Stars: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon
Director: Wes Craven
While Jason was dying in Crystal Lake, a new horror icon was being born on Elm Street…
Brief synopsis:
15-year-old Tina Gray is having a tough time. During the day she is stuck in a toxic relationship with her boyfriend Rod while her single mother seems more interested in her boyfriend than her daughter. She gets no relief at night as she is stalked by a badly burned man with knives on his fingers in her nightmares. Wanting a little support while her mom goes out of town, Tina invites her best friend Nancy and her boyfriend Glenn over for the night to keep her company. Nancy mentions she has also been nightmares of the same man. Rod crashes the party and, after sleeping with Tina, mentions that he has also been having nightmares.
Sadly, Tina’s fears are proven well-founded. She falls asleep and is stalked by the nightmare man again but this time he succeeds in his attack and kills her. Rod is woken up by his sleeping girlfriend thrashing around on the bed and then suddenly getting cut from out of nowhere. As she magically crawls around the walls and ceiling, the blood continues to pour out as she dies. Rod, knowing he will be blamed for the death, jumps out the window while Nancy and Glenn discover Tina’s body. After calling the authorities, Nancy is questioned by Lieutenant Thompson who also happens to be her father and her mom’s, Marge, ex-husband. Nancy tells her father that Tina dreamed this was going to happen to her.
Spoilers below (you have been warned):
Nancy understandably does not get any sleep and, against her mother’s advice, decides to go to school to keep her mind busy. Her father uses her as bait to draw Rod out. Before he gets arrested, Rod tells Nancy that he thought he was having another nightmare. Nancy goes to school and falls asleep in class. She ends up in a boiler room with a badly burned man in a dirty red and green sweater who has finger knives. She wakes herself up by purposely burning her arm on one of the steam pipes. As she leaves school, she notices that her burn came with her from the nightmare. She talks to Rod in jail who describes the same man as the person haunting his nightmares.
Nancy attempts to take a bath but falls asleep and the nightmare man attempts to drown her. She escapes and, realizing he is stalking her in her dreams, starts to take No-Doz pills to stay awake. Glenn breaks into her bedroom later that night and she asks him to watch her while she sleeps so she can attempt to see if the nightmare man is real. She falls asleep and finds the man attacking Rod in the jail. Nancy grabs a sleeping Glenn and runs to the jail but they are too late as Rod is found hung in his cell. Although his death is ruled a suicide, Nancy is convinced that he was murdered and refuses to sleep. Her mother Marge, who is using alcohol to cope with the whole situation, takes Nancy to a sleep clinic to try and help her sleep.
At the clinic, Nancy is hooked up to multiple machines and falls asleep. While sitting with the technician, Marge asks him what dreams are and he admits no one really knows. Nancy slips into REM and the machines start going nuts as she is attacked by her nightmare. As she fights an unknown figure, she appears to convulse on the bed. Her mom and the workers at the clinic run in to wake her up and find that she has three slashes on her arm and a small section of her hair has turned gray from fright. Nancy also finds a dirty brown hat in the bed, grabbed off the head of her attacker. Marge takes Nancy home and calls her ex-husband to tell him of the existence of the hat while drinking her morning vodka. She then tries to hide it from her daughter but Nancy isn’t letting it go. She grabs the hat from the drawer and points out that the man’s name is in it – Fred Krueger. Nancy wants to know who Fred is but Marge insists that Nancy just needs to get some sleep. Nancy’s response is to grab her mom’s vodka bottle and smash it while yelling “screw sleep.”
Nancy meets up with Glenn and they discuss dreams. Glenn mentions that the Malaysians and that, if they came across something evil in their dreams, they take away its power. He notices the book Nancy is carrying is called “Booby Traps and Other Anti-Personal Devices” and she explains that she is into survival. She leaves him and arrives home to find that her mother has barred all the windows on the house, making escape impossible. She confronts her mother who then takes her daughter to the basement and pulls a sack out of the furnace. In the sack is Freddy Krueger’s finger knives. Marge then explains that Freddy Krueger was a child murderer who was killed a dozen kids in the neighborhood. He was arrested but, due to legal snafu, the police were forced to let him go. The parents decided to take the law into their own hands and burned him to death in his house. Marge attempts to reassure her daughter that she can sleep now because “he's dead because Mommy killed him”. This is not the reassurance to Nancy the drunk Marge thought it was.
Nancy talks to Glenn and they arrange to meet up later to try and catch Freddy by bringing him out of her dream. She also warns him that “whatever you do, don’t fall asleep”. Glenn does not listen and ends up pulled into his bed and turned into a geyser of blood shooting up out of the bed onto the ceiling. Nancy tries to get to him but Marge has locked the doors and hid the keys. Nancy calls her dad to verify that Glenn is dead and tells him that she is going to go to sleep and bring Freddy out into the real world. Lt. Thompson encourages his daughter to sleep and assigns an officer to watch the house. Nancy then puts her drunk mother to bed and goes to work booby trapping the house. She falls asleep and, when the alarm goes off, drags Freddy into the real world. They fight all over her house, ending in the basement where she douses him in gasoline, sets him on fire, and locks the door. She finally gets her father’s attention and his men break down the front door to help her. The group head to the basement but find Freddy has escaped. Nancy and her father follow the fiery footprints to her mother’s bedroom where they find the two in a tussle. They attempt to save Marge but are too late and the woman and Freddy both disappear into the bed.
