The first time I saw Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, I was twelve years old, flipping through the wasteland of late night television and saddened that I was not able to go trick-or-treating with my friends during a dull Halloween.

Then I stumbled onto an older-looking movie with an eerie, dream-like tone, with a young woman running through a dark, seedy boiler-room. I wasn’t sure what she was running from but she was running and I cared. I heard the clanging of four sharpened razors attached to the hand of a large, frightening figure. He attacked her.

Then she awoke. The dream was over. Tina Grey (Amanda Wyss) was ok. Then she looks upon her nightgown to find four slash marks on it. The dream was over but the legend of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was born.

Tina, frightened by her dream asked her friends Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and Glen (Johnny Depp of Miramar, Florida in his feature film debut) to sleep over.

Tina’s boyfriend Rob (Nick Corri) soon arrives at the party to sleep with his girlfriend, only to watch her get slaughtered and picked apart and thrown onto the ceiling like a plush doll.

Everyone knows the tale of Freddy Krueger some 25 years after the release of the 1984 classic. He’s the child murderer who made it out of prison on a technicality but was incinerated in a boiler by the town’s people. He’s come to take revenge on their children by hunting for them in a place where their parents cannot protect them: their dreams.

Dreams and reality. The great discussion in art and life raging from thinkers like Freud to artists like Dali or even moviemakers such as Federico Fellini. Craven’s film takes it all to a frightening conclusion as Nancy and Glen struggle to survive as the dreams become more and more real.

All this coupled by the eerie, surreal imagery of slaughter in small town America, captured by the keen eye of cinematographer Jacques Haitkin; slow motion and over saturation during small town scenes with mist and shadow play during dream sequences juxtaposed with extreme violence and Charles Bernstein’s childlike, subversive score.

Craven’s staging his importance to the horror genre along with his creation of a villain who really is a threat, because he exists in an area unreachable to anyone. It is the film of a director who is being allowed to really show his vision of what horror is.

Craven’s writing is not perfect. Certain dialogue falls flat, and how many times can the teen couple mid-coitus meet a violent end? Nancy is a typical teenager and so is Glen, and so the problem of stereotyping is there as in many movies.

But it is Freddy’s movie. It’s not enough to be able to lurk and hide in dreams; you’ve got to bring real power and imposition to the role, which Englund does with such mastery. It is fair to say that this is an iconic role.

The kids in this movie do fine and serve their purpose; they die or try to escape dying and keep us watching the movie.

The star is of course Freddy, whose costume will be worn for countless Halloweens. In fact, I think I’ve chosen my costume for this year.

Verdict: Recommended.

“Is It Worth It?” is a weekly feature rating the relative quality of films screened by SPC. A Nightmare on Elm Street will be shown in GC 140 on Oct. 30 at 5 and 8 p.m.