The Nightmare on Elm Street Movies Are Wonderful, Flawed, and Endlessly Rewatchable
Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street movies rank among the most iconic horror films. They say more than you’d think about the decades when they were made, starting with the cultural anxieties of the Reagan era.
1985 release poster for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. (Universal History Archive / UIG via Getty images)
In 2003, I was driving home from the movie theater with my younger brother, and I was pulled over for speeding. The cop asked where we were coming from and then what we’d seen. When I told him we were getting back from Freddy vs. Jason, his demeanor changed. The ticket he’d about to give me was forgotten. He asked me “who won,” and we spent several minutes talking about it before he let us go.
Fans had been awaiting the crossover battle between the dream-haunting killer at the heart of the Nightmare on Elm Street films and the hockey mask–wearing star of the Friday the 13 films for a very long time by 2003. It was an event.
It was also, unmistakably, a Freddy movie that featured Jason rather than the other way around. To some extent, that’s just a natural product of combining the silent implacable force behind the hockey mask and the wisecracking Freddy Krueger. Jason is creepy because of the absence of personality; Freddy is personality.
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