31 horror films you need to watch this October
A Nightmare on Elm Street
The Concept
The best thing to do when faced with a seemingly impossible problem is to go to bed and figure it out in the morning. Unless, of course, that problem happens to be a horrifically scarred man in a tacky sweater with a knife-glove, in which case sleep is your absolute worst option. The movie kicks off with California teenager Tina Gray wakes from an awful nightmare about a disfigured man with knives on his fingers, later finding long slashes torn in her nightgown. As more kids in Tina’s friend group begin dreaming of Freddy Kreuger and waking up to find evidence that their dreams are somehow spilling out into the real world, the stakes quickly become clear: they have to figure out how to stop Freddy, before he murders them in their dreams—and they die in real life.
The Breakdown
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a master of dream sequences, blurring sleep and reality until even the audience can’t be wholly certain whether the characters are awake or asleep. The strangeness of the dreams paired with the constant sense of paranoia and unreality keep the movie’s tension chugging along right up until the final frame.
It’s a classic slasher with an effective twist. The characters are fighting something utterly inevitable—sleep itself—and growing weaker for every hour they stay up. And when they do fall asleep, all you can do is scream at them helplessly to wake, knowing every moment they’re asleep is giving Freddy another chance to nip on into their dreams and disembowel them. Oh, and a potentially revealing fact: one scene in the movie involved over 500 gallons of fake blood. So brace yourself for that.
The Scare Factor
Though there isn’t much here that the modern horror fan will find novel or blood-chilling, A Nightmare on Elm Street definitely stands the test of time; some of the deaths are genuinely disturbing, and the dream sequences will keep you anxious and off-balanced for the entirety of the film. On top of that, the movie plays on a theme that every human being can find terrifying: the universal need for sleep. You can avoid staying at a haunted hotel or walking through a graveyard at night, but everyone has to sleep sometime. And that’s when Freddy gets you.