A Nightmare on Elm Street (Infinifilm Edition)
Tagline: If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming, she won’t wake up at all
Released: 1984
Starring Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Ronee Blakley, Amanda Wyss, and Robert Englund
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Wes Craven
Format: DVD
Distributed by New Line Cinema
DVD Release Date: September 26, 2006
Features:
Remastered Picture – Restored from the original film negative
Dolby Digital 5.1-EX Surround sound and DTS-ES 6.1 surround sound
All-Access Pass:
“Never Sleep Again” – The making of A Nightmare on Elm Street
Beyond the Movie:
“The House That Freddy Built: The Legacy of New Line Horror”
“Night Terrors: The Origin of Wes Craven’s Nightmares”
Infinifilm Interactive Features:
Pop-up prompts, Nightmare Fact Track and video clips
Exclusive Infinifilm ROM content
Additional Features:
Feature length commentary with Wes Craven, Bob Shaye (Producer/New Line Founder), Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Ronee Blakley, Sara Risher (New Line Co-Producer)
Archived audio commentary with Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin
Alternative Endings
Trivia Challenge
Theatrical Trailer
Premise: Dig your claws into the chilling masterpiece that spawned the greatest horror franchise in film history – now remastered and featuring hours of new Infinifilm extras. Starring Robert Englund as infamous horror icon Freddy Krueger, this “insomnia-inducing” (Kirk Ellis, The Hollywood Reporter) original from director Wes Craven “goes straight to the heart of terror” (Jim Emerson, Seattle Times).
When her best friend Tina is brutally murdered, teenager Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) suspects the killer isn’t Tina’s boyfriend but rather a much more horrifying figure from her dreams. Convinced that this vicious murderer is stalking her friends and killing them as they sleep, Nancy enters a desperate race against time to bring him out of dream world and stop the bloodbath… before she falls asleep and becomes his next victim!
Plot Breakdown (spoilers): Fifteen-year-old girl Tina Grey (Amanda Wyss) has a disturbing nightmare in which she is being stalked through a dark boiler room by a figure with distinctive razor-sharp knives for fingers on his right hand. Just as he catches her however, she wakes up screaming, only to discover four razor cuts in her nightdress identical to the cuts in her dream. The next day, she finds out that her friend Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) experienced the same dream. That night, Tina, Nancy and Nancy’s boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) have a sleep-over to make a distraught Tina feel better. Tina’s rebellious boyfriend, Rod Lane, crashes the party and goes to bed with Tina in her mother’s bedroom. Later that night, Tina has another nightmare, and this time the killer catches her and brutally murders her. Rod wakes up to find Tina being cut open by invisible knives and then dragged across the ceiling. Rod, being the only other person in the room at the time, is suspected of the killing, and is arrested the next day by Nancy’s father Donald Thompson (John Saxon), a police lieutenant.
Later, Nancy has three sadistically violent nightmares where she is viciously stalked, then attacked by the same terrifying figure that attacked Tina. These nightmares lead her to talk to Rod in prison, who tells her what he saw in Tina’s mother’s bedroom. Much to the dismay of her mother Marge (Ronee Blakley), Nancy becomes increasingly convinced that the figure appearing in her dreams is the same person who killed Tina. After having a prophetic dream in which the horrific figure visits Rod in jail, Nancy, and a skeptical Glen, rush to the police station in the middle of the night to check on him, only to find that he’s been strangled by his own bed sheets. To everyone except Nancy, it appears to be a suicide.
In an effort to help her daughter, Nancy’s mother takes her to a dream therapy clinic to ensure she gets some sleep. Once again, she has a horrendous nightmare. This time, her arm is badly cut, but she finds that she has brought something out from her dream: the killer’s battered hat. It arouses concern, but also other feelings in Nancy’s mother, who is clearly hiding a secret. Eventually, Marge, increasingly drink-sodden, reveals to Nancy that the owner of the hat, and the killer, was a man named Fred Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer who killed at least twenty children over a decade earlier. Furious, vengeful parents burned him alive in his boiler room hideout when he was released from prison on a technicality. Now, it appears he is manipulating the dreams of their children to exact his revenge from beyond the grave. Nancy’s mother reassures her that Krueger can’t hurt anyone, pulling Krueger’s knife-fingered glove from a hiding place in the furnace, reinforcing this supposed fact.
After days of not sleeping, Nancy devises a plan with Glen to catch Krueger. However, Glen succumbs to sleep and is viciously killed by being sucked into his bed and shot back up in a fountain of blood. Later that same night, Nancy, convinced she can carry Krueger out of her nightmare like she did the hat, sets various booby traps throughout her house, all while her mother sleeps from her consistent drinking. When ready, Nancy falls asleep and confronts Krueger, successfully holding onto him as she awakens. Nancy is then left alone with Freddy after pulling him into the real world. She runs through her house and forces him into the booby traps she had set earlier, effectively battering the supernatural killer. After setting Freddy on fire, Nancy locks him in the basement, and finally gets her skeptical father and the police to help. When arriving on the scene, they find Freddy has escaped and follow his fiery footsteps that lead upstairs. As Nancy and her father find the footsteps’ endpoint, they witness Freddy smothering Marge with his flaming body, disappearing to leave her corpse to sink into the bed and fade away. After sending her father out of the room, Nancy turns her back on the horrific scene and calls to Krueger, knowing he’s still there and that she is still dreaming. Freddy rises back up from the bed and threatens to kill her. In response, Nancy faces down Krueger and turns her back on him, draining him of all energy and destroying him. She then leaves her mother’s bedroom and appears outside her house, unaffected from the events of the last few weeks. Marge soon joins her daughter at the front door and sends her off to school with her seemingly alive friends, who had just driven up in Glen’s car. When Nancy gets into the car, the doors lock, trapping her inside. Freddy possesses Glen’s car and makes him and the gang drive away, with Nancy screaming for help at her indifferent mother. As Marge watches the car drive off, Freddy’s gloved hand bursts through the door’s window and pulls her through.
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