A Nightmare on Elm Street

Written and directed by wes kraven

Rating: 🏆 most excellent

A group of high school students begins having strange dreams about a man who’s chasing them. He’s creepy, covered in burns, and has knives for fingers on one of his hands. At first, they dismiss it as just a dream. But then they start noticing that things that happen in the dream leave behind evidence in the real world. Get cut in your dream? You will wake up with a cut in real life. And how are they all having dreams about the same person? When one of the teens is savagely murdered in her sleep, it falls on the savviest and badass friend, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) to figure out what is happening and how to make it stop.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was made in 1984 and it’s still a favorite for a reason. Freddy Krueger is an incredible villain who is both terrifying and unpredictable. Nancy might be my favorite protagonist in a horror film. Although she is young and dismissed by every adult in the film, she’s the only character with a brain that we can trust. She is brave, scrappy, and endearing, which can be very hard to pull off when your character spends most of the movie screaming and being chased. This film launched Johnny Depp’s career and he plays Glenn, a dreamboat who cannot for the life of him stay awake. He’s the perfect counterbalance to Nancy. While we can always trust Nancy to make things work, we can always count on Glenn to give us anxiety by messing everything up. Nancy’s mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) is an icon. You can see that Nancy got a lot of her positive traits from her mother, and not her infuriatingly incompetent father (John Saxon) who is a stereotypical bumbling police officer in a horror movie. Her mother tries her best to help Nancy, but she ultimately provides comedic relief with her one-liners and her fifth of vodka.

This movie was probably really scary when it came out, or if you watched it as a child. In seeing it for the first time as an adult, I found this to be more of a comedy than a horror. But that didn’t make me enjoy it any less. I can’t wait to watch the rest of the films in this franchise because I absolutely loved this movie!