40 years later, a legendary horror director’s most important film just got a massive upgrade

A young woman in a nightgown is chased by a burned man with blades on his fingers and runs through a hallway into an abandoned factory. Suddenly the man jumps out of the shadows and rams his gun into her stomach and… she wakes up. It was just a nightmare. Or was that it? The girl looks down and sees the front of her nightgown being torn to shreds as if by a handful of knives.

From the first 10 minutes A Nightmare on Elm Street, It is clear that we are dealing with something special. Not only do we get our first exciting, surreal dream sequence and a small hint of Freddy Krueger’s original creation, but we also meet the four main teenage characters, learn enough about them to define them, and discover the shared plight that drives the story becomes the rest of the film. This all points to a film that has become part of the Mount Rushmore genre of the slasher subgenre and that showcased not only the director’s cinematic skills but also his writing talent in surprising ways.

A Nightmare on Elm Streetwhich turns 40 this year and is gifted with a very fine 4K UHD Blu-Ray release, is just one of the crowning achievements of the late Wes Craven, a man who has shaped the horror genre throughout his career no less revived three times. He made dark exploitation-style films The last house on the left And The hills have eyes in the 70s, and then in the 80s he created a horror icon with Freddy Krueger. Then, after a series of underrated films like The snake and the rainbow, The people under the stairsand the reality-altering Wes Cravens New nightmarehe directed Scream and helped create one of the most successful new franchises of modern times.

Craven had always been far more thoughtful than many critics would have perceived. Having grown up in a religious household so strict that it bordered on fanaticism, horror was a genre that Craven only explored in adulthood, after years of struggling with his faith and trying to channel his burgeoning creative talents into it to implement something concrete. That initially meant writing scripts, and although early projects like Last house And hill Perhaps it doesn’t smack of anything, well, literary, both are deep in a kind of cultural commentary: Why does humanity drive acts of violence? Is the need to overcome it a purely primal fixation, or does it lurk in the minds of all of us?

From nightmareCraven had largely moved away from the barbarism of his early work, but not from attempting to embed thematic depth into his horror films. Although one of the main seeds of nightmare was planted by something primal (as a child he had been afraid of a Krueger-like figure on the street staring out his bedroom window), he used the idea to explore the fascinations of real life and combine them with the metaphysical. Accounts of people having horrific nightmares and dying in their sleep mixed with explorations of human consciousness and how young people are forced to reckon with the sins of the past.

If that sounds too heady, or possibly oppressive, for a mid-’80s crowd-pleasing slasher, you’re in for a surprise. So many horror films, especially slashers, deal with the repeated act of table setting. How can you plausibly ensure that someone is murdered alone? How do you reinvent the status quo every time someone is out of action? How do you consistently convey the narrative to the characters so that they can learn along with the audience? They constantly jump back and forth between horror and normality, skipping scare fodder for unsuspecting people in the same room, urgency and information. The best slasher films handle this with flying colors – HalloweenThe Movie, for example, is so atmospheric that the viewer feels like they’re being swept along on a thrilling ride – while the worst films barely seem stitched together.

Wes Craven’s writing work on nightmare is relentlessly paced, presenting the threat of Freddy as all-encompassing, like a shadow hanging over every scene. Since the characters agree that they are afraid of falling asleep, this plot drive becomes more frantic the more tired they become. The conversations become more and more desperate and the relationships fail. The risk of characters acting unrealistically (Few slasher films escape without at least one “Why are you going into THAT ROOM?!?” moment because they’re never really given the chance).

Just like the poor teenagers who are threatened, the film literally doesn’t let the audience relax. This is supported by the fact that from the start, Craven forces the viewer to question where the real world ends and where the dream sequences begin. Once we discover this trick, we are on guard until the end.

Not every slasher villain is an ace up his sleeve like Freddy in this regard. Poor Jason Vorhees pretty much has to trudge through the woods (what you see is what you get from this guy). But it shows that Craven wasn’t content to stick to the already established writing rules of the slasher. He wanted something that was both more playful and unpredictable.

In the years since the original Nightmare on Elm StreetFreddy appeared half a dozen more times, fighting Jason, and was rebooted with limited success. But Craven would never really be able to top the writing of his first work with Freddy. It’s admittedly fun A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors had to deal with the fact that Krueger was on his way to becoming the horror world’s late-night comedian, and Wes Craven’s new nightmare is inspired, but also always self-referential. With A Nightmare on Elm StreetWes Craven has struck gold in a subgenre that was already on the verge of exhaustion, with a script that definitely won’t put you to sleep.