John Carpenter didn’t invent the slasher genre with Halloween in 1978 but he certainly popularized it and solidified the formula. Two years later, Friday the 13th codified the rules and helped make it of the most popular genres of the early 1980s. But within a few years, the genre was starting to grow stale. Its popularity was waning. There are just so many ways a masked killer can slice and dice his way through a group of sexy teens. Or so we thought. In 1984, Wes Craven created A Nightmare on Elm Street, which completely re-energized the genre. Freddy Krueger completed the trifecta of classic slasher villains (Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers being the other two). To celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary, Warner Bros. is releasing A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time on 4K UHD and it has never looked better.
Buy A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 4K UHDI grew up in the 1980s and slashers were a part of my cinematic coming of age. I can remember hanging out in the boys’ locker room discussing which Jason, Freddy, or Michael Myers movie we’d seen. We were too young to be watching those films in the theater and most of our parents weren’t letting us rent them, but you could catch them at random on late-night cable TV. I had an eight-foot poster of Freddy Krueger hanging on my bedroom door. Though if I’m being honest, I’m not sure if I’d seen any of his films at that point all the way through. Certainly, I’d never seen one not edited for television. But the characters were iconic and I loved them. I’ve since seen all of the films in the Nightmare Universe, but the original remains my favorite. It is truly a great piece of horror cinema.
Watching it yet again, I’m struck by how well put together the film is. With a runtime of just over 90 minutes, it puts us inside this universe, invents a brand new mythology, gives us the thrills, and several great set pieces, and rolls the credits without any filler. There isn’t a flat or boring moment to be found.
What sets it apart from all the other slashers coming out at the time, even the good ones like Halloween or My Bloody Valentine, is that Freddy Krueger exists only in our character’s dreams. This allows the film to create all sorts of fantastic moments without us ever cracking wise, MMT3K style, about how whatever ridiculous thing the villain is doing could never happen in real life. But Craven also blends the dreams with reality. Scenes are edited so that we’re never quite sure if a character is awake or asleep, thus we never know when Freddy will appear. That keeps the viewer continually on edge.
Likewise, unlike Jason or Michael Myers who are hulking, silent killers, Freddy is a wiseacre. He doesn’t talk all the time in this film like he will in later ones, but he makes the occasional macabre joke and likes playing with his victims before slicing them up. Slashers never were truly frightening. Other than the occasional jump scare, slashers don’t tend to terrify. They were fun to watch. We talked about the kills like they were accomplishments. The characters, other than the villains, were disposable. We came for the killers and the killers were fun to watch. Freddy Krueger was the most fun.
Watching it now as an adult and a father is interesting. The film is fully ensconced in the world of teenagers. It deals with teenage problems (at least until the guy with knives for fingers shows up). They have to go to school, handle peer pressure, and come to terms with their burgeoning sexuality. Unlike a lot of slashers, sex isn’t front and center (though there is a rather exuberant and loud bit of sexing that happens mostly off-screen), but it is very much there. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), our hero, is the virginal Final Girl of so many of these films but she doesn’t make too much of a thing over it. Her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp making his cinematic debut) makes a few tepid moves towards her. Her rebuffs aren’t so much virginal as they are “not now because a crazy killer is murdering my friends.” This does leave him sleeping on the couch whilst listening to his friends make that exuberant and loud sexing, creating one of the movie’s funniest bits. One scene finds Nancy in the bath. She falls asleep with her knees up and spread apart. Freddy’s hands come right up between them. Later, she’ll be on the phone and the mouthpiece will literally turn into a mouth and Freddy’s tongue sticks out to lick her. So sex is very much present but more thematically than explicit.
The adults are either assholes, drunks, or not present at all. Nancy’s mom (Ronee Blakeley)
spends more time with a bottle then with her daughter and her father (John Saxon), a police lieutenant, is always out on a case. Glen’s parents seem more concerned with his reputation than actual safety. Mostly, the adults are background characters as the teenagers must deal with the nightmare that has come to them (and as we’ll learn later in the film, that nightmare is a direct result of the parent’s actions).
The film is full of iconic scenes and images. Amanda Wys getting chased by Freddy through a boiler room in her white nightgown. Johnny Deep getting pulled into his bed. Showers of blood. Freddy’s elongated arms. The aforementioned bathtub scene. Wes Craven and his crew are masters of delivering the frightening goods.
I’ve seen this film a dozen times and I look forward to a dozen more. It never grows old.
This new 4K UHD transfer looks terrific. It looks substantially better than my old DVD copy with much more clarity in the darker scenes and a more natural color gradient all around. All of the extras have been ported over from previous releases. They include two audio commentaries featuring Wes Craven and most of the cast. Then there are alternate endings, multiple behind-the-scenes featurettes, a 22-minute retrospective on the entire series, and a 50-minute documentary on making the film.
