A Nightmare on Elm Street ((film)
John Saxon - Lt. Thompson
Ronee
Blakley - Marge Thompson
Heather Langenkamp - Nancy Thompson
Amanda Wyss - Tina Gray
Jsu Garcia - Rod Lane (as Nick Corri)
Johnny Depp - Glen Lantz
Charles Fleischer - Dr. King
Joseph Whipp - Sgt. Parker
Robert Englund - Fred Krueger
Lin Shaye - Teacher
Joe Unger - Sgt. Garcia
Mimi Craven - Nurse (as Mimi Meyer-Craven)
Jack Shea - Minister
Ed Call - Mr. Lantz
Sandy Lipton - Mrs. Lantz
David Andrews - Foreman
Jeff Levine - Coroner (as
Jeffrey Levine)
Donna Woodrum - Tina's Mom
Shashawnee
Hall - Cop #1
Carol Pritikin - Cop #2
Brian Reise - Cop #3
Ash Adams - Surfer #1 (as Jason Adams)
Don Hannah - Surfer
#2
Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American horror film directed and written by Wes Craven. The film features John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, Robert Englund and Johnny Depp in his feature film debut. Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, the plot revolves around several teenagers being terrorized in their nightmares by the ghost of a serial child murderer named Freddy Krueger.
Craven produced A Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of just $1.8 million, a sum the film earned back during its first week of release. Grossing $25.5 million at the United States box office, A Nightmare on Elm Street has become one of the most popular entries in the horror genre and the film's villain "Freddy Krueger" has become one of the most well recognized villains in cinema history. Both critics and Craven have mentioned that the film owes some of its success (if not inspiration) to John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), which was hugely influential in spawning a long line of slasher films and originating many clichés found in low-budget horror films of the 1980s and 1990s.
The film's premise is the question of where the line between dreams and reality lies. The villain, Freddy Krueger, thus exists in the "dream world" yet can kill in the "real world". Sequels to the original would continue to blur the distinction between dream and reality before finally challenging the line between art and reality by showing Heather Langenkamp, playing a fictionalized version of herself, haunted by the villain of a series of films she has starred in. Critics encouraged and praised the film's ability to rupture "the boundaries between the imaginary and real," toying with audience perceptions. Some movie historians interpreted this overriding theme as a social subtext, "the struggles of adolescents in American society", and their overwhelming need to confront "the harsh realities of life".
Plot
A fifteen-year-old girl named Tina Grey (Amanda Wyss) has a disturbing nightmare in which she is stalked through a dark boiler room by a figure with distinctive razor-sharp knives for fingers on one of his hands. Just as he catches her, however, she wakes up screaming, only to discover four razor cuts in her nightdress identical to the cuts in her dream. The next day, she finds out that her friend Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) experienced the same dream.
That night, Tina, Nancy and her boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) have a sleep-over to make a distraught Tina feel better. Tina's rebellious boyfriend, Rod Lane (Nick Corri), crashes the party and goes to bed with Tina in her mother's bedroom. However, Tina has another nightmare, and this time the killer catches her and brutally murders her. Rod wakes up to find Tina being cut open by invisible knives and then dragged across the ceiling. Rod, being the only other person in the room at the time, is of course suspected of the killing and is arrested the next day.
Nancy then has three sadistically violent nightmares where she is viciously stalked then attacked by the same terrifying figure who attacked Tina. These nightmares lead her to talk to Rod in prison, who tells her what he saw in Tina's mother's bedroom. Much to the dismay of her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley), Nancy becomes increasingly convinced that the figure appearing in her dreams is the person who killed Tina. Nancy and a skeptical Glen rush to the police station late at night to talk to Rod, only to find that he's been strangled by his own bedsheets. To everyone except Nancy, it appears to be a suicide. Nancy's mother takes her to a Dream Therapy Clinic to ensure she gets some sleep. Once again, she has a horrendous nightmare. This time, her arm is badly cut, but she finds that she has brought something out from her dream: the killer's battered hat. It arouses concern, but also other feelings in Nancy's mother, who is clearly hiding a secret. Eventually, Marge, increasingly drink-sodden, reveals to Nancy that the owner of the hat, and the killer, was a man named Fred Krueger, a child murderer who killed at least twenty children over a decade earlier. Furious, vengeful parents burned him alive in his boiler room hideout when he was released from prison on a technicality. Now, it appears he is manipulating the dreams of their children to exact his revenge from beyond the grave. Nancy's mother, however, reassures Nancy that Krueger can't hurt anyone, pulling Krueger's knife glove from a hiding place in the furnace as a visual aid.
Nancy devises a plan, with Glen, to catch Krueger, but Glen succumbs to sleep and is viciously killed by being sucked into his bed and shot back up in a fountain of blood. Nancy is left alone with Freddy after pulling him into the real world. She runs around her house and forces him to run into booby traps she had set earlier. After setting Freddy on fire Nancy locks him in the basement, and finally gets her father and the rest of the police to help. After discovering that Freddy has escaped and that fiery footsteps lead upstairs, Nancy and her father, Donald Thompson, a police lieutenant, witness Freddy smothering Marge with his flaming body, disappearing to leave her corpse to sink into the bed. After sending her father away, Nancy faces Krueger on her own and succeeds in destroying him by turning her back on him and draining him of all energy, which also seems to revert all of the murders and bring everyone back from the dead. In the last scene, Freddy possesses Glen's car and makes him and the gang drive away with Nancy screaming for her mother when Marge gets grabbed by a clawed hand and pulled through the door window.
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