Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street

• 26th Mar 2011

The horror genre has a few landmark films that changed everything that followed. A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of them. Released in 1984 it was an instant smash hit both commercially and critically. Shot by Wes Craven for only $1.8 million it went on to gross over $25 million worldwide. Over the next twenty years the film spawned a franchise, a TV series and a cross-over film as Freddy took on that other 80s horror phenomenon, Jason.

Wes Craven had already made a splash in the horror genre before he got round to making A Nightmare on Elm Street. His impact on the genre had already been felt with his vicious debut The Last House on the Left and the superb The Hills Have Eyes, both of which have recently been re-made. The genesis of the project came from events in LA when Craven was young. A series of unexplained fatalities among a group of Asian men in their sleep was put down to Asian Death Syndrome. Reports published in the LA Times later became the jumping off point for the script of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Set in the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio, the film centres around a group of teenage friends who start experiencing the same dreams. The dreams all feature the same scary character (guess who?)  who wears a dirty green and red sweater and has a glove with knives for fingers. As her friends begin to die in shockingly un-explained ways, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) attempts to unravel what’s going on.

The 80s gave rise to horror icon Jason Voorhees thanks to the Friday the 13^th franchise. A Nightmare on Elm Street was the birth of the other great horror icon of the decade in the shape of Freddy Kruger. Both were so popular that in 2003 they would finally clash, Marvel-style in the imaginatively titled Jason Vs Freddy. Originally Freddy was conceived as a child molester (something that was reinstated in the remake) but due to controversy was changed to a child killer. He was hunted down by a group of vengeful parents, led by the policeman Donald Thompson (John Saxon), who burned him alive.

The film became an instant classic due to its ingenious use of dream sequences in a conventional slasher narrative. There was nothing original about a frenzied killer hacking his way through a group of high school teenagers. But the concept of a killer coming from beyond the grave via the dreams of his intended victims was a masterstroke for Craven. The sequences are so well done that the viewer sometimes has no idea when the dream begins or ends, making for wonderful tension.  The influence this film had on the horror genre is immeasurable. Craven himself played with the standards he’d set when creating the post-modern classic Scream in 1996, moulding the clichés into a new form of terror.

Seventeen years on and the brilliance of Elm Street is fully intact. The amount of classic horror sequences are actually never-ending. The death scenes are all staggering as Tina (Amanda Wyss) flies around her bedroom before being slashed to death and Glen (Johnny Depp in big screen debut) is swallowed whole by his bed before being thrown out as a pulverised mush. The film is simply packed with amazing images and sequences. For Craven himself the highlight is the tongue phone. It cost nothing to achieve and created maximum scare value.

Robert Englund became the first world horror icon since Hammer-era Christopher Lee. He reprised the role of Freddy eight times in total and remains as famous today as he ever was. The design of Freddy was meticulous by Craven, right down to the choice of colours for his sweater – they were chosen after Craven read an article in Scientific American in 1982 that said the two most clashing colours to the human retina were green and red. Running around in superb make-up tearing up innocent teenagers, Englund gives a full blooded performance, more than worthy of the legendary status it now holds.

The film’s ending remains a point of slight controversy for both fans and the director himself. Two separate endings were shot with Craven preferring Nancy killing Freddy by ceasing to believe in him, then waking to discover it was all a dream. New Line leader Robert Shaye wanted the twist ending that made the original cut with the audience discovering that they are watching a dream within a dream. Freddy possesses the teenager’s car and rips Nancy’s mother through the hole in the door.

Certain films of my childhood sadly seem less than spectacular today when I revisit them. A Nightmare on Elm Street simply gets better with each viewing. The horror is astonishing and the writing and direction are brilliant, making it a total masterpiece of the genre.  No matter how many poor films Craven has made after Elm Street his legendary status is ensured due to this one film. A Nightmare on Elm Street should appear in every ’greatest horror films ever made’ list.

Aled Jones