40 years ago, A Nightmare On Elm Street gave us the greatest kill in '80s horror

Wes Craven was, among his many other gifts as a filmmaker and horror auteur, a master tone-setter. From Casey’s death at the beginning of Scream to the panic-laden violence that permeates The Hills Have Eyes, he knew how to let his audience know exactly the kind of film he was making, and exactly how he wanted to scare them. With A Nightmare On Elm Street, it all starts with a glove.

The opening frames of Craven’s slasher-fantasy breakthrough, released 40 years ago this month, are devoted to Freddy Krueger crafting his signature weapon, a knife-tipped gauntlet perfect for snatching and slashing at his victims, in the dingy confines of a boiler room. At a time when most slashers were relegated to single blades (be they knife, ax, or chainsaw), Craven introduced us right away to the idea that his slasher would be different. His weapon would be an extension of his body, a direct connection to his intimate, reality-shifting evil. It’s a hell of a way to set the tone, but Craven wasn’t done. 

It starts with the glove, and then it builds, in less than 15 minutes, to the movie’s first kill, a death scene so inventive and evocative that it remains the single best kill scene in the entire vast landscape of 1980s horror cinema.

To understand why Craven’s opening Nightmare On Elm Street kill is so impactful, we first have to remember what mainstream horror cinema was like at the time it arrived. By 1984, the slasher genre was well-codified thanks to the success of Halloween in 1978 and the boom of imitators launched by Friday The 13th in 1980. Theatrical audiences understood the conventions of these stories, the way in which masked killers would methodically hack through unsuspecting youths. And, thanks to advancements in practical effects technology, they knew to expect gore. Nightmare On Elm Street came out, after all, two years after The Thing gave us an alien shapeshifter making spidery beasts out of human limbs, and just months after Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter impaled Jason Voorhees’ malformed head, slowly sliding down the blade of his own machete.

But The Thing was science, and Friday The 13th had not yet established the “Zombie Jason” conceit of its later films, so you could argue that Nightmare‘s eventual blending of the supernatural and the natural was key to its effectiveness. But even that’s not the whole story. Supernatural horror was well-established, and even supernatural slashers had arrived through films like Evilspeak. It wasn’t just that Craven was mixing the slasher with the supernatural. It was how he mixed them, which brings us back to that first kill.

The opening minutes of A Nightmare On Elm Street present a quartet of ordinary American teenagers: Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp), and Tina (Amanda Wyss) and her boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri). Like so many typical American teenagers, they’ve arranged to spend the night alone, with no parental supervision (Tina’s family is out of town), placing them in clear slasher-victim territory. Throw in Heather’s unwillingness to sleep with Glen (while Tina is more than happy to sleep with Rod), and the girls’ shared anxiety over uncannily similar dreams they’ve had, and it all adds up. If you went into the movie theater in 1984 with any knowledge of slasher films, you knew what to expect next.

The genius of Wes Craven is that you got it. The kill sequence begins with all the teens asleep, and kicks to life as Tina hears noises from outside the bedroom window. It’s nothing supernatural, just a few taps against the glass, the kind a garden-variety killer might make. Tina and Nancy have already established that they’re dreaming about the same man—with knives on his fingers and a dirty red-and-green sweater—but maybe the dreams are just precognitive flashes of what’s about to happen in the real world. 

As Tina goes outside to investigate, we get more of the same. She’s not in a dream world. She’s in the alley behind her house, while Nancy seems to be the one having strange dreams inside, as a figure pushes through the wall above her bed. Tina’s been lured out in the same way that Annie Brackett was lured out in Halloween. It all makes sense. We know the rules. We know them so well that, even when Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, in the iconic makeup and fedora) finally appears in the alley with his arms stretched like a Seussian nightmare, we can easily assume that he’s a supernatural being walking through a mundane landscape. A monster in the alley who only comes out at night.

Tina runs, Freddy gives chase, and it’s here that A Nightmare On Elm Street begins the single greatest kill in any 1980s horror film, one that evolves from clever to brilliant. When Freddy catches Tina, the point-of-view of the kill immediately shifts to Rod, who wakes to find Tina screaming under the covers of the bed. Confused and panicked, he pulls the blanket free, and watches in horror as slits open in Tina’s chest, as blood wells, as she magically floats up above the mattress. In moments, thanks to the same cinematic tricks that allowed Fred Astaire to dance upon a ceiling, she’s high above Rod, shrieking in pain, thrashing around the ceiling of the room as the walls are painted with her blood. It’s where she stays, pleading for her life, until she finally crashes down to the mattress again, sending gouts of crimson into Rod’s face.

The premise of A Nightmare On Elm Street has permeated the culture, even for people who’ve never so much as glimpsed a frame of the original film. Freddy Krueger’s ability to kill people in their dreams is famous, but what’s often less-discussed about the way Craven wields that concept is how it extends into the real world. A slasher who can kill you in your dreams is frightening enough, and the first kill in Nightmare would still work even if Craven had only shown us Tina thrashing in bed while Freddy ripped her apart in the dream world. The idea that something that insidious and mysterious could invade our consciousness when we are at our most vulnerable, and leave our loved ones waking in baffled despair, is terrifying. But Craven takes it further. 

In every major slasher film that came before this one, audiences grew used to killers who obeyed the rules of reality. Any death, no matter how gruesome or how tragic, came through mechanisms that we could all easily grasp. Jason stabs you, Leatherface carves you up, Michael Myers strangles you with a telephone cord. These things are frightening, and unsettling, but they happen within clear parameters. With Freddy, and Tina’s death scene, Craven sets out the same clear parameters, then upends them not once, but twice. Tina’s not just dying in a dream. She’s suffering incomprehensibly on two planes of existence at the same time, thrashing and bleeding in both her dream and in reality. This is not a supernatural being that can kill you in the real world, and it’s not a supernatural being that can only harm your unconsciousness while you’re sleeping. It’s both, and that’s drilled into our heads by Craven’s brilliant decision to unfold the climax of the kill from Rod’s point of view. Tina does not die in isolation. She dies, screaming and pleading, in full view of her friends, upending their realities at the same time her own reality is extinguished. It’s a masterstroke, and it buys Craven all of the reality-manipulating elements he needs for the climax of the film later, when Nancy realizes she can drag Freddy into her reality and manipulate his perception the same way he’s manipulated hers.

A Nightmare On Elm Street remains a landmark of horror cinema for many reasons, from Englund’s incredible, icon-solidifying performance to its impact on New Line Cinema to, yes, its incredible final girl in Langenkamp. The breadth of its impact all reverberates from that opening kill, a genre-tweaking tone-setter for the ages, and one whose influence can still be felt in horror cinema today.