Starring:
John Saxon as Lt. Thompson Ronee Blakley as Marge Thompson Heather
Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson Amanda Wyss
as Tina Gray Jsu Garcia as Rod Lane (as
Nick Corri) Johnny Depp as Glen Lantz Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger
“One,
two
Freddy’s coming for you…three, four better lock
your door…five, six bring your crucifix…seven,
eight gonna stay up late…nine, ten never sleep
again.”
Freddy Krueger. Nancy
Thompson. These names have become engrained in the minds of
movie-goers everywhere…horror lovers and non alike. In Wes
Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street these
names are of the monster that comes in your dreams, and the heroine
determined to stay awake until she finds a way to defeat him.
A Nightmare on Elm
Street is, for so many reasons, one of the classics
of horror that shall outlive us all. This movie broke many
“rules” of horror, and demonstrated to everyone
that no place is safe, not even dreamland.
Nancy Thompson
(Heather Langenkamp) is a
typical American teenager with troubles galore: Her
boyfriend (Johnny Depp) wants their relationship to be more
“physical” than she’s comfortable with,
her parents are divorced and don’t get along, her mother
(Ronee Blakley) is a raging alcoholic with liquor
bottles hidden all over the place (including in the hall closet with
the towels) and her father (John Saxon) is simultaneously
over-protective and never around. Plus she has bad dreams.
One morning at school Nancy
learns that her best friend, Amanda (Tina Gray) has been having bad
dreams also. And so has her boyfriend…and so has
Tina’s boyfriend (Rod Lane). In fact, they are all having the
SAME bad dream.
A man,
with a dirty striped shirt, brown hat, scarred face and knives for
fingers is terrorizing the teens in their sleep. And there’s
more…injuries received in the dream miraculously exist
in “real life” when they awake. This
dream thing is getting serious.
The man in their dreams is
Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), and it turns out that he is the spirit
of “the bastard son of a 1000 maniacs” –
a child murderer who was later murdered himself by
the parents of his victims, and who now exacts his revenge on those who
burned and killed him by attacking their descendents while they sleep.
Nancy and her friends are, of course, those descendents.
A Nightmare on Elm Street has
several elements that make this horror movie one of a kind:
•
The monster in Freddy Krueger is original, VERY scary, seemingly
immortal and comes to his victims when they are most vulnerable.
• The hero in Nancy Thompson is a
REAL teenager, with a real life and real problems. She could be ANY
teen in a small town, which makes the whole thing more horrifying.
• Some people die in A
Nightmare on Elm Street that just shouldn’t if the
“rules of horror” are followed…i.e. No
sex, no drugs, no sin.
• Nancy
doesn’t take all of this “lying down”
(ha) but fights back, actually giving ole’ Freddy a run for
his money.
A
Nightmare on Elm Street
has a highly original twist on the slasher theme, and Wes Craven seems
to delight in surprising the audience and keeping
everyone on their toes. The storyline is rich, the characters are deep,
and the scares intense. Craven even adds those strange “dream
things” (seemingly illogical happenings that we experience in
our dreams that make perfect sense at the time) to create a horror
experience that gives us pause to the very act of retiring
for the night.
There have been several sequels
to A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the first
is the best. Add this one to your library of the classics,
and recognize that in a genre that can tend to be somewhat lacking in
truly original concepts, A Nightmare on Elm Street
is a distinguished exception. Comments
or questions about A Nightmare on Elm Street?
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A man,
with a dirty striped shirt, brown hat, scarred face and knives for
fingers is terrorizing the teens in their sleep. And there’s
more…injuries received in the dream miraculously exist
in “real life” when they awake. This
dream thing is getting serious.
Blink
Del.icio.us
Digg
Furl
Google
Simpy
Spurl
Technorati
Y!
MyWeb