A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

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Movie Details

• Genre: Horror, Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 1984-11-09 Limited
• Running Time: 91 min.
• Director: Wes Craven
• Cast: John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Johnny Depp, Jsu Garcia, Charles Fleischer, Joseph Whipp, Robert Englund, Lin Shaye
• Producer: Robert Shaye
• Writer: Wes Craven
• Distributor: New Line Cinema
• Official Site: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Official Site

One can criticize Wes Craven’s latest horror movie--a low-budget shocker that has already grossed $20 million worldwide--for a few unnecessary visual gimmicks, for a conclusion that departs from the writer-director’s original scheme, and for Ronee Blakely’s baroque hambone performance as a tremulous alcoholic who stresses each statement as if it was her last. (This is the funniest camp acting since Louise Fletcher’s turn as the pill-popping workaholic in Brainstorm.) But A Nightmare on Elm Street is destined to become a classic of the genre. As with the best horror films of recent years--Jaws, Carrie, Don’t Look Now, The Brood, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre--the film’s disturbing visual power is also notorious fun. Craven, the ex-humanities professor whose controversial Last House on the Left had many of us repeating, “It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie,” here tells the story of four teenagers who discover that they share similar nightmares, and that a fiend named Freddy Krueger is stalking each of them in their sleep; the film moves freely through their individual dreamstates as the killer kills and the dreamers dream up revenge. Craven gives the mechanics of this B-movie plot a frenzied and often magically surreal about-face: The dream sequences find beauty (and ghoulish humor) in landscapes of terror--as when the killer’s arms suddenly extend across a dark alley, or when the heroine flees up a staircase only to find each step turning to mushy paste. (Edward Staiger)