Wes Craven
A Nightmare On Elm Street

"If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming she won't wake up at all"

In 1984, a small production company that until then had been active only in the university circuit (New Line, a brand now linked to major productions like the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) brought to cinemas worldwide a film destined to burst powerfully into the collective imagination linked to horror cinematography.

The film in question is "A Nightmare On Elm Street" (in Italy released as "Nightmare: dal profondo della notte"), which also featured a very young Johnny Depp. The plot is quite simple, yet at the same time original: a mass murderer accused of killing many children (Freddy Kruger, played by former-Visitor Robert Englund) is released from prison, and the families in the neighborhood where he lived decide to take justice into their own hands by burning him alive in his home. The man, however, rejected even by hell, remains in a limbo between life and death, allowing him to enter the dreams of the young children of his executioners, who, if killed in the dream, also die in reality. The central point of the film revolves around this "parallel reality" of the dream, into which the viewer is almost unconsciously introduced by a very inspired and cohesive direction that makes the change of "location" (pardon the term) almost imperceptible at first (the protagonists seem to continue to be awake and doing what they were doing just a second before), and then, as it progresses, you realize something is amiss, an invisible and at the same time tangible presence seems to control everything, and the tension inevitably begins to rise until Freddy comes on the scene to start his macabre game.

Talking about "A Nightmare On Elm Street" requires a moment to focus on the character that more than any other contributed to the film's success, namely the maniac Freddy Kruger, a character who in this first episode (subsequently, many more will be made, some of them truly beautiful and thrilling) is not very talkative or visible; to be clearer: in later sequels, various directors will give the "razored" killer (oh, I forgot, Freddy kills with a glove equipped with razor-sharp blades) a distinct "black" humor and more verbosity. In fact, in the fourth installment of the saga, the madman in question, disguised as a voluptuous model, attacks (obviously in a dream) a young man resting on a water bed and, just as he's about to finish him, asks if at his age it still seems appropriate to wet the bed when dreaming about pretty girls. This last point, namely the fact that the murderer is seen little and speaks even less, makes everything more distressing and oppressive, as evidenced by the gruesome murder of a friend of Nancy, literally torn to pieces by invisible blades in front of her boyfriend's shocked eyes, then accused of the horrible crime and unjustly incarcerated.

In conclusion, we are faced with a well-structured and constructed horror film, where violence and tension are well balanced to keep the viewer glued to the screen. Moreover, I would like to point out, and then conclude my analysis, that the entire "Nightmare" saga has been reissued in a "digipack" format, enriched with deleted scenes in the original language, but subtitled in Italian, with some delightful behind-the-scenes footage that explains the creation of the most beautiful scenes of the various films, and their genesis, from the script to their put on film, and finally with a scale reproduction of the original movie poster.

P.S. Deserved mention must also be made for the soundtrack, which has also become a classic alongside that of "Halloween" and "The Exorcist."