Every A Nightmare On Elm Street Movie Ranked Worst To Best
1. A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
It really was a tough decision not to give Dream Warriors the top spot here, but it likewise would've been hard to put any Elm Street film at #1 other than Wes Craven's iconic original.
Craven had already put himself on the horror map with The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, but 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street took the writer/director to an entirely different level.
Spinning a very real story of people mysteriously dying in their dreams, Craven took that concept and ran with it to create the dream-stalking, child-killing monster known as Freddy Krueger. And by the end of that first film, Krueger was already thrust into the upper echelon of horror villains.
It wasn't just the introduction of Freddy that made A Nightmare on Elm Street stand out from the pack, for Heather Langenkamp's Nancy Thompson made for a great protagonist, the fictional setting of Springwood felt like an entity in and of itself in much the same way that Haddonfield and Camp Crystal Lake did, and the backstory of the parents of Elm Street partaking in vigilante justice to burn the sinister Krueger alive was fantastic - both adding a history of trauma to the town, whilst also giving Freddy motivation for his present-day acts.
Throw in some truly genius, oft-ooey gooey death sequences, and a smart, sharp script, and A Nightmare on Elm Street remains a timeless classic of the genre.