A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) Movie Review
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Movie Review
If you knew me well enough you’d know that I’m not exactly a gigantic fan of the horror genre. Don’t get me wrong, I can watch a good horror movie from time to time but I don’t find being scared to be enjoyable. No way you could convince me to watch something like The Conjuring or the It remake. Watching that kind of movie just isn’t my idea of a good time. That being said, I’m more than up for old-school horror movies that have a fun element to them. See my review of John Carpenter’s The Thing for further evidence, while Scream quickly became one of my all-time favorite movies last summer. Mostly, these kind of “scary” movies don’t actually scare me that much. The most scared I’ve ever been while watching a movie was when I saw The Sixth Sense. I don’t care what anyone says, The Sixth Sense is very creepy. Anyway, A Nightmare on Elm Street only added to the list of horror films that I wasn’t phased by. Can I be scared? The answer is definitely yes, but please don’t show me that kind of movie.
For those who have never heard the iconic premise of A Nightmare on Elm Street, you are in luck because I’m about to tell you. The story follows Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and her three friends, Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp), Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), and Rod Lane (Jsu Garcia) when Tina starts to have nightmares about a man with burned skin, a dirty red and green sweater, and knives on his hands. All of them, besides Glen, have nightmares about the same man, and together they realize something is happening to them that’s connected to the knife-handed man in their dreams. After two of the friends die violently in their sleep, the two remaining kids come to the conclusion that the killer is attacking them in their sleep. Determined to stay awake at all costs, they try to decide what to do until one of them eventually falls asleep and is killed by the murderer. The one remaining teen discovers that the man who has been killing their friends is Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer who was burned to death by neighborhood parents many years ago. Freddy’s back from the dead, and to get revenge on the people who killed him, he’s taking vengeance on a new batch of suburban teenagers in their subconscious. Freddy can only kill when his victims are asleep and dreaming. Eventually the last teen and Freddy battle to the death.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is widely considered to be one of the most innovative and influential horror films of all time, especially within the slasher subgenre. While it didn’t quite inspire me to stand right up and start writing movies about killers, I can definitely see why it’s so praised and honored. The cinematography is really extraordinary; there are so many shots that are so well-crafted and obviously very thought-out. Wes Craven did a great job directing this and setting the tone of the movie, which is dark and somewhat dreamlike (no real surprise), but also somewhat campy. It’s not really a “funny” movie, but some parts will have you laughing under your breath like, “Wait, that actually just happened?” Freddy isn’t cracking one-liners, which keeps it from being cheesy, but there’s a tongue-in-cheek vibe all over this movie that could make watching it more fun for those who are clever enough to pick up on it, and slightly more frustrating for those who are just expecting a straightforward movie with normal death scenes. The deaths in Elm Street are a lot more creative and artistic than ones in movies like Friday the 13th. Roughly five people die in this movie, including Krueger himself, but the deaths that do happen are executed brilliantly and brutally.
The mood and overall vibe of this movie are very well-represented, but sometimes they are tainted by the movie’s uncreative and dated dialogue. “Up yours with a twirling lawnmower!” had me cringing. I think if I could change one thing about Elm Street, it would have more interesting and engaging dialogue. Lots of the characters don’t really have distinct personalities. Tina is supposed to be weak and fragile, but she ends up getting into a bunch more trouble than Nancy. Glen is supposed to be the “jock” character, but compared to Rod he seems wimpy, and Nancy’s mom’s (Ronee Blakley) personality is just all over the place. This proves that more of the focus is on the horror aspect of the movie and the dreamlike storytelling than character development or dialogue. That’s fine, but it takes away a certain aspect of the movie that one of Craven’s later works, Scream, had.
Safety chart:
Violence: 9/10 - Obviously this is a decently violent movie, with bloody, unrealistic deaths in the form of stabbings, hangings, burnings, etc.
Language: 7/10 - F-words, s-words, other various cursing by adults and teenagers alike.
Drinking/smoking: 5/10 - Nancy’s mom is seen drinking and/or drunk several times.
For fans of the horror genre, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a must-see. It gave birth to the iconic slasher killer Freddy Krueger, and single-handedly made slasher movies worth seeing and making again. The cinematography is disturbingly beautiful, the tone uncompromisingly dark yet delirious, and watching the film is almost like being inside one of Freddy’s nightmare-scapes: you have no idea what’s about to happen, but whatever it is, it’ll be shocking. The movie’s tension keeps amping up until the frantic and harrowing final showdown between Freddy and the remaining teenager. For a low-budget movie like this, what Craven and the rest of the crew accomplished is fairly astonishing. Elm Street isn’t a movie I’ll be forgetting about anytime soon. Another interesting thing I noticed was that nobody mentioned that the events of the film took place on “Elm Street.” Anyway, I’d give this movie a B+, which isn’t a bad grade. It could’ve been a little sharper on the dialogue side of things, a little more well-rounded when it comes to characters, and honestly I wouldn’t have minded if it was a little more frightening. The only parts that remotely scared me were the parts with the talking corpses inside of the body bags, walking around and whispering vague things. Other than that, A Nightmare on Elm Street is mostly a very enjoyable venture into the world of 1980’s horror.
