A Nightmare on Elm Street

The "Nightmare" has been recently on in our TV and I must admit that even after those fourteen years it made a deep impression on me. I saw the film for the first time in 1989 and at that time I was scared because I was just a teenager then. But now, I can see that the film has got something unique, which makes the film different from other horror movies. I think it`s down to the basic idea of this film - dreams and everything that can happen in our dreams sometimes become true. The authors of this film did not have to be bound with the need to stay realistic and that opens a free way to their wildest imaginations. Charles Bernstein`s music in this movie has become clasic and we can hear the basic melodic motive in some of the sequels. Original music composed by different authors in the sequels to this first Nightmare stays far far behind Bernstein`s masterpiece.

There have been many periods of film release that have had impact on film history(think "Wizard of Oz","It Happened One Night" and "Gone With the Wind" in 1939 or "Close Encounters" and "Star Wars" in the Summer of 1977,for examples),but one that comes to mind for me was one particular month:November,1984. That's when two somewhat under-budgeted films,James CAmeron's "The Terminator"(which would catapult then-cult figure Arnold Scwarzenegger to super-stardom) and this film,Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street". Both central characters,the eponymous Terminator and "Nightmare" menace Freddy Krueger would become iconic film images for decades to come.

The plot line of the story's no government secret here: a handful of high schoolers in a seemingly ordinary town in Ohio are being haunted in their dreams by a grotesque figure. When this figure starts murdering each one of the group,it's up to Nancy(Heather Langenkamp),the most stable and level of the group,to ferret out and end the terror. Robert Englund,previously known from supporting character roles and his touching,gentle alien in the "V" mini-series and t.v.series,is able to develop a nearly permanent career as the seemingly indominable child-killer. Wes Craven would redefine his own career,as well as the slasher genre,with this film,where he had previously been known for visceral,uncomfortable shockers like "LAst House on the Left" and "The Hills HAve Eyes".

Definitely worth a look,especially for those who consider themselves horror film buffs.

The teenagers of Springfield, Illinois are having nightmares. Tina and her best friend Nancy learn that they're dreaming about the same creature, a hideously burned man in a dirty red and green sweater who bears an odd weapon; a glove with razor fingers. When Tina is brutally murdered in her bed one night, suspicion falls upon her volatile boyfriend Rod, who was the only other person in the room with Tina when she died. But Rod swears he didn't do it, and tells Nancy that he too has been suffering from terrible nightmares in which a knife- fingered man is trying to kill him. Nancy begins to suspect that something evil is happening within their dreams, and that perhaps the boogeyman is real. When Rod turns up dead in his jail cell, Nancy is convinced that a ghostly killer is stalking them in their sleep. Her mother, worried for Nancy's sanity, takes her to a dream clinic where her sleep patterns can be monitored. When Nancy awakens screaming from a nightmare with a bloody slash mark on her arm, she shows her mother and the doctor what she has pulled out of her dream: the battered fedora that the killer always wears. The hat bears a name tag: Fred Krueger. Nancy's mother recognizes the name and soon tells Nancy the story of a brutal child killer who had terrorized the town many years ago. When he was released on a technicality, Nancy's parents and the parents of the other nightmare-plagued children hunted Fred Krueger down and burned him alive. Fred Krueger is dead, but he's found a way to return and wreak vengeance upon the children of his killers. Nancy knows that she must find a way to stop him before he kills her and everyone else on Elm Street.

I just sat down and watched this movie again the other day and it's still damn impressive. The acting isn't always the greatest and it looks just the slightest bit dated, but it's still a really damn good movie. It's power lies in the fact that sleep cannot be avoided. In so many other horror movies, the victims are nothing more than vapid cattle wandering dumbly up the slaughterhouse chute and calling out: "Is anyone there?" as they go up. They purposefully get themselves into stupid and dangerous situations and therefore we feel no real pity for them when they are eviscerated. However, in A Nightmare On Elm Street, all the characters have to do to endanger themselves is to go to sleep. Even the most hardcore insomniac (like myself) knows that eventually, sleep will come for you; it is unavoidable. We cannot blame our cast for wandering around doing stupid things in their dreams, because how many of us have had dreams in which we show up for work naked? Very rarely are we in control of our dreams, and in A Nightmare On Elm Street, the only person in control is Freddy Krueger.

Robert Englund as Freddy is flawless. Before this movie was released, the boogeymen of horror films had always been hulking, silent, expressionless shapes usually hidden way behind masks. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But Englund gave us a new kind of Boogeyman - a smartass. Freddy is hideously burned, covered in scar tissue and has all the fashion sense of a wino, but he's cool. Not content to simply disembowel his screaming victims, Freddy has to tease them a little first, flirting, humiliating or showing off. He makes Tina watch him cut off his own fingers and smiles at her like a drunken uncle who's just pulled a coin out from behind her ear. He sticks his tongue in Nancy's mouth via her telephone. He doesn't waste his sense of humor on the guys in this film, but there's plenty of sequels in which he makes up for that.

This is such a great, innovative film, filled with pretty cool special effects, disturbing sound effects (including scraping metal fingernails and baby goats bleating in terror) and creepy music. The boiler room is an especially unnerving set, complete with hissing pipes and dripping chains. A young Johnny Depp and his feathery 80s hair make their debut in this film as well, and though his character is about half a million miles away from Captain Jack Sparrow, the raw talent is still very much in evidence here.

