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Some peo­ple will often tear down a movie pre­vi­ously regarded as a clas­sic because it shows its age when viewed from a mod­ern van­tage point.  Your Humble Reviewer has two prob­lems with this approach.  Number one, it’s an ageist point of view that fails to look at the movie in its his­tor­i­cal con­text, which is how you are sup­posed to deter­mine what is and what isn’t clas­sic.  Number two, such a narrow-minded way of think­ing is built on the con­fu­sion that a clas­sic film must be per­fect in every way to earn the ‘clas­sic’ tag.  A film doesn’t have to be flaw­less to earn such a des­ig­na­tion.  It merely must break new ground in a way that influ­ences sub­se­quent films — and the “imper­fect clas­sic” is often as fas­ci­nat­ing to watch as the flaw­less kind.

A good exam­ple of the “imper­fect clas­sic” is Wes Craven’s orig­i­nal ver­sion of A Nightmare On Elm Street.  It has become fash­ion­able in recent times to give it a good bash­ing, dis­miss­ing it as a mediocre film that had one good idea (Freddy Krueger) going for it.  While it has some notice­able flaws, to dis­miss A Nightmare On Elm Street in this way is alarm­ingly short-sighted.  Whatever its prob­lems, there’s a lot here that still works and the film remains potent a quar­ter of a cen­tury after it first scared audiences.

A Nightmare On Elm Street opens with a jolt as Tina (Amanda Wyss) dreams she is being chased a maniac with knive-fingered glove and a burn-scarred face.  As he attacks, she awak­ens and finds her cloth­ing ripped.  She dis­cusses this night­mare with her friend Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and dis­cov­ers she had a dream with the same man in it.  That night, Tina’s night­mar­ish foe mur­ders her in her dream and this kills her in real life, leav­ing her tough-guy boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri) to take the rap.

Nancy makes the con­nec­tion between their col­lec­tive dreams and Tina’s death when Rod dies under sim­i­larly mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances.  She soon dis­cov­ers her par­ents — alco­holic mom Marge (Ronee Blakely) and belea­guered cop dad Lt. Thompson (John Saxon) — are hid­ing a ter­ri­ble secret in their past about the mys­te­ri­ous death of a child killer named Fred Kreuger (Robert Englund).  Both are too caught up in their adult world to under­stand what is going on so Nancy real­izes she must face her night ter­ror on its own terms.  Thus, the stage is set for a bat­tle fought on the bound­ary between dreams and reality.

If you want to take A Nightmare To Elm Street for being imper­fect, in can be done with ease.  Langenkamp’s per­for­mance suf­fers from stilted line read­ings and facial inex­pres­sive­ness — and Blakely’s dead-eyed, numb turn as the mother is even worse.  The teen char­ac­ter arche­types tend towards the generic and the dia­logue they are given is often annoy­ingly clunky in its attempts to seem hip.  However, the most frus­trat­ing prob­lem with the film is an end­ing that attempts to serve two mas­ters: with­out giv­ing too much away, it tries to be artsy while deliv­er­ing a point­less “gotcha” scare and it ends things on an unfor­tu­nate note of confusion.

However, these flaws seem minor in com­par­i­son to the tremen­dous vis­ceral power that A Nightmare On Elm Street has.  Craven directs his story with con­sid­er­able verve, set­ting up a plas­ti­cally per­fect vision of sub­ur­bia and off­set­ting it with sweaty, often claus­tro­pho­bic intru­sions of the teen char­ac­ters’ night­mare world.  He takes full advan­tage of the pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by the film’s many dream sequences, pack­ing them with skin-crawlingly sur­re­al­ist imagery (favorite exam­ple: a night­mare vision of Tina shrouded in a body bag, gloomily call­ing to Nancy before a cen­tipede squirms out of her mouth).  Better yet, he achieves the major­ity of his illu­sions via clev­erly con­ceived and deployed prac­ti­cal effects that give the night­mares a tan­gi­bly phys­i­cal texture.

Better yet, A Nightmare On Elm Street is the rare “dead teenager” film that has com­pas­sion for its Final Girl hero­ine and paints her as a brave, wor­thy oppo­nent for the film’s vil­lain.  Langenkamp’s per­for­mance is raw in the extreme but its fueled with a cer­tain gutsi­ness that no doubt endeared her to teens of her era, par­tic­u­larly the young ladies: Nancy is ready to fight and will­ing to do so with­out any help.  The film also sports two ace per­for­mances: Saxon man­ages to make his “dis­be­liev­ing par­ent” arche­type seem effort­lessly con­vinc­ing and Englund infuses Krueger with a Mephistophelian glee that makes him seem alive in a way that hor­ror vil­lains from this era rarely are.  He’d become a car­toon as the sequels rolled out but, in his orig­i­nal incar­na­tion,  Englund’s Freddy is the epit­ome of glee­ful menace.

To sum up, A Nightmare On Elm Street might wear its flaws on its sleeve but it also shows a depth and ambi­tion to the con­cep­tion and depic­tion of its hor­rors that is time­less.  That’s enough to secure its clas­sic sta­tus in Your Humble Reviewer’s eyes.