Freddy Krueger was always at least middle-aged, but now his whole series is about to follow suit: A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Wes Craven slasher classic, is turning 40 shortly after Halloween. It’s easy enough to play this game with any movie that’s more than a couple of decades old, but it still produces a chill: Nightmare is now as old to 2024 audiences as a movie from 1944 was during the film’s original 1984 release. (A sampling of 1944 horror movies, for further reference: Universal siblings The Mummy’s Curse, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Invisible Man’s Revenge.)
Unlike the Universal equivalents of the 1930s and 1940s, Freddy wasn’t able to share same-studio camaraderie with his fellow 1980s monsters – at least not until Jason Voorhees jumped from Paramount to New Line for a time, and the two squared off in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. Regardless, Freddy was part of a crew: Jason and Michael Myers were his closest contemporaries, though Leatherface (a 1974 creation revived by an ’80s Texas Chainsaw sequel) and Chucky (the diminutive tail-end slasher who emerged underfoot in 1988) could probably be included too. Among these monsters’ exploits in the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street stands tall as the best of the bunch, pretty handily. The first and best Halloween came out in 1978; the original Texas Chain Saw came out in 1974, and while the wild second film from 1986 is well worth seeing, it’s not as scary as Nightmare. Neither are the Friday the 13th movies, the most nakedly mercenary of the bunch.
The individual scare sequences of Nightmare are full of iconic imagery: a teenage boy’s bed spouting an impossible geyser of blood, Freddy’s knife-gloved hand reaching out from underwater in a bathtub, Freddy’s face bending physics to press through a bedroom wall. But what really makes it an unusually memorable and haunting dead-teenager movie is the liminal mind space it occupies. Craven’s suburbs aren’t as evocatively shot as John Carpenter’s version in Halloween (which captures small-town autumnal chill so well that it doesn’t even matter to know that it used California to sub for Illinois). But that’s because so much of Nightmare takes place in interior facsimiles of familiar places, particularly bedrooms. This isn’t a movie about teenagers out on their own, celebrating some distance from their parents by partying in the woods or necking in a car. Here, even the teenage sex happens in the relatively safe confines of actual houses.
Yet the kids still aren’t safe, because Freddy Krueger has the (unexplained, in this installment) power to invade their dreams, and cause so much harm that they wake up with gashes or burns – if they manage to wake up at all. Though she’s not exactly the most charismatic character in the movie, 40 years later it feels increasingly like the key character in Nightmare is Marge (Ronee Blakley), the single mother of designated final girl Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). Not only does Marge become the figurehead for the Elm Street parents who tried to cover up their vigilante justice against non-convicted child murderer Fred Kreuger (Robert Englund), she’s a functional alcoholic who can’t ultimately keep Nancy safe.
Interestingly, Craven doesn’t write Marge as villainous or even careless with Nancy’s feelings; she dotes on her, warns her about falling asleep in the tub, takes her to a sleep clinic when her nightmares persist. Yet Marge is also complicit with the Krueger problem that can’t be solved with mom tips or sleep monitoring, and Nancy’s standoffish behavior throughout the movie starts to resonate: She’s a teenager not glorying in newfound freedom, but adjusting to the fact that adults can’t actually save her. The fact that there’s no particular rule clearly stated or uncovered allowing Nancy to pull Krueger back into her world for a final fight makes the whole thing more unnerving. Nancy has been left to her own devices. Her father (John Saxon), meanwhile, can barely handle coming from across the street when she calls for help.
The final shock of the movie comes after Nancy, having seemly defeated Krueger by ignoring him, steps into a suspiciously soft and warmly lit new morning, her mother (last seen dragged into Freddy’s hellish dreamworld) and her friends all alive again. As she and her friends realize the car they’re in has locked them inside (and a convertible roof patterned like Krueger’s sweater seals them in), Freddy’s clawed hand smashes through the door and drags Marge back into the house, presumably to her doom.
The one-last-boo horror ending was pretty common by 1984, but it’s especially well-used in Nightmare because no attempt is made to delineate the real world and the dream world. Is this Nancy’s nightmare, and if so, is her mother able to share and die in it? Was Nancy wrong about how to defeat Freddy, or will nightmare versions of him simply continue to haunt her? Will be ever be able to trust her eyes again, if she does make out?
A few subsequent Nightmare sequels do feature Langenkamp again, albeit in very different ways, and you could probably piece together an explanation from those, depending on whether A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors or New Nightmare is your preferred path. (Craven had a hand in both, suggesting his personal affinity for Nancy). Other Nightmare sequels would give Freddy more screentime and quips, with more rococo versions of the gory dreamscapes he invades and reshapes to keep torturing future generations of confused teens. Many of them are quite inventive; the hit rate on Nightmare sequels is better than most slashers. But the original Nightmare is hard to beat precisely because its dreams are so quotidian by comparison – so easily blended, in other words, with “real” life. Faced with the pressure to shock and disturb viewers, a lot of slashers settle on nihilistic inevitability: There’s no way out; the monster will get you. A Nightmare on Elm Street might look that way, but it actually has a scary message that applies far beyond the world of dream-world slashers, perfect for a series entering its forties: Ultimately, no matter how much your parents love you, you’re on your own.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.