Wes Craven‘s up and down career hit something of a high with A Nightmare on Elm Street, the film that launched a hundred imitators and introduced the world to one of horror cinema’s most iconic characters, Freddy Kreuger. Craven had already made his mark on the genre with The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) but had hit one of his frequent fallow patches since with the underwhelming Deadly Blessing (1981) and Swamp Thing (1982). His career would continue to yo-yo back and forth, but Nightmare would prove to be his most commercially successful film until the slasher spoof Scream in 1996.
In Springwood, Ohio, Teenager Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) is pursued through her nightmares by a man in a stripy sweater and fedora that partially masks a horribly burned face. He attacks her in a boiler room with a glove sporting long, finger-like knives, before she wakes with inexplicable slashes on her nightgown. Her friends, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp in his big screen debut) are suffering similar nightmares of the mystery assailant who seems to murder Tina in her sleep a few days later. The police, headed by Nancy’s father Don (John Saxon), pin the blame on Tina’s boyfriend Rod Lane (Nick Corri) who in turn is killed while in police custody. From her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley), Nancy learns that the man of their dreams is Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund), a serial killer of children who was burned to death by the enraged parents of Springwood when he was set free on a technicality. Now Kreuger is stalking the children of his murderers while they sleep and if he kills them in his dreams, then they die in real life…
Given the success of the film and its sequels (it’s been credited for promoting producers New Line Cinema from modest distributor of foreign and art house films to major Hollywood player, later producer of the Austin Powers, Rush Hour and Lord of the Rings films) it’s hard to believe that Craven had problems getting his script before a camera. No-one in Hollywood was interested until New Line‘s Robert Shaye decided that it would be his company’s first in-house production and he was handsomely rewarded when his $1.1 million investment brought returns from the first film alone of $57 million.
After all the copycats and sequels it’s easy to forget just how startlingly original A Nightmare on Elm Street is. There hadn’t been anything quite like it before and it retains a degree of rawness and nastiness that the sequels increasingly toned down. There’s humour too – Nancy deadpans “God, I look twenty years old” after seeing her sleep-deprived face in the mirror, and Craven responds to Sam Raimi‘s ripped poster of The Hills Have Eyes in the basement of the cabin in The Evil Dead (1981) by having Nancy struggling to stay awake during a television broadcast of Raimi‘s film (Kreuger’s glove would turn up in the tool shed in Evil Dead II (1987)). But mostly it’s a surprisingly grim film that fell afoul of the MPAA (they demanded two cuts before awarding it an ‘R’ rating). Teenagers disappear in gushers of gore or are eviscerated while being levitated around their bedroom and the script is shot through with all manner of teenage sexual and societal angst, Kreuger slaughtering his victims with his phallic finger knives (the film is a Freudian treasure trove!), all in the name of revenge, heaping upon them the sins of their parents.
Freddy Kreuger proved to be the breakthrough role for Englund, previously a jobbing actor appearing in the likes of Tobe Hooper‘s Eaten Alive (1976), Gary Sherman‘s Dead & Buried (1981) and Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror (1981) before becoming indelibly linked with Kreuger, playing him a further seven times on the big screen and in all 44 episodes of the spin-off television series Freddy’s Nightmares (1988-1990). This early incarnation of Kreuger is by far the scariest, an unrepentant serial killer of children (a fact glossed over in later sequels), at least 20 of them if Nancy’s mother is to be believed, and a man of very few words. The wise-cracking, merchandising-friendly incarnation wouldn’t arrive until at least the third film in the series.
He was undoubtedly lessened and cheapened in later films, but here, he’s a highly effective bogeyman, as vile a human monster as you can get, making overtly sexual advances to his high school victims (he mainly stalks them in their bedrooms or in one particularly creepy moment, while they’re naked and vulnerable in the bath). He’s every parent’s worst nightmare and the monster that every child, even the high schoolers here, are terrified of. There’s are several levels of irony to the fact that Kreuger became the literal poster boy for 80s horror, his hideously scarred face not only on kids’ bedroom walls but on any number of lunchboxes, toys, magazine covers and other merchandising tie-ins.
