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To most fans the original NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is the best of the Elm Street films, whilst I’m not going to disagree with the consensus for me personally it’s a middling entry in the series. In terms of tone Wes Craven’s original film is one of the few legitimately scary Nightmare films. There’s a brutality and viciousness to Freddy’s attacks which is still legitimately unnerving and it’s interesting because this is the only film in the series that divorces Freddy’s dream attacks from their consequences in the real world.
Latter films will show Freddy dispatching someone in their dreams and then cutting to the victim spasming into death in the real world. In A Nightmare on Elm Street two of the major kills are shown completely subjectively and it makes them genuinely horrific. Tina being lifted from her bed and being dissected in mid air is terrifying and visceral because it’s so disconnected from reality. Glen being dragged into a vortex in the bed, despite it showing a little more of the cause and effect of his death, is similarly terrifying. In both cases our minds are left to do the leg work in regards to what horrible thing Freddy is doing to them in the dream world and it’s amazingly effective.
Also effective is Robert Englund as Freddy Kruger. Over the course of the season Freddy slowly starts to dominate proceedings, becoming almost an avenging jester by his fifth and sixth appearances, but in this film he is just utterly repellently evil. There’s an innate rapeyness to the character in his first appearances and it helps to create this truly loathsome character. With his grubby clothes, lecherous tongue and lustful eyes there’s a level of threat to the female victims that’s not really there in the later films. Simply put Freddy is scary and despite some shoddy effects he’s amazingly effective as a villain.
There’s an interesting thing going on with Freddy in this film in that there’s an element of masochism to the character, ostensibly he damages himself to show Tina and Nancy how powerful he is but there’s something that feels almost fetish about him slicing his body.
Faring less well are Freddy’s victims. The ELM STREET films are interesting because they never have the massive body counts that the FRIDAY and HALLOWEEN accrue in their later entries. At his most deadly Freddy kills six people, on camera, in one film. As such the ELM STREET films tend to focus on the ‘victims’ more than it’s stablemates. Because Freddy operates in such an operatic/theatric capacity we need to know a little bit about the characters for their dream sequences to work and as such there’s a genuine demand for the kids playing the victims to be interesting on screen.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET lays the groundwork for a trick that Wes Craven will play again in SCREAM in that he sets up a ‘fake survivor girl’. Tina is the first person we see on screen and is given a fair amount of attention until she’s ripped to shreds fifteen minutes into the movie. The problem is that the film only has four central victims and her death eliminates her from proceedings AND her boyfriend who largely disappears from the file until he’s killed half an hour later. As such the bulk of the films narrative falls on the characters of Nancy Thompson (played by Heather Langenkamp) and Glen Lantz (played by a debuting Johnny Depp). As such we’re left with a horror film that feels like it’s been rendered inert because we know that nothing can happen to these two leads until towards the end. There’s a lot of familial strife for Nancy (terrible parents is something of a meta-theme for the ELM STREET films) and occasional agitation from Kruger but it feels poorly paced at times.
Langenkamp does an admirable job as Nancy and she seems to get way more comfortable in the role as it progresses, but there’s a certain stiffness to her which takes some getting used to. Depp does okay in his role, it’s more interesting seeing Depp playing a straight-man rather than lathering himself in quirk.
The real star of the film is the style and art direction. As the series progresses it gets more and more overt in its stylisation practically becoming a day-glo cartoon by it’s fourth outing, but this first film is filmed fairly naturalistically and it gives the dream sequences and murders a real unearthly vibe. In particular Nancy’s dream in class, scored to distorted reading of a Shakespeare package and focused around the horrific image of Tina’s bloody corpse being dragged through the school in a polythene bag, is one of the most striking elements of the film. Craven talks at lengths about his interest in nightmares and how he used his own nightmares for inspiration and you can really see that in this film, there’s a dreamy, off kilter, quality to the nightmares in the film which mark it in stark contrast to the latter films and their zany, comic booky, dream sequences. In this film the dream world is a terrifying place even before Freddy Kruger shows up to perpetrate massive harm on your psyche.
What I find interesting is that despite being the ‘first’ of the ELM STREET films it doesn’t really set up the formula for the proceeding films. Freddy undergoes massive changes over the next two movies, the tone of the series changes, the focus on the dream world and the real world shifts to favour the former. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET feels like a skeleton of an idea which the third film builds upon and establishes the thematics and conventions of the series.