This remains the best movie of the Elm Street series, with a few good sequels and some really crappy ones. But Freddy is always worth watching.

Nancy is having grisly nightmares. Meanwhile, her high-school friends, who are having the very same dreams, are being slaughtered in their sleep by the hideous fiend of their shared nightmares. When the police ignore her explanation, she herself must confront the killer in her shadowy realm.

This Film Starred: John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp & Johnny Depp.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984 was written and directed by Wes Craven.

In my personal opinion this was a great film, it had it's scary moments which every horror should have unfortunately they did go a bit far on a couple of the sequels which got rather low ratings on here. Not all of the sequels are bad, for example I am a fan of 3 & 4 but sequels like 2 & 5 ARE GIVING THE Freddy movies a bad name and are shadowing the excellence of this movie in particular. People seem to recognise Freddy Krueger as the burnt serial killer with knives for fingers who appeared in all them bad films. A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984 is not one of them films and should be recognised as a the great movie it is. I highly recommend this film to all fans of the horror genre.

****/***** Very Good.

Every small-town neighborhood has an old legend that never dies. For the residents of Elm Street, Fred Krueger is the demonic soul that plagues their nightmares. Krueger was an evil child molester, burned alive by the parents of the children he had slain in the past. Now, years later, he has reappeared in the nightmares of Elm Street's teenagers. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) continually experiences these haunting visions in which the permanently scarred man chases her through the shadows of a boiler room -- the same room in which he used to slay his helpless victims. Nancy considers her dreams to be typical nightmares one of her best friends is apparently "sliced" to death during a deep sleep in her home.

Soon Nancy's dreams become worse, and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp) admits that he has also been experiencing unpleasant nightmares. Together they uncover the truth behind Krueger's death years ago, and vow to stay awake as long as they can and strategize a plan to bring Krueger back into the "real world" and kill him once and for all.

Loosely based on true events, Wes Craven's inspiration for the tale originated after he reportedly read that a number of people across the world had died in their slumber. Blending fantasy with reality, Craven wrote and directed one of the most iconic horror films of all time, which -- similar to "Halloween" before it -- spawned an inferior legion of sequels and imitators, all of which continue to pale in comparison to the original.

The brilliance of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is that it relies on psychological fear vs. cheap exploitation tricks. "Halloween," directed by John Carpenter and released in 1978, had re-sparked interest in the Hitchcock-style horror/thrillers, and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" builds upon this, cleverly channeling the mystery surrounding dreams and using it as a gateway for chills and thrills. Midway through the movie, a doctor played by Richard Fleischer tells Nancy's mother that the process of dreams -- where do they come from? -- has yet to be explained, and the fact that all humans tend to have dreams on a regular basis is essentially why this film remains so scary, even by today's standards. Some of the special effects are quite outdated but, unlike the "Nightmare" imitators, gore plays second to the plot and characters -- something rare in a horror film.

The sequels became sillier and gorier. Fred's name changed to the less menacing "Freddy" (which we all now know him by), he was given more screen time, the makeup on his face was not quite as horrific, he began to crack jokes more often and his voice evolved into a less demonic cackle. In the original "Nightmare" it is interesting to note that Freddy is rarely given screen time at all -- we see his infamous hands (wearing gloves with butter knives attached on the fingers to slice his victims), we see his hat, we see his sweater, we see his outline in the darkness of the shadows, but even when we finally see Freddy up-close, Craven manages to keep the camera moving so that we never gain a distinct image of the killer. Now, twenty years later, there's no mystery anymore -- Freddy's face is featured on the front cover for most of the films and his very presence has become the cornerstone of all the movies in the franchise. But in 1984, long before Craven predicted his character would become a huge part of modern pop culture, Freddy was mysterious and not very funny at all.

The acting is one of the film's weaknesses -- Heather Langenkamp is never totally awe-inspiring as Nancy, truth be told (although she does a decent job); Depp -- in his big-screen debut -- shows a sign of talent to come but basically mutters clichéd dialogue most of the time. The co-stars are acceptable at best. However the greatest performance is -- not surprisingly -- by Robert Englund, as Freddy, who is in the film barely at all. Ironically, as mentioned above, this only makes the film succeed at scaring us.

The direction is not as superb as "Halloween," and for that matter either is the film. Over the years, "Nightmare" has arguably been given an overrated reputation, although it is inferior to "Halloween." However, compared to some of the other so-called "horror films" released during the '80s -- including "Friday the 13th" and other dumb slasher flicks -- "A Nightmare on Elm Street" does seem to stand as one of the best horror films of the decade. Despite its flaws it is quite smart with a surprise "final" ending and one of cinema's greatest villains lurking at the core.

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" is really Nancy's story. The film focuses on Nancy's troubles, Nancy's dreams and Nancy's actions. The ending of the film becomes a bit muddled -- the booby traps are unfortunately a bit goofy and Freddy helplessly (almost humorously) chasing Nancy around her home supposedly trying to murder her is something the film could have done without -- but overall it is a satisfying mixture of horror, thriller and fantasy, a movie that taps into two seldom-recognized everyday events in human life, which are sleeping, and dreaming. Craven's ability to realize this unknown fear in a movie is, needless to say, quite fascinating. "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is not a great movie but for horror buffs it is a must-see and for non-horror-buffs there is a fair amount of other elements to sustain one's interest.