When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I had an 8-foot tall poster of Freddy Krueger that I displayed proudly on my bedroom door. I was so excited about it even though I’m not entirely sure if I’d seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street films at that point. I’d probably seen the first one and maybe one of the sequels. I’m sure I’d seen various trailers and clips, and I remember MTV running some kind of long promo for Part IV: The Dream Master. I definitely remember the video for the DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince song “A Nightmare on My Street.”
Buy A Nightmare on Elm Street 7-Film Collection 4K UHDThe thing is it didn’t matter how many films I’d seen; I still loved Freddy. He was a cultural icon. He remains one of the great horror icons from the 1980s. I used to stare at that poster – at his classic red and black striped sweater, his dirty fedora, that burned skin, and, of course, his glove with knives for fingers – in awe of just how cool a character he was.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure when I got around to watching the rest of the films. The first one was in regular rotation every spooky season, but it took me a long time to bother with the sequels. I bought a boxed set of the films on DVD many years ago, but for ages it just sat on my shelves, unwatched. Every now and again, I’d pull one of them out and give it a go, but then I wouldn’t follow up with any of the other films.
Finally, a couple of years ago I decided to work my way through the entire series. I’m glad I did. Not every sequel is a classic, and a couple of them are pretty bad, but pound for pound, the Nightmare on Elm Street films are one of the best horror series ever made. I was thrilled when I learned they were upgrading the entire set in UHD.
I’d argue there are two things that make the Nightmare films stand out above the crowd of 1980s slashers.
- Freddy kills inside the dream world. In dreams, anything can happen. The settings and landscapes can appear to be anything and change at any moment. Freddy can morph and change. His arms can grow long, his tongue can stretch, he can turn into a giant snake if he likes. The dreams can be as creative, interesting, and horrifying as the filmmakers can imagine.
- Freddy has personality. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and so many other slasher villains are mute. They don’t talk; they just stalk. Freddy loves to talk. In later films, he’d become a one-liner, joke-telling wiseacre, but even in the first film he’s says thing to disarm his victims. That gives him a vivid personality and makes him (and thus his films) stand out.
The original A Nightmare on Elm Street is a true classic. Writer/director Wes Craven created an iconic villain in Freddy Kruger and gave us some instantly recognizable set pieces. It is truly a good film and one of the greatest horror movies of the 1980s. Warner Bros. previously released it on 4K UHD and you can read my review here.
It was a huge success, and as such, a sequel was immediately commissioned. Preproduction began just five months after the first film’s release, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge hit theaters just under one year of the first film’s debut. That quick turnaround is often blamed for its many, many faults. The studio’s desire to churn out sequels at an amazingly fast rate would cause the franchise to have many more difficulties from a critical point of view.
For the most part, the sequels follow a very familiar pattern. A group of teenagers will start having strange nightmares involving a creepy dude with burned skin and knives for fingers. They’ll eventually realize that Freddy is real and he can kill them in their dreams. They’ll band together to kill him, finding creative ways to fight him in their dreams.
There are two outliers to this. Part 2 has Freddy essentially taking possession of a guy named Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) and using him to kill in the real world. It isn’t a good movie by any standard, but it is wildly homoerotic and made at a time when that was a recipe for trouble – so much so that Patton made a documentary about how the film essentially destroyed his career. The seventh and (sort of) final film in the franchise, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, is an exercise in meta-filmmaking (and now feels like a rehearsal for Scream). Heather Langenkamp, Wes Craven, Robert Englund, and John Saxon all play versions of themselves, people who were involved in the Nightmare franchise. But as it turns out, Freddy Krueger is real, and he’s stalking them in real life.
Over the course of the series, we will learn more about who Freddy is and his mythology. The first film tells us he was a child murderer that was caught by the police but got off on a technicality. A group of parents then burned him alive, which is why he is so burned-looking, and it is their children he goes after in their dreams.
In Part 3: Dream Warriors, we’ll learn his mother was a nun who worked at an insane asylum and was raped by over 100 of the worst inmates. Because of this, it was impossible to know who his real father was. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare will reveal that his adoptive father (played by Alice Cooper) was an alcoholic and repeatedly abused the boy. He would become Freddy’s first victim. We will also learn in that film that Freddy was once married and has a daughter.
Like most horror franchises, the characters in the Nightmare films, for the most part, do not last for very long. Lots of them are killed off within the context of a single film, but even the survivors have a tendency to disappear after one or two films. Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), the final girl of the first film, shows back up in Part 3, and then again in Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare (though again, in that film she’s playing a version of herself). Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) will be the hero of Part 4: The Dream Master and Part 5: The Dream Child. Other survivors will show up in the following film only to be summarily killed before the credits roll.
But while the characters don’t last long, the ideas they bring to the films do. In Part 3, our heroes will learn to team up in the dreams, as one character has an ability to bring others into her dreams. They will also bring into the franchise the idea that inside the dreams you can be whoever you want to be. Both ideas will be used throughout the rest of the series though the films will never truly utilize them well. I mean, why not dream you have a machine gun?
But as any fan of slashers knows, it isn’t the stories, or the mythology that brings us back; it’s the kills – and the Nightmare franchise has some pretty awesome ones. Some of my favorites include Phillip being played like a marionette (with his blood veins becoming the strings) in Part 3. Glen (a young Johnny Depp in his first film role) getting sucked into his bed, and a literal fountain of blood squirting up after in Part 1. In Part 5, Dan’s body turns into a motorcycle in a scene reminiscent of both David Cronenberg’s body horror films and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. And then of course there is Debbie in Part 4, who gets turned into a bug and ripped apart by the sticky goo of a roach motel.
The surreal nature of dreams allows the filmmakers to get really creative with the nightmares and kills, and while this doesn’t always pay off (see my notes on how quickly some of these films were churned out), when it does, there is nothing better (at least inside 1980s horror).
Each of the seven films in this set (it isn’t quite a “complete” set, as it does not include Freddy vs. Jason or the remake from 2010, or Freddy’s Nightmares, the TV anthology series that lasted two seasons) has been given new 4K UHD transfers. They all look quite good, especially the first and last (and most popular) films. You could certainly make some complaints about some of the sequels, especially concerning some of the brightness levels (they are very dark movies), but overall I think they come out looking good. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare comes in both 2-D and 3-D versions (and 3-D glasses are included).
There are a lot of extras for each film, including commentaries, behind-the-scenes features, and lots of interviews with people involved with the productions. As far as I can tell, all of these have been ported over from previous releases, but it is nice to have them included here.
I do wish the other two films and TV series were included in this set (not to mention Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, the documentary about the film series from 2010), but one imagines there are all sorts of rights issues keeping those films out. But for the original 7-film series, this is a terrific boxed set, and one well worth getting if you are a fan.
