Why You’re Wrong About Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
INTRODUCTION
Evil as metaphysical opposition, not metaphorical repression.
Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is one of those films that has been talked nearly to death—and often misunderstood in the process. Most discussions reduce it to either a Freudian parable about sexual repression or a meditation on inherited guilt. Both readings flatten the movie’s complexity. They miss how Craven constructed a story where evil functions as a real, active presence, and how the film asks whether ordinary people can resist it without losing themselves in fear or cynicism.
From the start, Elm Street situates us inside the fragility of American suburban order. The fences, clean sidewalks, and disciplined parents form a landscape of control, but something is already rotting underneath. The nightmares that haunt Nancy Thompson and her friends are not repressed desires clawing back to the surface; they are incursions from outside. The film’s logic never treats Freddy Krueger as a symbol of their hidden libido. He is exactly what the movie says he is—a murderer whose evil refuses to die.
The Parents Were Not Wrong—They Were Human
The Freudian interpretation collapses under the evidence of the film itself, and nowhere is this clearer than in the portrayal of the parents. Early in the film, Nancy’s mother quietly admits, “He was released… because of some papers not signed right.” That line tells the audience exactly what happened: Krueger’s escape wasn’t moral ambiguity about his guilt and evil nature—it was a legal failure. The camera lingers on her drink and trembling hands; guilt here for the mother is having succumbed to moral fatigue, not wrongdoing. The burning of Krueger, revealed through her confession, is framed not as mob hysteria but as grim necessity in the struggle against known and identifiable tremendous evil. The adults stepped in because justice collapsed, but they failed to hold fast to their moral duty, which was only amplified when they took the law into their own hands. And, of course, we may not all agree that taking the law into our own hands is the morally correct action in an absolute sense, but few, if any, of us would disagree that something would have needed to be done to stop Krueger and protect the innocent children. So, it becomes far less clear-cut regarding their vigilantism than one might think should one lean more toward the absolute legal authority to resolve the situation (and I might argue that the legal authority was forfeited once it failed by bureaucracy).
When the father dismisses Nancy’s warnings—“We’re in control of this situation, sweetheart”—the irony is deliberate. The evidence, though, is textual: those who try to hide evil rather than confront it literally bring it into their homes (which is plain since Nancy’s parents physically did bring back an artifact and remnant of Krueger and literally did hide it in their home). His very denial is what invites the nightmare back (and that same sentiment of “control” is very likely the key to understanding just why they chose to retain Freddy’s knife-glove after executing him). The parents are not tyrants guarding prudish values; they are broken people who once faced horror directly and then buried it. They drink, lie, and deny because they cannot reconcile their moral compromise with their comfortable suburban lives—which is no doubt an intentional storytelling mechanism that Craven uses to (a) reflect the true horrors of the Elm Street reality back to the audience and so cause introspection and dread, and (b) underscore the forthcoming virtuous overcoming Nancy later achieves in confrontation with Krueger. Their failure is not that they repressed their instincts—it’s that they numbed their conscience and stopped safeguarding the innocents. Alcohol and denial are symptoms of personal erosion, not excessive restraint.
The guilt-reading fares no better. Some argue that Freddy represents the return of the town’s collective sin, a monstrous echo of vigilantism. And you may see what I just laid out as support for that perspective. But the movie does not depict the parents’ earlier act—killing Krueger—as moral collapse, which would be key to the guilt-reading as the true reading of the film. Rather, the evidence and arguments I provide underscore the new reading I am suggesting here (which shares some lines with the guilt-reading, but which end beyond where the guilt-reading itself stops). Indeed, the story frames it as the desperate justice of people who watched the law fail. What destroys them is not the act itself but their inability to continue standing for the good afterward. They won once, but they did not persevere. The evil they defeated creeps back through neglect, not cosmic retribution. But it’s not that they are guilty per se. Rather, they are moral failures in the end because they forfeit their duty, and, while yes, that leads to guilt, such a reading would stop only at the parents and so fail to account for the rest of the film, which clearly revolves around Nancy as the successor to her parents.
Nancy’s Defiance Is Moral Renewal, Not Rebellion
Nancy’s character contradicts the Freudian reading completely. She isn’t tormented by forbidden desire or shame. Her defining traits are vigilance, restraint, and courage. The movie even stresses her moral steadiness: she refuses Glenn’s advances, she fights through terror rather than surrendering to it, and she literally wins by mastering self-control—by staying awake. If Elm Street were a tale of repression and sexual awakening, that structure would make no sense. The “virtue equals survival” logic at the center of the narrative would be inverted. This is especially true when one notices exactly how those who took the moral gravity of, for example, sexuality too lightly end up at the hands (or should I say blades?) of Krueger.
