Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street!!!

A Nightmare on Elm Street is the best kino of all time. This is the famous movie in which a burn victim with knives for fingers stalks a group of teenagers including Johnny Depp and the best Final Girl ever, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). I have the series documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and I've watched all four hours of it and all the extras twice. I have a copy of I Am Nancy, the Nancy documentary, signed by Heather Langenkamp, and I've seen everything in the series at least five times, even the bad ones. I even have a DVD of the first three Freddy's Nightmares episodes that was released in the UK (they never put out another one). On my assburgers diagnosis, this movie is listed as the cause.

Remember poster art?

The movie starts with Tina (Amanda Wyss) having a nightmare about 80s synth music, which is rudely interrupted by a cackling boogyman we'll come to know as Freddy Krueger. Tina is set up to be our Final Girl, but is killed off in a sweet switcheroo involving a revolving room gag from a Fred Astaire movie. It's a Hitchcockian twist so audacious it would have shocked audiences everywhere, if not for the fact the poster clearly identifies Nancy as the Final Girl. But who cares? It's a great poster, featuring the best tagline ever: "If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all".

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a rarity among slasher movies for having a plot and character arcs and all that screenwriting bullshit you used to get in movies in the olden days. Nancy grows up, takes charge of her life, learns to beat the monster, and bitches out her drunk mom all in the space of 90 minutes. Compare and contrast: The Hobbit (2012-2014).

Nancy becomes the voice of everyone who hated hall monitors (everyone).

So Nancy, who is into survival, does some detective work and finds that she can pull items out of her dream, specifically Freddy's hat, from which she learns his name, uncovering the dark secret her parents have been keeping from her. We've all had these moments in our lives when we discover that the world isn't quite right, and I don't think I've ever seen it captured better in a movie. But whereas most of us turn into bottle-pissing shut-ins who write blogs about horror movies, Nancy instead decides to use her knowledge to overcome her demons, which is pretty typical of the earnest positivity in post-Hills Have Eyes Craven, which is rare in horror, and kind of refreshing.

*Blocks ur path*

I haven't talked that much about Freddy yet, because the movie isn't really about him in the way the sequels were. Clive Barker described the original Hellraiser as a twisted family drama, and that's kind of true here too. Nancy learns her parents are murderers whose dysfunctions are manifestations of trauma from burning a guy to death, which must be an adjustment to say the least. But Freddy is scary in this film, which is easy to forget if you've seen some of the sequels. This is the one where he reaches up out of the bath with his knived glove and sprays Johnny Depp all over his room.

I think if this movie hadn't had all those sequels and become a great big merchandising machine, it would be regarded among the top tier of horror movies where it belongs. On the other hand, some of the sequels were underrated and good, and others were Ed Wood-like in their Icarean aspirations.