10 Best Slasher Films Of All Time
6. A Nightmare On Elm Street
By 1984, the slasher genre seemed played out until Wes Craven added a supernatural element and introduced Freddy Krueger, a horror villain just begging to given his own franchise. Not only did his name bring to mind Krug from The Last House On The Left, but Craven would throw in more of the is-it-a-dream-or-isn’t-it sequences he’d first used in that movie.
Freddy is perhaps the best known horror movie villain of the 1980s, so famous that he appeared in music videos and on lunchboxes, and seemed to be on the cover of Fangoria every other month whether he had a movie out or not. In his debut, though, he isn’t much of a punster and remains mostly in the shadows, stalking a bunch of teenagers (including Johnny Depp) in their dreams before slashing them to ribbons.
For a movie from the MTV-obsessed, short attention span 80s, the level of invention shown here is remarkable, and the movie boosted the careers of Craven and Robert Englund, the latter of whom became a sort-of modern day Boris Karloff. It’s too bad that New Line Cinema rushed the sequels, cranking one out nearly every year until 1990, by which time the genre had once again been run into the ground.