1980s Slasher On Netflix Holds Up Better Than Most Horror Movies Decades Old

I distinctly remember the first time I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street because I watched it while staying over a friend’s house on Saturday, October 31, 1998, when I was 10 years old. That year I, like many of my grade-school friends, dressed as Ghostface from the Scream franchise while trick-or-treating. Hopped up on Kit-Kat bars and Mountain Dew, my friends and I were gearing up to watch a horror triple feature starting with Halloween, rolling straight into Friday the 13th, and concluding with A Nightmare on Elm Street.

We made it through the first two movies without issue because we had all seen the censored versions on TV and knew all of the beats by then. But as much as Halloween and Friday the 13th still hold up to this day, they’re clearly dated because they’re very much a product of their times. As the witching hour approached, we were in the height of our respective sugar highs, not knowing we were about to crash, and we popped A Nightmare on Elm Street into the VCR.

By now, we all know the story behind A Nightmare on Elm Street. A group of teenagers are haunted by the ghost of a child-killer named Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) who was burned to death by the parents of his many victims. Seeking revenge, Freddy’s disfigured ghost is now going after Tina (Amanda Wyss), Nancy (Heather Lagenkamp), Glen (Johnny Depp), Rod (Nick Corri), and Marge in the one place their parents can’t protect them: their dreams. As the film ramps up in intensity, so do the nightmare sequences, which get increasingly difficult to discern from each character’s waking life as they fall into delirious states due to a profound lack of sleep.

Needless to say, none of us were prepared for what we were about to witness, and A Nightmare on Elm Street successfully terrified us into not getting a wink of sleep that fateful evening. It wasn’t the violence, or even Freddy’s terrifying burnt face and knife gloves that sealed the deal, however, but rather the power he had over his suspects as he eliminated them while occupying their dreams. Don’t get me wrong, the excessive gore didn’t help, but Wes Craven’s ability to blur the line between the conscious and subconscious realms is what truly made this film terrifying for a young audience.

It didn’t take me long to realize that A Nightmare on Elm Street was an entirely different kind of slasher film. When Tina has her fatal run-in with Freddy and gets violently tossed around in her bedroom before dropping to the floor covered in blood, I already knew that my friends and I were already suffering from renter’s remorse. If you know anything about slashers, they build up in intensity, and we were already preparing to call it quits before we even got halfway through the first act.

But against our better judgment, we persevered and watched the entire movie.

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I can honestly say that A Nightmare on Elm Street (available to stream on Netflix) had such an effect on me that I didn’t watch it for years after that initial viewing (though it’s still one of my favorites). If the late Wes Craven’s goal was to not make any money on the home-viewing front because nobody in their right mind would want to check the title out again, then he’d be happy to know that A Nightmare on Elm Street scared the absolute crap out of a bunch of preteens 14 years after its initial release.