A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) - film review

Tina and Nancy, two teenagers in a cosy American suburb, experience the same terrifying dream in which they are attacked by a disfigured man in a hat, with razor-sharp knives attached to his fingers.  One night, during a sleepover with their boyfriends Rod and Glen, Tina is brutally murdered.  The killing is witnessed by Rod, who sees Tina slashed by invisible knives and dragged onto the ceiling.  In a panic, Rod flees, and in doing so incriminates himself as Tina’s murderer.  Not long after the police have picked him up, Rod is also dead, having apparently hanged himself in a police cell.   Meanwhile, Nancy has begun to suffer the same terrible nightmares, in which she is relentlessly stalked by the disfigured stranger.  When she awakes, her body is marked by the injuries she incurred in her dream.  After one of her nightmares, Nancy awakes holding her attacker’s hat, which bears the name Fred Krueger.  Reluctantly, Nancy’s mother tells her Krueger’s story.  Twenty years ago, he terrorised the neighbourhood, abducting and killing children.  When the judicial system let them down, the parents decided to deal with Krueger themselves. They set fire to his hideout and burned him alive.  Now it seems Freddy Krueger is back, and hungry for revenge...

Even as early as the mid-1980s, the slasher movie had already begun its descent into disrepute, bringing to an end an unparalleled decade of American horror cinema.   Inspired edge-of-the-seat shockers such as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) had given way to formulaic gore fests in which the same anonymous bunch of two-dimensional teenagers were ritually carved up in the same grisly manner by the same knife-loving bogeyman.  But just at the very point when the slasher film was on the point of losing credibility altogether, director Wes Craven stepped in and delivered what is widely considered one of the genre’s best offerings, a film that is matched only by William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) in its sustained mood of sheer terror and its potential to scare an adult audience completely witless.  It also gave us one of horror cinema’s most enduring icons, the knife-fingered fiend Freddy Krueger.

A Nightmare on Elm Street starts from a truly terrifying premise, namely that nightmares can kill you.  One of the things which inspired Wes Craven to make the film was a report that several Cambodian refugees who had fled Pol Pot’s regime subsequently died in their sleep after suffering from horrific nightmares.   There is a tendency to dismiss dreams as mere by-products of sleep, so the idea that they can assume a sufficient semblance of reality to actually kill us is a desperately scary notion.  From this the question that inevitably follows is: what happens if the barrier between reality (as we understand it) and the dreamworld of our imagination is removed, so that we can longer differentiate between the two?  This is the essence of Craven’s film - a depiction of a truly nightmare scenario where reality and dream become intermingled to the extent that we cannot tell what is real and what is not.

A Nightmare on Elm Street makes a total contrast with Craven’s previous film, the tacky B-movie send-up Swamp Thing (1982), and sets a new benchmark in cinema horror (one that is still pretty well unsurpassed).  Unlike the majority of today’s so-called horror offerings, which appear to exist only to keep the manufacturers of theatrical blood in business, this one genuinely does offer an intense, visceral viewing experience.  The film is not just frightening, it is relentlessly compelling from start to finish, with enough shocks to make you feel you’ve been wired up to the mains.  Yet it is not the gory set-pieces which make the film so terrifying, gruesome as these are (the most memorable being Johnny Depp, in his feature debut, being converted into a bloody geyser - a touch of the grand guignol that is drenched in Freudian symbolism).  What is far more unsettling is the sense of lingering evil that permeates the film, a rank diabolical malignancy that seems to inhabit every dark corner, ready to strike at any moment.  This is a film that taps into our deepest and darkest fears and makes our worst nightmare appear a frighteningly real prospect.  In his one great masterpiece, Wes Craven shows us what our lives would be like if were ever to lose that essential facility that we have for distinguishing dream from reality.  It is nothing less than a vision of Hell.  Horror sans frontières.

What A Nightmare on Elm Street has in common with most slasher films of this era - most notably John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) - is the portrayal of adolescents as defenceless victims in an adult world which refuses to engage with their problems of confused identity and nascent sexuality.  The knife-wielding monsters that stalk these films embody two notions - the demon lust which tyrannises and corrupts the teenager as he/she comes of age, and the revulsion in the adult mindset for teenage promiscuity.  These films powerfully evoke the vulnerability and solitariness of the adolescent in a hostile and unsympathetic world, at a time when a sudden awareness of one’s mortality and sexual character takes hold and propels the youngster into a quasi-nightmarish existence, a phenomenon that we glibly term teenage angst.

A Nightmare on Elm Street may have been made on a shoestring budget (1.8 million dollars), but it surpasses the usual horror schlock offerings in every department, particularly the quality of its design, cinematography, screenplay and performances, to say nothing of its imaginative special effects.  No surprise then that it was an instant box office hit, grossing over 25 million dollars in the US alone, on the back of some positive reviews.   The film transformed the fortunes of the small independent company that produced it, New Line Cinema, who were quick to capitalise on this success by rushing out an immediate sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985).  This established a highly lucrative franchise which would deliver another seven films, a TV series (hosted by Freddy Krueger), a range of novels, comic books and other merchandising.   Reluctant as he was to get involved with a series of films, Craven scripted the second sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and wrote and directed the sixth (and most disturbing) sequel New Nightmare (1994).  Craven would also find time to direct Scream (1996), one of the most highly regarded horror films of the 1990s.  To this day, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains American cinema’s last great horror film, a blood-chilling excursion into the realm of boundless terror.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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