A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

In the dreams of his victims, a spectral child murderer stalks the children of the members of the lynch mob that killed him.

Director:

Wes Craven

Writer:

Wes Craven

Stars:

John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp

2 wins & 3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
John Saxon	...	Lt. Donald Thompson
Ronee Blakley	...	Marge Thompson
Heather Langenkamp	...	Nancy Thompson
Amanda Wyss	...	Christina 'Tina' Gray
Jsu Garcia	...	Rod Lane (as Nick Corri)
Johnny Depp	...	Glen Lantz
Charles Fleischer	...	Dr. King
Joseph Whipp	...	Sgt. Parker
Robert Englund	...	Fred Krueger
Lin Shaye	...	Teacher
Joe Unger	...	Sgt. Garcia
Mimi Craven	...	Nurse (as Mimi Meyer-Craven)
Jack Shea	...	Minister
Ed Call	...	Mr. Lantz
Sandy Lipton	...	Mrs. Lantz

Storyline

On Elm Street, Nancy Thompson and a group of her friends including Tina Gray, Rod Lane and Glen Lantz are being tormented by a clawed killer in their dreams named Freddy Krueger. Nancy must think quickly, as Freddy tries to pick off his victims one by one. When he has you in your sleep, who is there to save you?

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Plot Keywords:

dream | nightmare | freddy krueger | victim | psychopath | 

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Taglines:

Whatever you do, don't fall asleep...or you'll meet the terrifying Freddy.

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Genres:

Horror

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

16 November 1984 (USA)

Also Known As:

Les griffes de la nuit

Filming Locations:

1419 N. Genesee Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$1,800,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

$1,271,000 (USA) (9 November 1984)

Gross:

$26,505,000 (USA) (31 May 1985)

Company Credits

Production Co:

New Line Cinema, Media Home Entertainment, Smart Egg Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

91 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The film cost roughly $1.8 million to produce, a figure it made back in its opening weekend.

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Goofs

While Freddy scrapes his claws while his arms are elongated, while chasing Nancy down the lane, you can clearly see the skin under his glove is normal. Anyone who was burned to death would be scarred from head to toe.

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Quotes

Cop #3: [after seeing the crime scene in Glen's room] What the HELL did that, Lieutenant?
Donald: I don't know. What's the coroner got to say?
Cop #3: He's been in the John pukin' since he saw it.

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Connections

Referenced in There's Only One Jimmy Grimble (2000)

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Soundtracks

"Nightmare"
Performed by 213
Written and Produced by Martin Kent, Steve Karshner, Michael Schurig

User Reviews

You'll never want to fall asleep again

While I love horror films, I am not a big fan of the slasher genre, which has come to dominate and indeed practically to define horror since the late 1970s. While I do love the original "Psycho," most slasher films follow a different, and far more predictable, formula. The idea of a faceless killer going around stabbing teenagers just doesn't frighten me a whole lot, though some of these films do fill me with disgust--a rather different sort of emotion.

I am far more frightened by films that deal with distortions of reality, where it's hard for the characters to tell what's real and what's not. Admittedly, that genre isn't always so lofty either. Dreams are one of the most overused devices in the movies, having a whole set of clichés associated with them. We are all familiar with the common scene in which a character awakens from a nightmare by jerking awake in cold sweat. This convention is not only overused, it's blatantly unrealistic, for people waking up from dreams do not jerk awake in such a violent fashion. Moreover, these scenes are usually nothing more than little throwaway sequences designed to amuse or frighten the audience without advancing the plot.

What makes "Nightmare on Elm Street" so clever is how it creates an entirely new convention for representing dreams on screen. The dreaming scenes are filmed with an airy, murky quality, but so are many of the waking scenes, making it very difficult to tell whether a character is awake or asleep. Indeed, the movie never shows any character actually fall asleep, and as a result we are constantly on guard whenever characters so much as close their eyes for a moment. In crucial scenes, it is impossible to tell whether what we are seeing is real or happening only in a character's mind. But the movie ultimately suggests that the difference doesn't matter. The premise of the movie, in which a child-killer haunts teenager's dreams and has the capability of killing them while they're asleep, turns the whole "It was all just a dream" convention on its head: in this movie, the real world is safe, and the dream world is monstrously dangerous.

The movie finds a number of ways to explore this ambiguity, including a bathtub scene that invites comparisons with the shower scene in "Psycho" without being a cheap ripoff. My personal favorite scene, and one of the scariest I've ever seen in a movie, is the one where Nancy dozes off in the classroom while a student is standing up in front of the class reading a passage from Shakespeare. The way the scene transitions from the real classroom to a nightmarish version of it is brilliantly subtle.

The director, Wes Craven, understood that the anticipation of danger is usually more frightening than the final attack. There are some great visual shots to that effect, including one where Freddy's arms becomes unnaturally long in an alleyway, and another where the stairs literally turn into a gooey substance, in imitation of the common nightmare where it is hard to get away from a pursuer. The movie continually finds creative ways to tease the audience, never resorting to red herring, that tired old convention used in almost all other slasher films.

Despite the creativity in these scenes, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is still a formula movie, with relatively one-dimensional characters and no great performances. This was Johnny Depp's first role, as Heather Langenkamp's boyfriend, and although he does get a few neat lines of exposition (his speech about "dream skills"), his personality is not fleshed out, and there is no sense of the great actor Depp would go on to become.

Within the genre, however, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is a fine work. My main criticism isn't its failure to transcend the formula, but its confusing and obtuse ending, apparently put there in anticipation of sequels, but managing to create a mystery that the sequels were unable to clear up. The climactic confrontation between Freddy and Nancy is weakly handled. The crucial words she says to him are surprisingly clunky, and her father's muted behavior during that scene is almost inexplicable. It has led me to consider an alternative interpretation of the scene, but one that feels like a cop-out. The scene that follows, and where the movie ends, is anticlimactic and unnecessary. These clumsily-made final two scenes come close to ruining the movie, and it is a testament to the film's many good qualities that it still stands as an unusually effective horror film that invites repeat viewings.