Review: "A Nightmare on Elm Street" still feels revelatory at 40

Movie of the Week #11 makes us afraid to go to sleep

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This might be a surprise for readers or podcast listeners who have only gotten to know me in recent years, but I never watched horror movies much as a kid, or even as a young adult. My parents did not like (or really even approve of) them, so they just weren’t part of my media diet growing up, outside of a few standouts like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that slipped through the cracks (and which have been retconned as ‘psychological thrillers’ or some other such nonsense by a popular culture uncomfortable with the idea of horror movies being good or valuable). I was fascinated by horror from the outside looking in, though, enjoying YouTube series like James Rolfe’s annual Monster Madness series, or feverishly reading the Wikipedia summary for each new Saw movie in morbid fascination. But it wasn’t until I was living on my own that I felt comfortably fully indulging in the breadth of the genre, and one of my main ‘free time’ projects in recent years has been availing myself of all the horror films I didn’t see growing up. One of the best things about becoming a horror fan is that once you find yourself enjoying the genre, you’ll never run out of things to watch, either in the endless backlog, or in theaters (if you like going out to movies, horror is the only genre you can always count on having something in theaters, week in and week out).

All that being said, it still took an inexcusably long time for me to get around to Wes Craven’s titanic classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. I saw it for the first time this August, and the one benefit of waiting so long is that I got to see it in a theater, on the big screen, as part of a series of 1984 films celebrating their 40^th anniversaries (1984 was a big year – we already did Prince’s Purple Rain in this Movie of the Week series, and we’ll be discussing a few more from that year in the coming months). Suffice it to say, it was an incredible experience. I found myself vibing intensely on this movie’s wavelength from the word go; even knowing its outsized legacy and loving reputation, I was shocked at just how fresh, fun, and genuinely unsettling the film was. There are some classics that have been so thoroughly digested by popular culture that by the time you, as an individual, finally get around to seeing them, they feel picked clean; A Nightmare on Elm Street is not one of them. It stands firmly outside of time and above its own decades of cultural influence, and it just plays, fulfilling the basic shape of the slasher genre that had already exploded by 1984, but animating it with a singular imagination, soul, and playfulness. It is unusually well-acted, particularly by Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and its scares come from tapping into truly potent evocations of abuse, generational trauma, and the universally understood vulnerability of dream states.