Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I've never found straight up slasher movies to be that frightening. Sure, if done well they can be edge-of-your-seat fare, but it's unlikely to penetrate your dreams and give you chills several days later. On some level I think Wes Craven understood this and felt the slasher era to be coming to an end. Halloween had come out 6 years before and he knew that it couldn't be topped. Instead of calling it quits on the whole concept, he decided to give us one last hurrah with a special twist.

It's human nature to ponder the reason and meaning of dreams. Many thousands of years of civilization and we still don't know why they exist. Night after night we experience visions of fantastical worlds or life-threatening terrors, and it's that in-between state that can come just after waking, the space of time where it seems you've brought the malevolent dream creatures back into the real world, that Nightmare on Elm Street explores.

Watching it today, almost 30 years later, proves Craven knew how precisely to evoke that fear. The scenes where Fred Krueger is chopping off his fingers or just chasing someone through the boiler room are the least interesting. They exist at worst as filler, at best as a tip of the hat to the slasher genre. But to watch Fred walk down an alley with elongated arms or to see his hand rise slowly out of the bathtub… this is the stuff of nightmares, the things you are afraid of bringing to the waking world.

The balance of all these horror elements — the killer stalker, the blurred line between dreams and reality, the story of a hidden dark past — these all work together to create the quintessential horror film, but it's the fear of my own nightmares that gets under my skin for days after and makes Nightmare on Elm Street one of my favorites.

And if you'll allow me a moment of being a purist, let's set the record straight: it's Fred, not Freddy.