Craven cleverly switches back and forth between dream and reality seamlessly, keeping audiences as on edge and wrong-footed as the characters, never really sure at any given moment what to expect next. New Line insisted on the marshmallow stairs shot, the only time the film really plays into the stereotypical dream scenario, while elsewhere Craven cuts from a mundane English literature class (where a student is intoning a speech about “bad dreams” from Hamlet) to Nancy spotting a blood-soaked and body-bagged Tina beckoning her, or has Kreuger popping up in bathtubs or hanging victims from bedspreads in the local jail.
New Line were also responsible for the rather silly final shots of the kids, apparently all alive and well again, being driven off in a convertible, the roof of which is painted to echo the soon-to-be iconic stripes of Kreuger’s shabby sweater before Marge is dragged through a door window, presumably by Kreuger. Craven wanted Nancy to kill Kreuger by refusing to believe in him and end the film with her waking from a nightmare, but Shaye wanted a twist and the one they went with was one of several options that Craven cooked up late in the day.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was a massive hit and was mostly met with positive reviews. And it wasn’t just popular in the States – the British Dream Demon (1988) owes its existence to the success of the Elm Street films and the original seems to have gone down well enough in India (where it was unofficially remade twice as Khooni Murda (1989) and Mahakaal (1994)) and Indonesia (where it was reworked as Batas Impian Ranjang Setan (1986)). As well as the aforementioned television spin-offs there were no fewer than seven sequels of highly variable quality (A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989), Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and the Friday the 13th crossover Freddy vs. Jason (2003)), and a pointless and ill-regarded remake followed in 2010. No-one has yet seen fit to follow that one up.
Though the sequels were, for the most part, commercially successful (they coincided with the boom in home video which provided the perfect afterlife for any number of horror films) and while some weren’t at all bad, none of them packed anywhere near the punch of the original film which, despite the odd bit of clunky dialogue or flat performance, remains the quintessential 80s teens-in-peril film and boasts more original ideas and indelible images than almost the entire Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises combined.
Crew
Directed by: Wes Craven; Director of Chase Scene: Sean S. Cunningham [uncredited]; © MVMLXXXIV The Elm Street Venture; New Line Cinema, Media Home Entertainment, Inc. & Smart Egg Pictures present a Robert Shaye production. A Wes Craven film; Executive Producers: Stanley Dudelson and Joseph Wolf; Produced by: Robert Shaye; Co-Producer: Sara Risher; Associate Producer: John Burrows; Written by: Wes Craven; Director of Photography: Jacques Haitkin; Film Editor: Rick Shaine; Music by: Charles Bernstein; Costume Designer: Dana Lyman; Make-up: Kathy Logan; Hairstylist: RaMona [real name: Ramona Fleetwood]; Special Make-up Effects: David Miller; Mechanical Special Effects Designed by: Jim Doyle, Theatrical Engines; Production Designer: Gregg Fonseca
Cast
John Saxon (Lt [Donald] Thompson); Ronee Blakley (Marge Thompson); Heather Langenkamp (Nancy Thompson); Amanda Wyss (Tina Gray); Nick Corri (Rod Lane); Johnny Depp (Glen Lantz); Charles Fleischer (Dr King); Joseph Whipp (Sgt Parker); Lin Shaye (teacher); Robert Englund as Fred Krueger; Joe Unger (Sgt Garcia); Mimi Meyer-Craven (nurse); Jack Shea (minister); Ed Call (Mr Lantz); Sandy Lipton (Mrs Lantz); David Andrews (foreman); Jeff Levine (coroner); Donna Woodrum (Tina’s mom); Shashawnee Hall (cop #1); Carol Pritikin (cop #2)
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