A Nightmare on Elm Streetis a 1984 American slasher film directed and written by Wes Craven , and the first film of theNightmare on Elm Streetfranchise . The film features Heather Langenkamp , John Saxon , Ronee Blakley , Amanda Wyss , Jsu Garcia , Robert Englund , and Johnny Depp in his feature film debut. Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Springwood, Ohio, the plot revolves around several teenagers who, if they fall asleep, will be killed by Fred Krueger in their dreams, thus causing their deaths in reality. The teenagers are unaware of the cause of this strange phenomenon, but their parents hold a dark secret from long ago.

Craven producedA Nightmare on Elm Streeton an estimated budget of just $1.8 million,a sum the film earned back during its first week.An instant commercial success, the film's total United States box office gross is $25.5 million.A Nightmare on Elm Streetwas met with rave critical reviews and went on to make a very significant impact on the horror genre, spawning a franchise consisting of a line of sequels, a television series , a crossover withFriday the 13th, a remake , and various other works of imitation.

The film is credited with carrying on many tropes found in low-budget horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, originating in John Carpenter 's 1978 horror filmHalloween, including the morality play that revolves around sexual promiscuity in teenagers resulting in their eventual (usually graphic) death, leading to the term "slasher film".Critics and film historians argue that the film's premise is the question of the distinction between dreams and reality, which is manifested in the film through the teenagers' dreams and their realities.Critics today praise the film's ability to transgress "the boundaries between the imaginary and real",toying with audience perceptions.

High school student Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) has a disturbing nightmare in which she is stalked through a dark boiler room by a severely burned figure with distinctive razor-sharp knives attached to the fingers on a glove on his right hand. However, just as he catches her, she wakes up screaming, only to discover four razor cuts in her nightgown identical to the cuts in her dream. The next day, Tina discovers that her friend Nancy Thompson ( Heather Langenkamp ) experienced a similar dream involving the same sinister figure, but Nancy is convinced that all is well.

That night, Tina, Nancy and Nancy's boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp) have a sleep-over to help Tina feel better, as she is still troubled by her nightmare. Tina's rebellious boyfriend, Rod Lane ( Nick Corri ), crashes the party, and he and Tina have sex in her mother's bedroom. However, Tina has another nightmare, and this time the killer catches her and brutally murders her. Rod wakes up to find cuts happening on Tina's body as she is dragged across the wall and ceiling. Rod, being the only other person in the room at the time, is accused of the murder, flees the house and is caught the next day.

Nancy then falls asleep in school and discovers a bodybag next to her containing Tina's body. Nancy chases after the body bag and is taunted and viciously stalked by the figure in the empty hallways. She finds herself in the same boiler room Tina was first attacked in and is chased and quickly cornered by the figure, who is laughing maniacally as he drags his razor blades across steel railings, making a horrible screech. As he prepares to kill her, she deliberately burns her arm on a red-hot steam pipe, which wakes her up. Nancy goes home early and discovers a burn mark on her arm from where she burned herself to wake herself up. She goes to the jail and talks to Rod, where he tells her that he saw the cuts happening on her body "all at once", before telling her that he too had a nightmare involving the mutilated figure with "knives for fingers". To her horror, Nancy realizes that Rod is innocent and leaves.

Much to the dismay of her mother Marge ( Ronee Blakley ), Nancy becomes increasingly convinced that the figure appearing in her dreams is the person who killed Tina. Nancy, as an experiment, tells Glen to watch her if she sleeps, and if she shows signs of struggle or injury, to wake her up. Glen is skeptical, but agrees. Nancy finds the figure wrapping Rod's jail cell bedsheets around his neck. Nancy wakes up, only to discover that Glen has fallen asleep. Nancy wakes him up and they rush to the police station, only to find that she is too late and that Rod has been hung. To everyone except Nancy, it appears to be a suicide .

Nancy's mother takes her to a dream therapy clinic to ensure she gets some sleep. At the clinic, Nancy has another nightmare in which her arm is badly cut and strands of her hair have lost coloring. She also discovers that she has brought the killer's battered hat out from her dream, having done so by gripping onto it at the time when she was awoken. It arouses concern, but also other feelings in Marge, who is clearly hiding a secret. At home, Marge, increasingly drunk, eventually 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 in the late 1960s, when Nancy and her friends were just young. After he was arrested, he was released from prison on a technicality due to an improperly filled out search warrant. Furious, vengeful parents tracked him down and burned him alive in his abandoned boiler room hideout. Now, it appears that he is manipulating the dreams of their children to exact his revenge on the parents who killed him from beyond the grave. However, Marge reassures Nancy that Krueger can't hurt anyone, pulling Krueger's bladed glove that she had stolen on the night that they killed Krueger from a hiding place in the furnace as proof. Despite this, Marge installs bars on all the windows and begins to deadbolt the door as "security" from Krueger.

Nancy and Glen devise a plan to catch Krueger, to stay up all night until they can enact their plan. Nancy gets a call on her disconnected phone and Krueger tells her "I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy", implying that he has killed Glen, before laughing and sticking his tongue out of the phone, which causes her to hysterically stomp on the phone. Nancy tries to head over to Glen's house, but Marge is still awake and drunk again, who tells her that she will not be leaving.

Nancy attempts to call him to help him stay awake, but Glen's parents think that Nancy has lost her mind, so Mr. Lantz takes the phone off the hook, and Glen falls asleep. Krueger gets him by pulling him into his bed, and launches him out as a gory mass of blood, which his mother walks in on. Nancy decides to enact the plan herself, by setting various booby traps around the house, and setting a timer on both her wristwatch and her alarm clock . She grabs on to Krueger as the timer counts down to zero and she is woken up by her alarm clock. Nancy has successfully pulled Krueger out of her dream into the real world, where he is human again. She runs around her house and he succumbs to the brutal traps she had set. After setting Krueger on fire and locking him in the basement, Nancy tries to escape, only to remember the bolted door and bars on the windows. As Krueger is close to escaping, Nancy screams for her father, police lieutenant Don Thompson (John Saxon) and the rest of the police to help.

They finally come over and discover fiery footsteps that lead upstairs, implying Krueger's escape, Nancy and Don witness Krueger smothering Marge with his flaming body, and disappearing to leave her corpse to sink into the bed. After sending her father away, Nancy tricks Krueger into thinking that she thought that he was finally dead. However, she faces Krueger on her own and succeeds in destroying him by turning her back on him, telling him that she is no longer afraid of him, therefore draining him of all energy.

The scene changes to the next morning as Nancy gets in a car with Glen, Tina and Rod, who are alive and well again, on their way to school. Marge tells Nancy that she plans on giving up drinking as Nancy tells her that she "slept well". Krueger possesses Glen's car just as she gets in. While the car drives away with Nancy screaming for her mother, Marge is pulled through the door window by Krueger's bladed hand, implying that Krueger has tricked Nancy, and that he is still alive.