Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984
Directed by Wes Craven
I was surprised that this movie had the power to scare me in such a way that made my skin crawl. Freddie Kruger is a horrible, scar ridden child abuser that was captured by parents and burnt for his crimes. He now taunts the same parents children in their dreams, but it isn’t just a dream, the children wake up bleeding or with scars or even worse they don’t wake up at all.
I felt a different type of fear when watching this movie, it was the fear of Freddie capturing his victims and assaulting them rather than killing them. The scraping of his metal fingernails indicates that something bad is about to happen and the spectator feels both empathy and fear for the children involved. At the end of the film the spectator is comforted by the fact that Freddie has been banished and the children are now free to live their life and sleep in comfort. However, when the main victim enters a friend’s car she realises that Freddie is back and that he cannot be killed as she bangs on the car window and screams for help.
Written by Craven, a former English teacher, the film's premise is the question of where the line between dreams and reality lies. The villain, Freddy Krueger, thus exists in the "dream world" yet can kill in the "real world".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street
