A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

This thing is way better metaphorically than as a slasher.

way better than I remember. johnny depp in his youth... wowza!

A Nightmare on Elm Street is tailor made for those who like their gore leavened with thought-provoking ideas - something that is a rarity in this genre.

James Berardinelli

ReelViews

Nightmare’s skill wasn’t that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its ’70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states.

Nick Schager

Slant Magazine

A decent ride. It has a boogeyman, exploding teen-agers and blood by the vat; it's part of the oeuvre. It is also, alas, no significant advance of the sub-genre some of us feel, however improbably, attached to. Teens-and- slash may be a form full ofhack work and dim bulbs, but so long as that form stays within reach of young and relatively unsullied directors, there is hope. [6 March 1985, p.C5]

Bill Cosford

Miami Herald