First is still the best, focusing on primal fears versus wisecracks

Rating: 9/10 (20 October 2017)

Wes Craven's classic original film that spawned a highly influential franchised (and a terrible reboot) is still the best of them all. Craven cooks up an irresistible premise of child murderer Fred Kreuger killing the kids of Elm Street in their dreams as revenge for his mob justice murder by their parents may years before. What makes the set-up work so well is the blurring of the lines between dreams and reality when Kreuger stalks the kids in their dream. The characters fight sleep to avoid Kreuger, but are never quite sure when reality may have drifted into dreams after they may have dozed off in class, in a bathtub, or wherever they might be at any moment. Once reality moves into the dreamworld, Craven plays off of some of our most primal of fears; claws, drowning, burning, not knowing what's a dream and what's reality, and, of course, being killed in your dreams. In many ways, this film stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series. Most notably Freddy Krueger (in this film referred to as Fred Kreuger) has a total of 7-minutes screen time. This film is mainly about the Elm Street kids trying to figure out what's going on and how to stop Krueger. This film is also much stronger than the sequels because Freddy is not yet the wisecracking, one-liner delivering character he later became, which has the impact of making him a much more frightening of character. Since this is the first film in the franchise, it gets to tell the origin story of Freddy and Elm Street, which is more interesting than the sequels ("Dream Warriors" and "New Nightmare" being the exceptions) and who all basically recycled the same material but with bigger budgets and set pieces. Heather Langenkamp is quite good in the lead as Nancy and Amanda Wyss is good as well as her best friend. I did like how Craven (SPOILER ALERT!) pulled a bit of a Marion Crane by starting the film with Wyss, who gets killed off about 20-minutes into the picture and the film then shifts it's focus to Langenkamp. It's also pretty fun to see a teenage Johnny Depp in his film debut. And, of course, Robert Englund is very scary and effective as Fred Kreuger, even if he's not on screen all that much. Englund really made this character his own throughout this series and England's absence from the remake is a major reason why that film did not work. Also worth mentioning is the iconic music from Charles Bernstein, who for some reason never scored another film in the series, and also of note is the wonderfully surreal and dreamlike photography by Jacques Haitkin, who's now a second unit director of photography on major Hollywood films like Captain America films, the Fast & Furious films, and even the new King Kong film, "Kong: Skull Island." My main complaint about the film is the ending. The producers wanted a twist ending that left it open for a sequel and Craven wanted a happy ending. I'm not completely opposed to twist endings, though more often than not they don't work, or even unhappy endings, but I do think this film would have worked better if it had more definitive of resolution. And regarding the producers desire for potential sequels, Jason got killed at the end most every Friday the 13th film and managed to come back over and over again. Why wouldn't that work here too? Overall, this is Craven's best film and one that really got under my skin as a kid back in the day watching it over and over on VHS, but what's so great about the film is that it still holds up today, both in concept and in suspense and scares.