

She then deliberately burns her arm on a pipe. At school, Nancy falls asleep in class and dreams that the man chases her to the boiler room where she is cornered. The next day, Nancy's policeman father, Don Thompson, arrests Rod despite his pleas of innocence. Rod is awakened by Tina's thrashing and sees her dragged and fatally slashed by an unseen force, forcing him to flee as Nancy and Glen awaken to find Tina bloodied and dead. When Tina falls asleep, she dreams of the disfigured man chasing her. Tina's boyfriend, Rod Lane, interrupts their sleepover. The two stay at Tina's house when Tina's mother goes out of town, where she discovers that Nancy also had a nightmare about the disfigured man. The following morning, Tina's best friend Nancy Thompson and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen Lantz, console her, revealing they each also had a nightmare the previous night. Her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. Teenager Tina Gray awakens from a terrifying nightmare wherein a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove attacks her in a boiler room. In 2021, A Nightmare on Elm Street was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985). Later critics praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real", toying with audience perceptions. Critics and film historians state that the film's premise is the struggle to define the distinction between dreams and reality, manifested by the lives and dreams of the teens in the film. The film includes a morality play where sexually promiscuous teenagers are killed. The film is credited with using many of the tropes found in the low-budget horror films of the 1970s and 1980s that originated with the John Carpenter-directed Halloween (1978). Aside from Stunts, Polyester, and Alone in the Dark, it was one of the first films produced by New Line Cinema, who by that point mostly distributed films, leading the company to become a successful mini-major film studio and earning it the nickname "The House that Freddy Built".

It was met with rave critical reviews and is considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, spawning a franchise consisting of six sequels, a television series, a crossover with Friday the 13th, various other merchandise, and a remake of the same name. The film was released on November 9, 1984, and grossed $57 million worldwide. Ĭraven filmed A Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of $1.1 million. The film's plot concerns a group of teenagers who are targeted by Krueger, an undead former child killer who can murder people through their dreams, as retribution against their parents who burned him alive. It is the first installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, and Johnny Depp in his film debut.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American supernatural slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven and produced by Robert Shaye.
