Directed by: Wes Craven

Premise: In the town of Springwood, a teenage girl (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends are haunted by nightmares of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a burned figure in a fedora hat who wears a glove with knives fastened on the fingertips. As Krueger murders the teens in their dreams, they die in real life.

What Works: The original Nightmare on Elm Street is a classic horror film. This is due in no small part to the performance of Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, who plays the character as a sadistic but intelligent boogeyman. Although Kruger’s screen time is limited in this film, he makes such a strong impression that his presence permeates the entire picture. A Nightmare on Elm Street is also notable for its teenage characters. Unlike a lot of the slasher films released in the 1980s (and in comparison to many that have been made since), the teenage characters of Nightmare are more multidimensional and demonstrate more emotion and intelligence than their counterparts in Friday the 13^th or its imitators. A Nightmare on Elm Street also outdoes a lot of its contemporaries in its cinematic craft; the film is full of striking visuals and uses sound very effectively, especially the high pitched sound of Freddy’s blades scraping against pipes. The score by Charles Bernstein is also impressive, and the nursery-like chime has become as integral to the film and to the character of Freddy as the glove and the fedora. The original Nightmare is distinguished from its later sequels in its relentlessness and uncompromising brutality. In the original Nightmare, Freddy is an angry and vengeful psychopath whose psychotic energy has been given the ability to actually disrupt reality. The film takes advantage of this terrific premise and makes the idea as cinematic as possible, fooling the audience with what is real and what is not and in the process undermines the audiences’ own sense of reality. A Nightmare on Elm Street takes this further by placing the authority figures of the film as obstructionists to the heroine and her search for the truth and it uses the metaphysics of the story to invoke Freudian ideas about the unconscious; the teenagers are preyed upon by a demon that dwells in their unconscious mind and is the repressed sins of their parents and the only way to deal with it is to face the threat and drag it out into the waking world. With this subtext, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most successfully subversive horror film of its time.

What Doesn’t: A few of the special effects of A Nightmare on Elm Street have not aged as well, although much of the film holds up just fine.

DVD extras: New Line’s Infifilm edition includes a commentary track, alternate endings, featurettes, a fact track, video clips, and DVD-ROM content.

Bottom Line: A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the great horror films, standing alongside James Whale’s Frankenstein, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film manages to be extremely scary while also presenting a scenario that is packed with symbolic meaning.