Not Bad but More Sad than Scary

Rating: 4/10 (3 August 2014)

Other than this I've only seen two other horror movies: Alien and Poltergeist. Alien is a good sci-fi movie but not a good horror movie. I think the writer actually thought that using Freudian imagery would make it scary, which it didn't. I'm not going to think a monster is scary simply because it's head is shaped like a penis and I'm not going to think a spaceship is scary because its entrance is shaped like a vulva. And Poltergeist is not scary either. There are a bunch of weird scenes and a lady who spouts pseudo-philosophical gibberish but nothing that's actually scary.
As a horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street was more successful than these two other movies but it's still wasn't very scary. I'm not trying to act tough or impress anyone here and I'll admit I saw this at home on a bright and sunny day a little bit after noon and not in a darkened theater.
The whole idea of people coming out of dreams was too strange. I mean, the Xenomorph is believable because Alien didn't take place in an suburban American town in the 80s. And the ghosts in Poltergeist were alright because, well, ghosts have been a part of the horror genre for a very long time. I don't believe in ghosts, though I'll admit it's fun to speculate about them and other supernatural entities, but if a writer says that ghosts exist within the universe of his/her story, I can suspend my disbelief. But I can't be scared by something that's so far- fetched as people being attacked by people in dreams, even if the attacker has finger knives.
But I must say I was impressed by Wes Craven for creating some ambiguity in the dream sequences regarding whether they were real or not. I honestly thought ANoES was more confusing than Inception (which is not actually a very confusing movie) and I didn't really understand it until I went through a thread on the IMDb message boards.
I thought A Nightmare on Elm Street was more sad than it was scary. The ending made me tear up a little, since it's only a dream and Nancy's mother and friends are dead.
I did think the actors did well, especially Heather Langenkamp. I'm guessing the special effects were good for their time and I thought they still held up well in 2014. As a movie, it was okay. But as a horror movie, I didn't think it was scary enough.