A Nightmare on Elm Street: Critic Reviews

A Nightmare on Elm Street... puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.

Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

A highly imaginative horror film that provides the requisite shocks to keep fans of the genre happy.

Still stands on its own as an intriguing and chilling example of how horror works best when the characters and the audience don't have to be lobotomized.

First feature for knife-handed horror idol Freddy.

...a low-key horror effort that's ultimately not quite as enthralling as its premise might've indicated...

An imaginative, menacing, and scary film with top notch performances, an original premise, and horrifying villain...

Seeing the movie again, I was reminded that while the Krueger character did have some taunting, humorous dialogue, it was more eerie than funny. Krueger was truly a menacing, terrifying boogeyman in the beginning.

... ingenious exploitation that plays on primal fears and subconscious anxieties...

...decidedly anti-art - at one point, a teen dozes off while reading Shakespeare - yet it still manages to rank among the top horror movies of all time.

A fantastic horror film that still holds up resoundingly well today.

What the film did more than anything else was create a new horror star.

The Sandman of Reagan's dozy suburbia

Terrifically spooky and original, the film continues to feel completely modern despite being almost a quarter-century old.

...one of the great horror efforts and a worthy successor to the classic monsters of yesteryear.

My favourite horror movie.

An inventive and terrifying horror film that explores the inner psyche and its ability to turn nightmares into reality.

What makes Freddy truly terrifying, and an inspired invention on Craven's part, is that he exists not in the real world but in the shadowy realm of dreams.

It succeeds by preying on archetypal fears and imagery - the myth of the bogeyman, the power of the unconscious conjuring up the worst horrors imaginable.

One of the most intelligent and terrifying horror films of the 1980s.

An actual story, made by somebody who cared enough about his ideas to make them different and original.

The far superior of the two defining horror franchises of the '80s.

By 1984, the slasher film had already been done to death, but Craven added a fresh take with his idea of a killer that attacks in dreams.

What's so clever about Craven's variation on teen-horror is what now seems so obvious about it: A Nightmare on Elm Street takes all of this fear of unmanageable desires and makes it explicitly, even bluntly Freudian.