The teens on Elm Street seem to be dreaming of the same grotesque man in their dreams (or should that be nightmares). In their dreams, he uses as a weapon a leather glove that he has fashioned with long, sharp blades. When one girl, Tina Grey, actually dies horribly during one of her nightmares, it’s presumed her delinquent boyfriend, Rod Lane, has done the deed. But plucky and resourceful Nancy Thompson has a feeling that there’s more to this and that the man she keeps seeing in her nightmares is somehow responsible.

This film has more plus points than minus aspects. It’s completely unique with the ‘what happens in your dreams happens in real life’ conceit. This means that if you’re killed in your dream, then you’re not waking up! The first kill is extremely graphic and very shocking, even by the standards of the more extreme horror films available on home video at that time (it’s worth noting that the Video Nasties brouhaha was going on at that time in the UK. How ANOES wasn’t censored by the BBFC is anyone’s guess. Mary Whitehouse could have also chosen this film and its killer as Public Enemy Number 1 as well. Instead, she designated The Evil Dead as her cause celebre, and so Craven was spared).

I was obsessed with this movie when I first saw it on home video in the mid-80s. Expert direction, awe-inspiring cinematography and pitch-perfect locales capture the essence of Americana with suburban streets, high school classrooms and corridors. But the sphere of killer Freddy Krueger’s boiler room is also perfect. We find out that Krueger has somehow manifested himself in the teen’s nightmares after he was killed by a lynch mob of the Elm Street parents after he was found to be a local child killer who was set free on a technicality even though he was guilty of his crimes. The parents cornered him in his boiler room, doused the building in gasoline and set fire to it with him inside.

I also love that another ‘dream rule’ is established in the film, and that is that if you are holding something in your dream when you are woken up, this comes out of the dream with you.

The cast is perfect, with cult favourite John Saxon starring as Nancy’s cop father. We even have a young Johnny Depp as Nancy’s boyfriend. But it’s Heather Langenkamp as Nancy that steals the show. She carries the movie from start to finish and is the brilliant cast’s strongest link. Her performance is one of the best in the whole horror genre as she plays Nancy as extremely strong, very believable and, occasionally, very funny (after she looks at herself in the mirror to see if her recent traumatic experiences have affected her looks, she remarks ‘Oh God! I look at least 20 years old!’).

Whilst this is a great movie, it is marred by a couple of issues that prevent it, in my mind, from being the classic some lazily extol it to be. Firstly, I don’t believe that ANOES was only intended as a one-off and not as the start of a franchise. Witness the number of times Freddy’s name is mentioned in the film and is even uttered by him a couple of times! It feels to me like they are trying to establish him as a brand. Certain people had a franchise in mind, and I’m sure Craven and Robert Shaye at New Line were among them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but please fess up if that was the case!

Also, this is a great movie with a laughably bad ending. It must have been extremely difficult to end the film after Nancy has turned her back on the killer and taken away his power by not giving him that power (a great metaphor for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and how to deal with narcissists). Should the film have ended there? Many other filmed endings appear on the many ANOES DVDs and Blu-rays that have been released over the years. None of them really work. But with a movie to finish quickly, it must have been difficult to suddenly come up with a twist. But an obvious doll being yanked through a tiny window in a front door was a terrible choice.

But with the positives significantly outnumbering the negatives, this is still a horror film that deserves the recognition it gets. But it’s still not as good as The Hills Have Eyes, which I consider to be Craven’s masterpiece.

4 out of 5 stars