Film Review--A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street
written and directed by Wes Craven
starring John Saxon, Robert Englund, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, Johnny Depp, Charles Fleischer.

We still do not know much if anything about our dreams, suggests a doctor doing research into dreams in this film. In this film, the dream scape is unleashed upon cold, waking reality and possesses the ability to kill the unwitting while they sleep.

A decade after an angry mob of parents burnt alive famed serial child murderer Fred Krueger (Englund) he has returned to haunt the dreams of their children.

Fred Krueger seems to have had a special relationship with the local children. We don’t learn specifics only that he lured and butchered a great number of them before finally being caught. Due to a technicality he was set free but was unable to enjoy his solitude for very long because the raging fury of the parents of the dead children swarmed upon him and took their anger and frustration out on him. Like all great cinematic spooks Krueger could not be put down so readily and he made it his mission to make them pay for their mistake.

The film deftly explores the relationship between the dream state and reality through several characters who encounter Krueger in their dreams and return to waking life with physical evidence of what occurred. The prospect is immensely attractive and cinema and fiction writers have been trying for centuries to fully express the implications that such possibilities inherently suggest. This film is an inspired rebuff to our hopes regarding this potentiality because with great bounty comes great sorrow. This is just one manifestation of the idea but naturally there are many more.

Fred Krueger reached a level of infamy in death that very few achieve in life. He became a fiend of such depraved magnitude that the very mention of his name was enough to chill the bones of those left to remember.

Tina Gray (Wyss) has a terrible nightmare where she is being threatened by a horrifically burnt man wearing a tattered green and red striped sweater and with razor-sharped knives extending from the fingers on his right hand. She wakes up with slash marks on her dress as proof of her experience in the dream. She learns that her friend Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp) has been dreaming of the same figure.

Fred Krueger once terrorized the entire community when he stalked, captured, and murdered over twenty children. Yet he has managed to make a deal with his custodians in Hell and been allowed to enter into the dreams of anyone he chooses. It’s not so clear just where the ability to transfer dream characters and objects into real life comes from. It’s not all Krueger’s doing because Nancy is able to drag his hat back with her when she snatches it off of his head just before waking up.

Tina and her boyfried Rod Lane (Garcia) have intense sex and fall asleep. Freddy comes back for her and this time he gets her and brutally murders her while Rod watches in amazement. It’s a fairly thrilling death sequence as she is dragged up a wall and across the ceiling with blood splattered everywhere. Rod is arrested and Freddy hangs him in his cell. Nancy and her boyfriend Glen Lantz (Depp) devise a plan to defeat Freddy but Glen falls asleep and is obliterated in his bed with an impressive spew of flesh and bone spewing toward and coating the entire ceiling. This leaves Nancy alone to deal with the beast so tenaciously assaulting her in her dreams.

So, much of the film deals with Nancy’s continuous torments at the hands of Fred Krueger. In one key scene she is in the tub and the camera is placed at the end so we see her with her legs spread open as the knife-hand emerges from the water. It’s a strangely telling scene that illustrates the sexual nature of Krueger’s intent toward Nancy. It suggests that he is interested in mutilating her sexually or at least violating her in some way. Krueger tends to lay on his victims on occasion simulating a rape. He is more driven by sex than, say, Jason Voorhees, or even Michael Myers. Krueger is not repelled by sex and seems to rather enjoy it whenever he’s afforded an opportunity to get near it.

Nancy is really still a girl trying to make sense of the changes that are occurring in her body. She is not they typical oversexed female teen who has populated so many modern day horror films. She’s much more modest and self-effacing. She doesn’t use her sexuality to manipulate others mostly because she hasn’t been trained, however, subliminally, in the art of seduction. Perhaps it is this girlish quality that attracts Krueger to her. She reminds him perhaps of one of the little girls he raped and slaughtered and he’s eager to relive that experience through her.

Lucid dreaming is explored subtly in this film as Nancy on several occasions attempts to remind her dream Self that what she is experiencing is only a dream. However, awareness is not enough to combat the sinister machinations of Fred Krueger. Eventually, Nancy learns a trick and uses it to (albeit temporarily) defeat Krueger which is something she learned earlier in the film from Glen.
The film employs expert lighting techniques and sound cues to create a legitimately frightening landscape that it maintains throughout. The opening sequence sets up the tone effectively and generates a considerable amount of chills in the audience. Tina is in a boiler room where she is being taunted by Krueger. She’s wearing a sheer nightgown, taunting him with her form readily apparent beneath the fabric. She is alluring and he is terribly excited. He wants her but is most likely impotent. Did he not sexualize his child victims or was it just a matter of predator catches prey with no overt sexual content attached to the killings? These new victims are supposed to be fifteen and yet Krueger murdered children much younger than that. So, why did he wait so long for these kids to become teen-agers? If the thrill was strictly with one age group, then one would expect it to remain so through the special avenue of dreams.

Fred Kreuger possesses all of the frenetic posturings of the oversexed killer. His problems most likely stem from sexual inadequacies which explains why he would target children as they are not likely to point out and subsequently laugh about any shortcomings.

With her friends dead Nancy takes it upon herself to bring Krueger out of her dreams in order to defeat him. In a rather imaginative final battle sequence she uses her ingenuity to assist in her capture of the demonic child killer. The ending is wonderfully ambiguous as it always must be in top notch horror films. Here, it appears as if the dream state cannot be properly absolved of its complicity in creating horror for the victims on Elm Street.

The performances in this film are all effective for this genre. Heather Langenkamp captures her character’s essential naivety and stresses Nancy’s lack of full maturity into womanhood. Langenkamp allows us to follow her character through her dreams and out into waking reality. Johnny Depp, in his first feature role, is believable in a quiet role. His character’s most dramatic moment comes with his death; otherwise, he’s secondary to the true thrust of the narrative. John Saxon is quite impressive as a character that represents law and order or the perfectly rational against all of the chthonic and measureless forms that populate dreams. Robert Englund is magnetic and infinitely creepy as the butcher of children who has found himself a most eventful and delightful new hobby in Hell. Englund provides audiences with a character who is, to the minds of most folks, utterly evil, and manages to make him likable throughout.

Overall, this film does everything it needs to do in order to create a world of legitimate horror. Fred Krueger is an audacious character who nevertheless is easy to get behind. Certainly, he’s a notorious killer who has taken the lives of many children but he’s also something of a dark romantic hero. He’s a villain with a terrific bloodlust who is necessarily fascinating to observe. He goes about his business with maniacal efficiency and one can’t help but admire his fortitude and his perseverance. The characters are all well written and their stories come off as believable.
Ultimately, this film stands as one of most consistently entertaining horror films in the genre. It gets under the skin and most certainly disrupts the dreams of those who encounter it.