A good urban legend flick, but best as a meta film

Rating: 6/10 (3 July 2020)

This review will go into the film's merits as well as its most gaping flaw.
By now, you've surely seen many movies and shows that imitate or reference this classic horror. So you might wonder: can it still surprise you and thrill you, or is all the surprise ruined like Rosebud in Citizen Kane? Simply put, it's a thrill alright. This film is full of utterly unique and creatively creepy ideas that have never been successfully imitated. You can tell the cast and crew put a ton of energy into this production; the dream scenes are both extremely spooky and just plain fun.
The film doesn't beat around the bush or give you infodumps about how the nightmares work. It just jumps into its Twilight Zone concept, truly embracing its genre of horror-fantasy. It piques your imagination and puts you on the edge of your seat during the tense parts, especially in the claustrophobic cat-and-mouse finale. Almost 40 years later, the film's style still feels like an innovative breath of fresh air.
By now, you surely know the premise: a killer stalks teens in their nightmares, and when they die in their dreams, they die in real life--often in very bloody and messy ways, at that! So the plot is a thrill, but what about themes? The story's themes are pretty familiar territory for slashers. But when you step back and look at the film's meta-themes, there is some darker, deeper stuff at work here.
For instance, if you're watching as an adult, you'll probably notice how exploitative the film is towards its teen actors. The movie is glad to give glamorous shots of half-naked teens, showing off the boys' muscles and as much as they could of the girls--after all, we all know sex sells. But this is a movie where the villain is a child molester who sexually assaults teens onscreen; the villain's actions are presented as evil, yet director Wes Craven (a middle-aged 45 year old man when he made this film) is utterly shameless in objectifying his teens for profit.
This hypocrisy is utterly disgusting. If you're actually thinking while you watch the film, you will probably find that its exploitation (and lack of integrity) is a huge drawback that makes it harder to enjoy the movie.
And so, if you really want to enjoy this film, it works best to view it as a meta-horror. It is a psychological tale of a director, Wes Craven, a middle-aged man who makes a movie about his idealized, sexy teens. He creates a scene where two teens have cartoonishly loud, screaming sex while a virgin boy listens obsessively--a scene that clearly reflects Wes' own intense preoccupations. We see a dirty old man living out both his sexual fantasies and his sexual insecurities through teens, like a stunted Peter Pan wannabe who never accepted his own adulthood.
That statement might sound like a stretch, but it simply isn't--Wes' rejection of adulthood is on full display here. He portrays every single adult in the film as a useless loser or an adversary. In appearance, the adults all range from frumpy and homely to downright monstrous, making the teens even MORE idealized in comparison. The heroine is Craven's flawless dream girl: smart and brave but also vulnerable and fine with getting half-naked for his camera. We never even learn about the characters' interests; she is just Craven's tool. He presents her as sexy, but it's important that she's virginal because that childlike innocence makes her more exciting to Craven. Craven's next step is making a villain who embodies all of his dirty-old-man qualities, allowing him to self-flagellate but also revel in his sleaziness, entertaining people with it, making it charming and fun. His idealized girl degrades and dominates Craven's shame-avatar Freddy... and yet Freddy gets what he wants in the end.
If you just take the film as a story, it has some great spooky scenes and a tense, satisfying ending. If you take the film as a whole, then its exploitation will detract from its appeal. But if you take it as a meta-story about a twisted director who exploits teens, self-flagellates for it, but ultimately embraces his sleaziness because it's profitable, you will find some a thought-provoking psychological tale here (as well as a shining example of Hollywood's usual hypocrisy).
Whether you enjoy this film for the surreal, gory spectacle or for its meta-narrative value, I can confidently recommend it for sheer horror value.