Nightmare on Elm Street is a film that -unlike Friday the 13th- received both good reviews from critics and a great turnout at the box office. The movie (and sequels) center around the character of Freddy Krueger, a serial killer who had murdered at least twenty children and was sent to prison. He was however, released on a technicality and subsequently hunted down by the angry and upset parents of the children whose lives he had taken. They trapped him in a boiler room and burned him alive. In the film he is exacting revenge on those parents by terrorizing their remaining children with nightmares.

Freddy Krueger

A girl named Tina is the first to have these nightmares. In her dream she is being followed through a boiler room by a man with knives attached to his fingers, he claws her just before she wakes up. After she wakes though, she realizes that the place where he clawed her is bleeding. The following day when talking to her friend she realizes that this other girl had a dream very similar to her own. The two girls and their boyfriends spend the night in the same place, but while upstairs one couple experiences something terrible. The girl is caught by Freddy in her dream and killed, while in reality the boy watches as girlfriend is cut open with invisible knives and then dragged up and across the ceiling never seeing the guy in a Freddy Krueger costume. He is sent to prison for the assumed murder of the girl.

As the movie progresses the line between dreams and reality gets even harder to find, and characters one by one are killed. Eventually the remaining girl manages to drag Freddy from the dream world that he resides in, our to the real world and attempts to do away with him.

If everything that happened to you in your dreams had repercussions on your life, would you ever want to sleep again?

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow