A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

a nightmare on elm street (1984) movie

Genre              |   Horror

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   91 minutes

Released         |   9 November 1984

cast

Heather Langenkamp ... Nancy Thompson
Robert Englund ... Fred Krueger
John Saxon ... Lt. Thompson
Ronee Blakley ... Marge Thompson
Amanda Wyss ... Tina Gray
Jsu Garcia ... Rod Lane (as Nick Corri)
Johnny Depp ... Glen Lantz
Charles Fleischer ... Dr. King
​Lin Shaye ... Teacher

director

Wes Craven

writer

​​Wes Craven ... (written by)

cinematographer

Jacques Haitkin ​

music

Charles Bernstein ​

film editor

​Patrick McMahon ... co-editor (as Pat McMahon)
Rick Shaine

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box office result

Worldwide             $​​​​​​​25,504,513

Australia                 $​​​​​ not available

North America       $​​​​​​​25,504,513

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movie minutiae

​Wes Craven first came up with the basic idea for the movie from a series of articles in the "Los Angeles Times" over a three-year period, about a group of Southeast Asian refugees from the Hmong tribe, several of whom died in the throes of horrific nightmares. The group had come to the U.S. to escape the murderous reign of Pol Pot, and within a year of arriving, three men had died all in similar situations, the young, otherwise healthy man would have a nightmare, then refuse to sleep for as long as he could. When he finally fell asleep from exhaustion, he awoke screaming, then died. Autopsy results revealed that they had not died from heart failure, but had simply died. It was this inability to find a cause of death, that intrigued Craven so much. Medical authorities have since called the phenomenon Asian Death Syndrome, a variant of Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome (SUDS), and Brugada Syndrome.

 ​The scene where Freddy's arms elongate were achieved by having men with fishing poles on each side of the alley operating a set of puppet arms attached to Robert Englund.

​The very first time we see Freddy in the movie, he isn't being played by Robert Englund, but by Special Effects man Charles Belardinelli, as Belardinelli was the only one who knew exactly how to cut the glove and insert the blades.

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related movies

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (1985)

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) MOVIE IMAGES

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A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) STORY SYNOPSIS

​In Wes Craven's classic slasher film, several Midwestern teenagers fall prey to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a disfigured midnight mangler who preys on the teenagers in their dreams -- which, in turn, kills them in reality. After investigating the phenomenon, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) begins to suspect that a dark secret kept by her and her friends' parents may be the key to unraveling the mystery, but can Nancy and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp) solve the puzzle before it's too late?

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 9 November 2015

​​Pop Movee Rating

Genre-defining...

That's the description that best applies to Wes Craven's 1984 supernatural horror thriller A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

Not only does Craven introduce audiences to perennial “Boogeyman” Freddy Krueger, he cleverly taps into mid-80s teen angst in a way that only John Hughes' THE BREAKFAST CLUB was able to rival in that era. Unlike that film, NIGHTMARE wends its way into its various protagonists subconscious by setting-up adults as fundamentally flawed when it comes to protecting the interests of the young.

Wes Craven had already achieved success in the horror film genre with THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) and THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977). Both movies were seen as anti-establishment and represented the vigour of independent film-making that emerged in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is a far more accessible work and did extremely well at the box office, but it was the emerging home video market where the movie consolidated and created the success that spawned the Freddy Krueger franchise. Millions of teenagers around the world rented the film, based largely on word of mouth reviews from friends, and we're both captivated and scared witless by its story.

School girl Tina (Amanda Wyss) has been having nightmares...

In them, she is stalked by a shadowy figure who wears a red & green sweater, a fedora hat and has knives for fingers. She shares her nightmares with her friend Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), who tells Tina that she had had an almost identical dream. Their respective boyfriends (a very young Johnny Depp & Nick Corri) also allude to the same nightmare and it becomes clear that a sinister force is at work. It's at this point the audience have to accept that reality and fantasy have collided for no apparent reason other than to get Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) into the action.

Unlike the hulking presence of Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees or Leatherface, Freddy actively banters with his would-be victims and takes psychotic delight in torturing them to their death.

It becomes clear that Craven's perspective at this time was that Middle America was being worn down through death by a thousand cuts. The ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan's economic policies and the failure of the U.S. in countries like Vietnam subconsciously inform Krueger's motivation to attack those most vulnerable - children. Craven taps into this fear and exploits it through a number of set-pieces that see Wyss, Corri and Depp all murdered by Kruger, leaving Langenkamp’s Nancy to battle it out one-on-one with the phantasmic serial killer.

Craven shows that it's not just Freddy who's a terrible adult.

Nancy's mother (Ronee Blakley) is a drunk who can't find the courage to protect her daughter. Her father (John Saxon) is a local police officer, but is so biased in his opinion of Nancy's friends that he fails to heed any clues his daughter is able to provide about who's killing the teens of Springfield. The adults are portrayed as clueless and serve to reinforce Craven’s view that those responsible for protecting children are the least-equipped to do so. Even as Nancy screams from the bars behind her bedroom window, telling the world that she’s got Krueger in the house with her, Saxon’s deputy stands on the front lawn of the house across the street wondering what he should do. It’s a clichéd scene, but it goes to the heart of the film’s theme.

Ultimately, it falls to Nancy herself to work out what is going on and defeat Krueger in his domain; a point that has always been a little troubling...

Nancy is a relatively normal teenager and doesn’t appear to have any exceptional survival skills, but in the film’s final Act, she becomes an expert in guerrilla warfare tactics with the ability to make light-bulb bombs, sledgehammer traps and several other nifty self-defence techniques to combat Krueger on her terms. Craven, however, leaves no room for explanation of Nancy’s new-found abilities. He presses on, telling his story and leaving his audience with the message that young people need to be afforded the chance to be heard and that, sometimes, the most responsible thing an adult can do is shut-up and listen.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is a classic horror film in every sense...

Before Jason Blum and micro-budget horror films became a cinematic staple, Wes Craven’s film was made for just $1.8 million and shot in just 32 days. Given the production value of the movie, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET punched considerably above its weight. Despite budget limitations, Craven was able to utilize many on-set physical effects (in place of more expensive post-production visual effects) to generate the visceral reaction in audiences he needed for the film to work.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET provides just enough excess for anyone who has seen the film to remember the set-pieces, but Craven manages to balance this with an inventive premise and one of the most memorable antagonists in cinema history.

​There’s no argument that the franchise became even more far-fetched as the demand for “Freddy” increased, however, the 1984 original continues, to this day, to be a benchmark in how to make a horror film.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) USEFUL LINKS

A Nightmare on Elm Street - Wikipedia
​A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) - IMDb
​​A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) - Rotten Tomatoes

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