A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

I have seen A Nightmare On Elm Street before, but I was probably about 9 or 10 years old (my Mum was very liberal when it came to what we watched) and there was one scene which scared the living daylights out of me and, ironically, haunted my dreams for years to come.

Because of the negative emotions I associated with A Nightmare On Elm Street I never rewatched it due to that one scene (I’ll let you know which one in the spoiler bits) even though I bought the box set to try and get over my silly fear!

So here we are, many, many years later and I am watching A Nightmare On Elm Street once more so let’s crack on with the review.

The films opens with Tina running around what looking a like some disused industrial building. I say “running” but she’s actually slow-mo flailing down the corridor in such a stereotypical horror girl cliché I had to laugh.

Tina’s grabbed from behind and a gloved hand with knives in place of the fingers reaches around and tears across her stomach. Screaming in pain Tina reaches down and feels blood only to wake and sit bolt upright, her mother banging at the door to see what on Earth was going on.

It was all just a dream!

But was it? Tina’s night clothes are ripped in the exact same place that she was sliced by the attacker in her nightmare!

The following night, Tina invites her friend Nancy over along with Nancy’s boyfriend Glen as Tina’s mum is out of town and she doesn’t want to be on her own, plus a sleepover is always a laugh.

They’re having fun until Tina’s on again, off again boyfriend Rod shows up and the two of them head up to Tina’s mother’s room to “make up”. After having a bout of extremely loud sex — much to Glen’s annoyance as he’s been rebuffed by Nancy — the pair fall asleep only for Rod to be awakened by Tina thrashing around and screaming.

He throws the bed covers off her and she’s writhing around, obviously scared but he can’t wake her. All off a sudden she’s dragged around the bed and then 4 deep cuts slice across her stomach. She’s then flung around the room, dragged across the ceiling and lands on the bed before rolling onto the floor in a pool of blood.

Rod, not knowing what the heck is going on, legs it leaving Nancy and Glen to find Tina’s body and making Rod suspect number one in Tina’s brutal murder.

Before her death, Tina and Nancy had discussed a very similar dream that they had been having, with Glen also hinting that he might have seen something similar in his dreams too.

After Nancy is used by her policeman father to lure Rod out of hiding, Rod talks about an invisible person being in the room the night of Tina’s murder and having a dream about a man with straight razor blades for fingers.

Nancy starts to wonder whether the dreams have more meaning, especially when she falls asleep in class and is approached by the burned man in a red and green vest with knives for fingers that Tina described. She’s chased around the same industrial area that we saw Tina in at the start of the film — although Nancy is a slightly better runner than Tina — and she can only wake up after burning her arm on a steam pipe while crying “This is just a Dream!”

But was it? Just like Tina woke up with her night clothes sliced, Nancy wakes in her classroom with a burn mark on her arm in the same place she pressed against the pipe in her dream.

As reality and dreams start to become blurred and real life starts to become shadows, Nancy desperately tries not to fall asleep so she can avoid the man in her dreams.

Is Nancy losing touch with reality due to grief over the loss of her friend, is it due to lack of sleep or is there something evil stalking her through her dreams?

How long can Nancy stay awake? And if she does fall asleep, will be be forever?

Youthful Scares, Adult Hilarity

🎃Warning! Spoilers for A Nightmare On Elm Street ahead!🔪

As I said, I watched this film waaaaaaaay to young and I couldn’t really understand what was happening but I knew that there was a scary dream man who could come and suck me into my bed and turn me into puree.

And that scene stuck with me for YEARS! The Johnny Depp blender scene was all I could remember to the point of forgetting the rest of the film.

In the scene Glen (Johnny Depp in his first major role) has fallen asleep on his bed after being warned not to by Nancy and out of the blue he’s sucked down into the bed along with the TV that was next to him and the record player his headphones were plugged in to, leaving a hole behind where he was laying

There’s the sounds of a struggle and then out of nowhere the biggest geyser of blood appears shooting out of the hole left by the disappeared Glen. This thing is massive and covers the entire room in a firehose of blood to the point of being ridiculous.

It’s at this point in my rewatch that I realised how stupid this film is. I’d spent years being haunted by this scene to the point of avoiding watching the film at all costs, to now discover that I found it hilarious.

This film came out 3 years after Friday The 13th: Part 2 and Halloween 2 and yet it doesn’t really improve on either film, in fact in some ways it copies them almost beat-for-beat and adds little to the horror genre.

Like Jason in Friday The 13th: Part 2, Freddy is hardly on screen and when he is it’s so dark you can’t really see who or what he is. And again, as with Jason, the final girl is easily able to out manoeuvre and out think Freddy making him more of a joke than a supernatural force to be reckoned with.

There were a couple of points during the final confrontation between Freddy and Nancy in the real world where it goes full-on Home Alone (or maybe Home Alone goes full on Nightmare On Elm Street?) where Nancy rigs up a load of booby traps after reading a book on the subject because I guess every school library and/or small town bookshop carries those.

To see Freddy open a door only to be smacked in the stomach by a enormous mallet, fall over the stair’s banister and then set off a trip wire that fires something in his arse was hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing, even when the Lush Mum got sucked into the bed.

I guess this was scary to a 1984’s audience and 9-year-old me when I watched it, but now I just couldn’t take Freddy seriously as a supposedly maniacal killer and honestly can’t see what all the fuss is about.

I get why it’s become a cult classic, for me it sits in the “so bad it’s good” category but over-the-top gore geyser aside it’s not really a horror film.

There was some slight back story about Freddy given by Nancy’s lush of a mother, but not really enough to get a feel for who he was and why he’s chosen dreams as his vehicle to torment and kill people — I guess it does set him apart from Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees but at least with Halloween and Friday The 13th you had some backstory and lore.

With A Nightmare On Elm Street you get a vague mention that Freddy was a child murderer who got off on a technicality and was hunted down and burned to death by a group of vigilante parents, including Nancy’s lush of a mother.

There’s no proof that Freddy actually killed the kids, there’s no reason he should be entering dreams and there’s no mention that he’s specifically targeting the children of the parents who burned him to death (if that’s what he’s even doing) or even why he’s decided to act now.

If I am honest, the whole film is a mess. An enjoyable mess, but still a mess nonetheless.

Looking back I am kind of embarrassed it’s taken me *ahem* number of years to finally get around to watching this again, and I might dig out the next one when I have some time just to see what kind of a mess that film is or whether it improves on the source material.

Is A Nightmare On Elm Street a good horror movie? No, I can’t say that it is. While it ticks the trope boxes of sex = death, alcohol = death and purity = life, there isn’t much of a plot going on apart from a couple of chase scenes and a hat in a bed.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look as it’s the start of a very long and popular franchise just don’t expect any mind blowing effects or and Earth shattering Freddy lore.

Watch this film if you want to see Johnny Depp get blended, or see an evil guy almost hit in the nuts with a comically large mallet.

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