Wes Craven’s Most Important Movie Is Still a Masterclass in Horror Filmmaking

Stalked by a burned man with blades on his fingers, a young woman in a nightgown runs through a hallway and into an abandoned factory. Suddenly the man jumps out from the shadows and plunges his weapon into her stomach and... she wakes up. It was just a nightmare. Or was it? The girl looks down to see the front of her nightgown torn to shreds as if by a fistful of knives.

From the first 10 minutes of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s clear we’re dealing with something special. Not only do we get our first suspenseful, surreal dream sequence and a little hint of Freddy Krueger’s initial creation, but we meet the four leading teenage characters, learn enough about them to be able to define them and discover the shared plight that will drive the rest of the film. It’s all indicative of a film that’s become part of the Mount Rushmore of the slasher subgenre, one that provided a surprising showcase for not only the director’s filmmaking aptitude but his writing talents as well.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, which turns 40 this year and is being treated to a very nice 4K UHD Blu-Ray release, is just one of the crowning achievements of the late Wes Craven, a man who rejuvenated the horror genre no less than three times over his career. He made gritty, exploitation-style flicks like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes in the ‘70s only to turn around and create a horror icon in the form of Freddy Krueger in the ‘80s. Then, after a string of underrated films like The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs, and the reality-bending Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, he directed Scream and helped create one of the most successful new franchises of the modern era.

Craven had always been far more thoughtful than many critics would have perceived. Having grown up in a religious household so strict it bordered on fanaticism, horror was a genre Craven only approached in his adulthood after many years of wrestling with his faith and trying to funnel his burgeoning creative talents into something concrete. That initially meant script writing, and though early projects like Last House and Hills might not reek of anything, well, literary, both are deeply invested in a kind of cultural commentary: What drives mankind to violent acts? Is the need to conquer a purely primeval fixation, or does it lurk in the minds of all of us?

By Nightmare, Craven had mostly moved on from the barbarism of his early work, but not from trying to nestle thematic deep dives into his horror films. Though one of the major seeds of Nightmare was planted by something primordial (as a child, he’d been frightened by a Krueger-esque figure on the street staring up at his bedroom window), he used the idea to explore real-life fascinations and meld them with the metaphysical. Reports of people who suffered hideous nightmares and passed away in their sleep blended with explorations into human consciousness and how young people are forced to reckon with the sins of the past.

If this sounds too heady or potentially stifling for a mid-‘80s, crowd-pleasing slasher, you’d be surprised. So many horror films, especially slashers, are concerned with the repeated act of place-setting. How do you plausibly get someone alone to be murdered? How do you reinvent the status quo every time someone is off’d? How do you relay narrative to the characters over and over again, allowing them to learn with the audience? You’re constantly leaping back and forth from horror to normalcy, jump scare fodder to clueless people in a room, viscerality to information. The best slasher films handle this with aplomb — Halloween, for example, is so coated in atmosphere that the viewer feels like they’re being carried along for the thrill ride — while the worst barely feel stapled together.

Wes Craven’s writing work on Nightmare is relentlessly driven, presenting the threat of Freddy as all-encompassing, like a shadow that hangs over each scene. With characters uniting over the fact that they're afraid to go to sleep, this plot propulsion only becomes more harried as they grow more tired. The conversations become more and more desperate, and the relationships break down. The risk of characters acting unrealistically (few slasher movies escape without at least one “Why are you going into THAT ROOM?!?” moment) drops because they’re never really given the chance to.

So just like the poor teenagers being menaced, the film literally won’t let the audience rest. This is aided by the fact that, from the beginning, Craven forces the audience to wonder where the real world ends and where the dream sequences start. As soon as we discover this trick, we’re on our guard until the end.

Not every slasher villain is an ace in the hole in this regard like Freddy. Poor Jason Vorhees is pretty much left to stomp through the woods (what you see is what you get with that guy). But it shows that Craven was not content to play by the already established writing rules of the slasher. He wanted something that was both more playful, more unpredictable.

In the years since the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy has appeared a half-dozen more times, fought Jason, and been rebooted to limited acclaim. But Craven would never really be able to top the writing of his first effort with Freddy. His admittedly fun A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors had to contend with the fact that Krueger was on his way to becoming the late-night comedian of the horror world, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is inspired, but also ceaselessly self-referential. With A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven struck gold in a subgenre that was already close to exhaustion, and he did so with a screenplay that definitely wouldn’t leave you falling asleep.