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Except, of course, they didn't. Smash cut to an unspecified number of years later, after some of those parents have replaced their old kids with new, unmurdered ones. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) Glen (Johnny Depp), Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Rod (Nick Corri, now known as Jsu Garcia) are two teenage couples who are also BFF's. They've also all been suffering from severe nightmares involving a knife-wielding maniac in a striped sweater and battered Fedora. One night, the gang crashes at Tina's to offer moral support to their now insomniac friend. That night, they experience Freddy's revenge firsthand, setting in motion a series of events that hopscotch the line between dreams and reality.

And that’s really the best part of the film. Somehow, Freddy exists in the ether somewhere, able to inhabit the dreams of his victims (it’s a leap of faith, no explanation is given) and control both the environment, as well as their perception of it. In other words, Freddy is in your nightmares, waiting to murder you in the most horrifying and ironic way possible. And if you die in the dream, you die in real life. Once the kids realize this, they take countermeasures, which consist of basically not sleeping for days at a time. The great thing about that is when you’re sleep deprived, you tend to doze off without realizing it - which means that at any time you could find yourself in Freddy’s world without knowing you’ve fallen asleep.

The movie toys with this skewered perception to some extent, and when it works, it’s pretty effective. Unfortunately, most of the time it’s pretty clear when a character has fallen asleep, so for the viewer, the element of surprise is lost. One of the best assets a story like this could possibly have is the fact that we don’t always know when the characters are asleep or awake, but unfortunately, this isn’t utilized often enough. Still, watching the characters try to make sense of their situation and master the “rules” of Freddy’s universe and turn the tables on him is interesting. In that regard, Elm Street still does a great job of taking the standard issue “slasher” formula and breaking new ground with it.

That said, a couple of things kind of bothered me.

Like most slasher villains, Freddy seems to favor killing off the promiscuous kids first, and he doesn’t seem to have a problem doing it in sexually aggressive ways, as well. This leads me to wonder - was Freddy just a child “killer” or was there more to it than that? And if there was, I can’t help but recall that these are supposed to be high school kids so...yuck? What’s more interesting though, is the fact that each of the children in this story come from highly dysfunctional homes, where either the adults are absentee, or the parent-child dynamic is reversed. Tina’s mother is a hard drinking gambler, Rod and Glen don’t seem to have parents at all, and Nancy’s father (John Saxon, sadly not punching anyone) is obsessed with his job as the town’s stereotypically jaded police chief.

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