HALLOWEEN 2K18: A Review of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984)

I couldn't come up with a non-rapist caption for this

While Jason Voorhees was "wrapping up" his box office dominance early on in the year with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, another spooky supervillain of motion picture horror was being conceived by the well-known filmmaker Wes Craven. Craven, by then who had done a few terror flicks to his credit, was creating something truly imaginative and original for the time. Enter Freddy Krueger, the child killer of Springwood who was chased and killed by the angry parents who sought to keep anymore children from being killed. After his murder, he later returns in a different form entirely, able to stalk and murder people in their sleep, hosting people's own nightmares and creating truly uniquely horrific scenarios for which people to die in. The first entry, 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, remains a classic to this day.

Heather Langenkamp's dream comes true

The film opens, showing fifteen-year-old Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) being stalked through a boiler room and attacked by a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove. She awakens from the nightmare, but her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. The same ones she got in her dream. The following morning, Tina is consoled by her best friend, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp...no, don't Google It is that Johnny Depp). Later, Nancy and Glen sleep at Tina's following her mother's out-of-town departure; the sleepover is interrupted by Tina's boyfriend Rod Lane (Nick Corri). Falling asleep, Tina sees the burnt man and runs. Awakened by Tina's thrashing, Rod witnesses her being fatally slashed by an unseen force. He flees as Nancy and Glen find Tina, mistakenly blaming Rod. Nancy tells her father, Lieutenant Don Thompson (John Saxon), of Tina's death.

Wes Craven decided to incorporate his original concept art
for Freddy into the movie somehow

The next day, Rod is arrested by Don, despite his pleas of innocence. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and finds the burnt sweater man, calling himself "Freddy Krueger", chasing her in the boiler room. Nancy burns her arm on a pipe and then awakens, disrupting a rather "riveting" study session in her classroom. She notices the burn mark on her arm and becomes horrified. At home, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and nearly gets drowned by Freddy. Nancy goes to Rod, who tells her what happened to Tina, and Nancy believes Freddy is responsible for Tina's death. That night, Nancy has Glen watch over her as she falls asleep. She tries to find Freddy and sees him preparing to kill Rod. He turns his attention on her; she runs and wakes up when her alarm clock goes off. Nancy and Glen go to the jail and discover Rod dead in his cell in an apparent suicide hanging. The special effects for the sheet moving around Rod's neck aren't half bad, even today. At Rod's funeral, Nancy's parents become worried when she describes the man in her dreams. Her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) takes her to a dream clinic. In her dream, Nancy is attacked again and grabs Freddy's hat. When the staff wake her up, she has a gash on her arm and Freddy's hat in her possession, realizing she can pull items out of her dream into the real world. By now you're probably beyond confused on how this is possible, even in a fakey-fake horror movie realm such as this, but I promise you... it doesn't get explained, but you'll still have fun anyway.

He isn't quite as cool as Dr. Loomis in Halloween

At home, Marge bars the windows and begins drinking heavily. She tells Nancy that Freddy was a child murderer released on a technicality. Ain't it always the way? In a form of vigilante justice, the parents in the neighborhood of Elm Street burned him alive. Realizing that Freddy has manifested himself in the form of a dream stalker and that he desires revenge, Nancy convinces Glen to help her kill Freddy once and for all. She plans to take Freddy into the real world, and sets up booby traps in her house Home Alone style. Concerned over her influence, Glen's parents prevent the two from meeting. Glen falls asleep at their appointed hour, and in the most gruesome and chilling scene in the movie, Freddy kills him and releases his blood in a large fountain in his room, which is witnessed by Glen's mother. Just before this, Freddy calls Nancy through her phone and tells her that "he's her boyfriend now".

Tasked with fighting Krueger alone, Nancy puts Marge's drunk ass to bed and asks her father Don, who is across the street, to break into the house in twenty minutes. In her sleep, she locates Freddy at the last second and pulls him out of the dream. In the real world, Nancy runs from Freddy, who trips on the booby traps. She lights him on fire, locks him in the basement, and rushes to the door for help. The police arrive, and they realize Freddy has escaped the basement. In Marge's bedroom, they see a still-burning Freddy smother her. After Don puts out the fire, Freddy and Marge have vanished. Despite her father's words, Nancy believes she is still in danger.

Before he knew how to sell his body to Disney for money

Freddy finds and attacks Nancy once again. Realizing he is powered by his victim's fear, just completely out of the blue, she calmly turns her back on him, reducing him to nothingness. My guess is that Wes Craven wrote himself into a corner and needed a quickie method of killing Freddy so the movie could just end, because this seems a bit cheap. Thought, somehow, it makes more sense in Freddy vs Jason, so go figure. After "killing" Freddy, Nancy steps outside into a bright morning where all of her friends and mother are still alive. She gets into Glen's car to go to school when the top comes down and suddenly locks them in. The top sports Freddy's sweater pattern and colors. As the car is driven uncontrollably down the street, Marge is grabbed through the window of their front door by Freddy's gloved hand and is dragged through it to her apparent death.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. Freddy Krueger isn't the wise-cracking funny guy he'll become in later sequels, he's the straight, stone-cold dream stalking killer. He's got some one-liners, but they're more chilling than hilarious. Nancy's a great a protagonist and Glen's a great sidekick, except for the fact that he's lazy half the time. John Saxon is fun, but stern as Nancy's dad Don. All-in-all, a fantastic start to a franchise that would, like many of the things from the 1980s, get worse and worse with all the excess that it was bound to partake in. Upon A Nightmare on Elm Street's release, Jason realized he'd have to share the box office dollars with another icon, and came out of his short retirement to revive his franchise...