A group of teenagers all suffer from the same nightmares in which they are chased by a scarred maniac in a red and green striped jumper, wearing a battered hat and having a glove with knives extending from the fingers. When the students start to die one by one in bizarre ways, one of the girls, Nancy Thompson, discovers the killer's identity, a school caretaker called Freddy Kruger who was killed years before when the parents of the children he had molested in his boiler room set fire to the place, resulting in Kruger's death. Now he is returning in their children's dreams to get revenge, and the only way to avoid his wrath is not to fall asleep....
Review:
A truly terrifying pic from director Wes Craven, with some inspired plot twists and hallucinatory scenes of horror and Freddy Kruger's scream world. Kruger soon became one of the eternal icons of horror movies mostly due to Robert Englund's strong, cackling performance under all the latex, and effective photography from Jacques Haitkin. Interestingly some of the dialogue was re-looped just days before release when a child molestation racket in a California school was exposed, demanding a rapid rewrite of small portions of the script. Try to spot future star Johnny Depp in an early role. A truly classic frightener, followed by six sequels of varying effectiveness.
