Classic horror title, more of an 80s teen fantasy movie.

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2015)

A Nightmare on Elm Street was created by Wes Craven, an English lit professor, who probably got the project green-lit because its so teen orientated, and plays on the idea of dream-reality invading our waking life in such an original way.
The movie starts with an excellent plot conceit, local bad-boy (played by Johnny Depp) is accused of a crime he didn't commit. The real culprit? A scarred, cackling ghost, formerly a school caretaker that was burnt alive by vengeful Elm Street parents for abusing children.
A Nightmare on Elm Street has a sense of purpose, context, and layered story elements the other films in this series lack, and that said, the movie is also the only "Nightmare" film created by Wes Craven for the whole decade of numerically staggering hack-n-slash sequels. (Seven? Eight? Nine???) The decision to build this movies character into a "franchise" is actually a symptom of how 80s cinema was overly commercial and a tad mindless compared to the 70s classics that film geeks and reviewers still laud today as quality cinema.
That aside, the movie does have a sense of dread and insularity as the teens of Elm Street realize that they're trapped in a supernatural pact against the evil spirit of Freddy Krueger, and the special effects are pretty cool. The prosthetics, Jacques Haitkins cinematography and the pulsing 80s synthesizer score all became standard tropes for 80s big-league horror and its various low budget imitators where you gets stabbed in the eyeball by a guy in a hockey mask coming out of a closet in the dark etc. Bam!!! You got stabbed!! Ouch!!! EwwwwÂ….fake blood.
Personally, I'd rate the film as a '6', but upped it a notch because of the excellent title!! Also, creature design effects for Freddy Krueger are some of the most iconic in horror history, that said most of the other releases in the series are just VFX vehicles with anonymous teens getting sliced and "nightmare-ified". Worth seeing, but would have been better off as a single movie.