A Nightmare on Elm Street

Beyond kick-starting Wes Craven’s career and marking the coming of age of New Line Cinema, which until then had been a marginal production and distribution company on the college campus circuit, “Nightmare on Elm Street” constitutes a work of seminal importance in the history of the genre itself, an artistic product that revolutionized and refreshed the very concept of horror.

It’s virtually impossible to escape modern-day boogeyman Freddy Krueger’s razor-sharp blades. No walls or locked doors can possibly protect us from an entity capable of violating our most intimate inner realm, that final bastion of the intrapsychic universe that is our dreams, where he attacks us at our most vulnerable moment, when the ego drops its normal defenses to engage in oneiric activity.

For better or for worse, the director has always been fascinated by psychoanalytic trends, and here he outlines some reflections on the value of concretely voicing one’s fears and anxieties as the prerequisite first step in the process of working through and overcoming those feelings (the subject will be duly elaborated and expanded on in the notable “New Nightmare“, 1994). In fact, although typical slasher elements are undeniably present (brutal, up-close killings, Christian bigotry), the film boldly takes a different path with its unusual emphasis on the psychological realm, and even more so for its marked visionary nature on a figurative level.

Additionally, the opportunity to operate on different planes of reality allows the good Wes to make room for a wide gamut of highly atmospheric visual solutions: for example, the famous scene when the glove with the knife blades pops up between the legs of the girl dozing off in the bathtub. Turning to the cast, the young actors’ performances aren’t terribly rousing – Johnny Depp makes a feeble film debut – but the legendary Robert Englund, with the help of David B. Miller’s masterful make-up, demonstrates a certain “savoir faire” playing the maniac, having finally found the role of a lifetime (for now his Freddy is still savage and sinister, a far cry from the inexorable, ludicrous changes his character undergoes in later installments).

Box office gold: gross receipts of $26 million in the US alone, against a budget of nearly 2 million.