod.
Nancy is questioned at the police station by her father, Lieutenant Don Thompson (Saxon), about the murder. Nancy claims that they were only there to comfort Tina who had bad dreams. Nancy is unknowingly used as bait to trap Rod and he is quickly arrested for the murder of Tina, despite his pleas of innocence.
At school, Nancy falls asleep and sees visions of a dead Tina in a bodybag. She follows a trail of blood to a boiler room where Freddy appears. He corners her, but Nancy wakes herself inside of the dream by burning herself on a hot pipe. The burn mark is on her arm in the real world. Nancy then visits Rod in jail. He reveals that he also had dreams where he was chased by a man with knives for fingers.
Nancy takes a bath and falls asleep. She’s attacked by Freddy but manages to get out of the tub. She then decides to take pills to stay awake. That night, Glen visits her and she asks him to watch over her as she sleeps. In her dream she visits Rod in jail and sees Freddy enter the cell with him. Nancy tries to call for Glen to wake her, but nothing happens and Nancy runs back to her home in the dream. Freddy chases her into her room and attacks her, but an alarm goes off and wakes Nancy up. Glen was fast asleep next to her.
The pair go to visit Rod in jail as Nancy has a bad feeling about it from her dream. Lt. Thompson stops them at first and chides Nancy for being up late. Meanwhile, Freddy manages to make a blanket creep around Rod’s neck and drag him up against the cell ceiling where he chokes to death. Nancy, Glen and the police are too late to save Rod.
Nancy’s mother decides to take her to a hospital for sleep disorder studies. Nancy sleeps and encounters Freddy Krueger again and manages to bring back his hat into the real world. Marge, Nancy’s mother sees the hat and is visibly distraught. Back home Nancy confronts her mother about the hat which has the name “Fred Krueger” inside it. Marge says that he can’t hurt anyone since he’s dead.
After spending a day outside the house looking up boobytrap information she finds her house’s windows are now covered in burglar bars. Marge takes Nancy to the cellar and tells her that Fred Krueger was a child murder who killed 20 kids in the neighborhood. After Kreuger didn’t go to prison because of a technicality, a bunch of the neighborhood parents tracked him down to an abandoned boiler room, poured gasoline everywhere and lit it on fire. Marge shows Nancy the gloves with finger knives as proof.
Nancy calls Glen and hatches a plan where she’ll go to sleep and drag Freddy into the real world and Glen can beat him with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, Glen falls asleep and while he’s asleep he gets sucked into his bed and a torrent of blood gushes out of his bed onto the ceiling.
Nancy tries to prepare to leave the home but hears the phone ring and she disconnects it. On the second time when she answers Freddy’s tongue licks her mouth. She tries to get out downstairs but her drunk mother has locked the house. Nancy asks her father to come over to the house and arrest Freddy in a half-hour. Nancy then falls asleep.
While in the dream she encounters Freddy she realizes that he’s only a dream and has no power over her in the dream if she doesn’t allow it. He seemingly explodes. She goes out the next day to a car ride with Glen and realizes that they’re in a dream still as the sweater-like top of the convertible comes up and traps them inside the car as the film ends.
Review:
This film is the first in a long franchise and it arguably the best of this franchise. It launched Robert Englund’s name into horror and launched the career of Johnny Depp.
The concept of a monster that can only kill you when you sleep is very unique and the audience never quite knowing if they are witnessing a dream or reality adds to the tension. Is it a normal day in class or has Nancy dozed off again? The movie really plays up that aspect and it pays off.
You can really feel the helplessness of the teens as their lives are controlled by adults who do not entertain the idea that Fred Krueger is alive and killing the town’s kids again. Over all this is a fun horror film that is a classic for a reason and should be seen by any horror fan.