A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

It’s been 36 years when this movie was released in 1984. c, Amanda, Johnny and Jsu are 10+ years older than me. Robert England has to be 5 or more years older than them. Years after critics called this and other slasher films garbage, they gave Elm St a 2nd or 3rd look and realized how the story and script were well written compared to today’s horror films. Don’t fall asleep.

This thing is way better metaphorically than as a slasher.

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