Minneapolis A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Movie Showtimes

Genre: Horror, Suspense/Thriller
Release Date: 11/09/1984
Running Time: 91 mins
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
Offical Site: Click Here
Buy Tickets

Box Office

2012, 65.2 mil, 65.2 mil
Disney's A Christmas Carol, 22.3 mil, 63.3 mil
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, 5.9 mil, 8.7 mil
Men Who Stare at Goats, 5.9 mil, 23.0 mil
Michael Jackson's This Is It, 5.1 mil, 67.2 mil
The Fourth Kind, 4.6 mil, 20.4 mil
Couples Retreat, 4.2 mil, 102.0 mil
Paranormal Activity, 4.0 mil, 103.7 mil
Law Abiding Citizen, 3.8 mil, 67.2 mil
The Box, 3.2 mil, 13.2 mil

Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

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) — Edward Staiger