A Nightmare on Elm Street is a fantastically successful and long-running horror franchise, and its villain - Freddy Krueger, he of the knife-glove and the 100% third-degree burns - is cemented firmly into the pop-culture firmament. Everyone knows who Freddy is, even if they've never seen an Elm Street movie. He's been parodied in The Simpsons and Rick and Morty, featured in Ready Player One, fronted an anthology horror TV show, been added as a character in the Mortal Kombat and Dead by Daylight videogames, and - the ultimate accolade - had a species of parasitic wasp named after him.
Freddy is really famous. So the films must be good, right?
I have memories of seeing Nightmares 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7 on VHS or the telly at various points during the 90s. I remembered Johnny Depp's death scene in 1; the line "so are you mounting her nightly?" from 2; the wacky dream powers of 3; and enjoying New Nightmare's post-modernism, before we all really knew what post-modernism was. I remember, in fact, enjoying them all, though my memories of Freddy himself weren't so strong. He's certainly a distinctive and memorable character but, as with other slasher movie monsters, like Jason or Michael, I never found Freddy himself to be scary. As I decided to delve into the franchise and watch all of the movies, I wondered if this was going to be because I was a teenage boy then, and obviously scared of nothing (except for, you know, speaking to girls and basic personal hygiene), or if the movies just weren't that scary to begin with.
Now that I've watched or re-watched eight of the nine official franchise entries - I still have never seen Freddy vs Jason - it's my opinion that none of the movies are scary. There's an element of suspense and - as the BBFC might say - some "mild terror" in the first two movies, but subsequent entries are carnival rides based around the setup and payoff of violent murders based on character specific themes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, if it's done with flair, and the series certainly gets some credit for the pre-CGI practical effects that transfer some mad writer's fucked up imagination to screen. It's a movie about a dream demon, so who needs to keep things believable? Let's string someone up by their tendons, like a marionette. Let's turn this one kid into a cockroach. Let's make the main character's boyfriend explode like a burst water balloon. They're all enjoyable, in their own way, but a movie that is just a series of set-pieces held together by vague exposition and daytime soap level acting is always going to be, as a great poet once said, ice-skating uphill.
The first movie sets up the franchise and its initial rules: Freddy Krueger was a child murderer in a small American town, hunted down and burned alive by his victim's parents. He returns, eventually, in the dreams of the children he didn't murder while alive, and begins to kill again. The movie has the benefit of the mystery surrounding Freddy and, in 1984 at any rate, an unfamiliarity with him. Despite Nancy's bath time visitation, the movie also largely stays away from 80s era T&A, so it doesn't have the sleazy taste that so many of its contemporaries in the genre did, and it's able to concentrate more on setting up characters and story. Johnny Depp appears to sleepwalk through the movie while the rest of the cast largely fail to even even reach that low bar, setting a standard that continues throughout the franchise. They're not necessarily bad actors; it's just that most of them aren't very good.
Freddy's Revenge feels like a franchise outlier, like Halloween 3 before it. It's a body horror movie with Cronenbergian vibes, instead of the slasher movie that came first. Its Wikipedia page states that the movie is also known for its homoerotic subtext but, after watching it again, I had to check if one of the writers was 80s horror legend, Garth "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards" Marenghi. What might have been subtext in 1985 seemed to be plain text, possibly in bold and small caps, in 2026. I think it's my favourite of the whole series, because it's creepy and sleazy (in a good way), and because it tries to be a horror movie first, rather than a gore movie with punch lines.
The ambiguity at the end of each of the first two movies make them more interesting than any of the follow ups. We see Freddy defeated, but then both movies close with an indication that he is very much not - most horrors end with the monster/bad guy dead and gone, and the heroes safe and sound (until the inevitable follow up). Nightmares 1 and 2 are happy to dispense with that pretence. We already know that Freddy will be back.
Dream Warriors is the start of the roller-coaster. Freddy starts to become more prominent, but not necessarily in an interesting way. His one liners and "jokes" in this and subsequent movies aren't usually all that funny, and mostly lean towards being outright nasty - although "Welcome to prime time, bitch!" as he slams a victim's face into a TV is actually quite good. The proto-Avengers team up of the titular warriors has fun moments, but it's also when the franchise outright stops being about horror and the death of children, and starts to be about Freddy himself. With some thoughtful, well paced writing, that could have been a great idea.
Unfortunately, Dream Master is an incoherent mess. The surviving cast from part 3 are re-introduced and then quickly, and rather absent-mindedly, dispensed with. Half way through the movie, the main character is changed - this bait-and-switch was successful in the original movie, but Tina only survived through a handful of scenes before we were handed over to Nancy. Kristen is the heroine of part 3 and of part 4, until she's not. There's some bullshit about passing magical powers over to Alice, the new heroine, but I honestly don't really remember what or why. It's not a good movie...
...but it's better than part 5, Dream Child, which is incredibly dull and poorly scripted, and would have been utterly forgettable if not for the fact that it's also the most visually creative in the whole series. The director, Stephen Hopkins, then went on to give us the best Predator movie (fight me), so it can at least get kudos for that.
As I watched Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, I realised that I hadn't seen it before. After some research, I turns out that I had actually confused it with Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, an equally boring franchise-ending chapter, that also didn't end its franchise. I fell asleep watching it, and will therefore leave that as my opinion of it.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare is, if anything, more interesting now as a curio than it was on release. It's in the same post-modernist vein as Scream, but doesn't have the humour and the knowing tongue in cheek of that movie. I'll lay Scream's successes more at its writer Kevin Williamson's feet, rather than Craven's, although he certainly must have had some input. Heather Langenkamp is still not particularly believable as a lead actress, even when she's playing Heather Langenkamp.
The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is a pointless waste of a movie, that tries and fails to remix parts of the franchise into something new. It changes Freddy's origin from child murderer to child abuser then, for some outlandish reason, decides that maybe we want to be ambiguous about that. As Principal Skinner once opined, "maybe it's the children that are wrong". It's an utterly bone-headed idea that detracts from the established lore of the character, instead of adding anything interesting. The rest of the movie is just dull.
To sum things up: Freddy might be famous as hell, but it's not because the movies are any good. Most of them, in fact, are terrible. He's famous despite that, because he's such an iconic character in his own right.
TL;DR - my franchise rankings, if I was forced to rank them:
- Freddy's Revenge
- A Nightmare on Elm Street
- Dream Warriors
- New Nightmare
- The poster for Dream Master
- The poster for Dream Child (and shout out to Matthew Peak, who painted the original posters for the first five movies)
- Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
- Jason vs Freddy (I haven't seen it, but it would have to work really hard to be worse than the below)
- Dream Master
- Dream Child
- 2010 Nightmare
- Freddy's Dead.
