A Nightmare on Elm Street **** (1984, Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri, Ronee Blakley) – Classic Movie Review 626

Wisecracking, dream-stalking, hacking slasher Freddy Krueger makes his terrifying screen début in 1984, slicing and dicing his way through teenagers’ nightmares in a welter of gags and gore, in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Robert Englund stars in the role of a lifetime as the pizza-faced maniac serial-killer who wields a glove with four blades embedded in the fingers and kills people in their dreams, resulting in their actual death in reality. It might be forgotten that Freddy originally had a revenge motive, as is stalking the children of the members of the lynch mob who hideously burned him.

In a career peak, director Wes Craven serves up a bizarrely funny, frightening, Freudian fantasy that plays on teenagers’ neuroses and awakening sexuality as the basis for a highly original horror film that mixes disturbing surreal dreams and brutal reality in a deeply unsettling way.

Englund’s boogeyman Freddy is less comic and much scarier here than in the five sequels from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge in 1985 up to Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991, and as result Freddy became an enduring horror icon and one of the great movie monsters. Englund’s makeup took three hours to apply. He based Freddy’s physicality on Klaus Kinski’s performance in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

The terrified teens are highly affecting and the experienced adult cast add acting clout. Heather Langenkamp stars as Nancy Thompson, teenage resident of 1428 Elm Street, Springwood, Ohio, who Freddy is targeting for death along with her group of friends, including Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), Rod Lane (Nick Corri) and Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp), one by one in their dreams.

John Saxon stars as Langenkamp’s policeman dad, Lieutenant Donald Thompson, and Ronee Blakley plays her mother Marge. Johnny Depp makes his unpromising film début as Glen, one of Freddy’s dozing victims, who gets eaten alive by a bed!

Film-wise, it is definitely a case of original and best. Surprisingly, none of the sequels is directed by Craven, unfortunately.

Craven came up with the idea for the movie from several newspaper articles in the LA Times over a three-year period about a group of Cambodian refugees from the Hmong tribe, several of whom died in the throes of horrific nightmares. More than 500 gallons of fake blood were used making the film.

The house where filming took place is located in Los Angeles, on 1428 North Genesee Avenue. The numbers 1428 on the side of the house were inevitably stolen and never returned, according to the upset owner Angie Hill.

The town’s name or location is never stated in this film. The second movie establishes the town’s name as Springwood.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was rebooted in 2010 with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger.

RIP Wes Craven, horror genius, who died on 30 August 2015, aged 76.

RIP John Saxon (born Carmine Orrico on 5 August 1936), who died on 25 July 2020, aged 83, after working on more than 200 projects over 60 years.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 626

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