Nancy stays in the room alone and waits for Freddy to reappear. She tells him that she has figured out the secret and that everything she has experienced is one nightmare, none of it is real, and she wants her mother and friends back. Remembering what Glenn had told her previously, she tells him that she is taking away all his power. Freddy attempts to attack her but disappears into dust. Nancy opens the bedroom door and finds herself outside on a bright and sunny day. Glenn pulls up with Rod and Tina in his convertible to drive them to school while Marge tells her daughter that she is done with drinking. Nancy gets into the car and the red and green convertible top suddenly pops on, the doors lock, and the windows roll up without anyone doing anything. Trapped in the car, begs her mother for help but the woman just smiles and waves as the car pulls away. They last thing we see is Marge being pulled through the window on the front door by Freddy as little girls in white dresses jump rope and sing the iconic “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…” nursery rhyme.
My thoughts (with spoilers):
This was one of my longer plot summaries and that is because this is one of the more complex horror movies of the 1980’s. Based on stories the late Wes Craven read about Hmong refugees who were tormented by nightmares and scared they would die in their sleep. They would drink coffee and take caffeine pills to stay awake but eventually sleep would win and they would die in their sleep. These stories would lead to one of the most successful horror film series of the 1980’s. Let’s face it, you have a chance of escaping from Michael or Jason if you can get away from Haddonfield or Crystal Lake but everyone has to sleep. No matter how hard you try, your body will force you to fall asleep.
A little back story on me here – I lost my husband at a young age and had some problems with insomnia following his death. One day I was in the middle of a store when I suffered a grand mal seizure. I was told that basically my brain was sick of my not sleeping and decided if I wasn’t going to sleep willingly, it was going to make me. I learned my lesson and make sure I get at least some sleep at night and haven’t had a seizure since. You can try and fight sleep but, eventually, your body will always win that fight. And that is Freddy’s biggest advantage in the horror icons game – everyone has to sleep.
Freddy was a departure from previous our previous horror madmen. Unlike Jason and Michael, Freddy was not content to just stalk you, he loved to play with his prey before he kills them. He enjoys the hunt, taunting the teens he will be attacking, scraping his weapon against anything that will give out that horrible screeching sound. He was a predator in life and his death only gave him more room to play and ways to play with the victims. Sure, he loves his boiler room but he also loves to get into your bedroom with you. In Craven’s original script, Freddy was a child molester and even if they officially dropped it from the backstory, it is still there in spirit.
But Freddy would not work without the right man behind the makeup and Robert Englund earned his horror icon status with this character. The only horror movie monster to be played by the same actor throughout the original run of films, Englund created Freddy onscreen, adding playful little touches here and there. He has stated that the make up process for the burned face was so long and difficult it didn’t take him much to get to the place where he wanted to kill people. Whatever his motivation, the film would not work without Englund, plain and simple.
But a movie monster does not work without good prey and Freddy has some good prey in this film. Craven pulls the Psycho twist of having us introduced to Tina and assume she is the lead character until she is killed off at the end of the first act. I know Heather Langenkamp has taken a lot of knocks for her acting but I think she works the material as well as anyone. Nancy is a survivor and the first horror heroine I had seen actively gear up for battle and take the fight to the bad guy. She probably will never win an Oscar, but I believe her character and feel bad for her that no one, not even her boyfriend (played by a young Johnny Depp in his first film role) or her parents believe her.
Craven also uses the dream imagery to its fullest low-budget best. The line between dream and reality is never clear. There is no sudden change of scenery or weird transition sequences. The character is simply doing something as simple as sitting in class and then sees a body bag in the hallway. These seamless transitions make sense because, as we realize at the end of the film, everything that has happened has been part of one long nightmare. The film is not called Nightmare on Elm Street, it is A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven never envisioned this as a series of films, it was always meant to be a one off. The only reason that there was an open ending was because the producer, Bob Shaye, insisted on it. He saw the potential for a franchise and, for better or worse, that is what we got.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a genre classic and one of the late Wes Craven’s best films. A must watch for any horror fan.
More films from 1984 to check out:
Johnny Dangerously – Underappreciated Michael Douglas parody of the gangster film, ably supported by Marilu Henner, Griffin Dunne, and Joe Piscopo.
Starman – John Carpenter film about an alien who takes the form of a woman’s late husband after he crash lands on Earth. She joins him as he runs to meet a rescue ship. Surprisingly sweet and a little sad, Jeff Bridges was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor for this film.
The Terminator – Arnold Schwazenegger became a star for his portrayal of lead role, a robot covered in human skin, sent to kill a woman named Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton is the correct Sarah Connor, future mother of the leader of the human rebellion John Connor, and Michael Biehn is the man sent back in time to protect her. I consider this more science fiction action than horror based on the way James Cameron directs it.