Moreover, Nancy’s dialogue reinforces that her rebellion is principled rather than anti-authoritarian. “I’m into survival,” she says after being mocked for not sleeping. Later, she insists, “I’m going to get him. I’m going to bring him out.” These are not lines of panic but of vocation—statements of duty. Contrast her again with her friends. Glen laughs off her warnings; Tina jokes about nightmares and satisfies her lust or desire until it’s too late. Rod, Tina’s boyfriend, is utterly incapable of saving Tina even though he is present for the entire event of her murder. Later, he himself is murdered. Their deaths are, at best, per the film’s own logic, the wages of moral inattention. Nancy’s discipline—her refusal to drink, to indulge, to surrender to lust or despair—is precisely what keeps her alive, and not just alive, but leads her ultimately to victory. The text underlines this: she sets traps, plans methodically, and faces Krueger alone, declaring, “I take back every bit of energy I gave you.” That line is theological. She is revoking consent to fear, reclaiming dominion. It’s the moral inversion of temptation itself.
Craven also uses the adult characters to refute the notion that repression itself is the root of evil. The parents’ weakness is denial; Nancy’s strength is vigilance. Her rebellion is not youthful arrogance—it’s moral renewal. She rejects the paralysis of her parents’ fear, confronts evil directly, and does so without unwarranted anger or corruption. When she finally turns her back on Krueger—refusing to grant him power through fear—she restores the moral order her parents lost.
The Ending Doesn’t Undermine the Story—It Deepens It
Craven said in interviews that his intended ending had Nancy walk away into sunlight, Krueger gone, peace restored. The studio demanded the twist: the convertible with its red-and-green top, the mother pulled through the door. Yet even within that imposed scene, evidence supports the same moral logic. Nancy’s calm voice—“You’re nothing.”—precedes it. She did win. What follows is cyclical imagery, not contradiction: the dream resets because the world resets. This is all later reinforced in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and, to some extent, hinted at in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge via Nancy’s journal serving as a beacon for Jesse and Lisa.
Cinematically, Craven tips his hand—the bright morning light, the absence of smoke, the lull before the car door slams. Evil reasserts itself because time turns, not because Nancy failed. As Craven later said, “I wanted it to end with her triumphing through her faith in herself.” The loop is therefore not negation but warning: the fight is never finally over for temporal beings. Whether you read the closing sequence as literal or symbolic, it underlines the cyclical nature of the struggle. Evil, while not eternal, temporally recurs because people forget, or at least tire of resisting it. The point isn’t that Nancy failed; it’s that the world does, and so a new generation will always need to step up to renew the resistance (until, of course, the ultimately temporal evil is obliterated and the cycle finally ended). The dream always returns when wakefulness fades.
The Generational Covenant
When Dream Warriors opens, Nancy’s first words after seeing Krueger’s handiwork are, “He’s back.” Her shock proves that he was gone. The sequel becomes textual confirmation of the moral cycle. Now a counselor, Nancy tells Kristen, “What you have to understand is that when you’re in the dream, you have some power.” The passing of wisdom—the handing of the torch—is literal. She has become what her parents were meant to be: a protector who teaches others how to stand.
This, again, matches the pattern: righteousness must be renewed, not remembered. The evidence lies not only in dialogue but in structure—Craven closes Elm Street with Nancy awakening; Dream Warriors begins with her teaching others how to awaken. Continuity of conscience is the point. Each generation must confront the same darkness anew.
Form as Moral Argument
Craven reinforces this theme through form as well as story. The film’s rhythm alternates between the domestic and the dreamlike, grounding its supernatural moments in the logic of conscience and reality. The score hums with nursery-rhyme eeriness—“One, two, Freddy’s coming for you”—an echo of innocence tainted by experience. The visuals bleed between waking life and nightmare with deliberate ambiguity, reminding us that the border between safety and danger depends on vigilance, not comfort.
Craven’s film remains unsettling because it treats evil as temporally continuous, not episodic (and not eternal since we see evil overcome time-and-again). Freddy Krueger is not a metaphor for teenage lust or suburban guilt. He’s an assertion that evil, once embodied, can outlast those who confront it because those of us who confront it are also vulnerable and temporal. That idea gives A Nightmare on Elm Street its rare power: it’s a horror film where the monster doesn’t explain the people—the people explain the monster, but where the monster is not truly unconquerable or eternal. And we see that confirmed in how the sheer act of standing-up, fighting, and staying virtuous (as best as one can anyway) leads to victory over the present evil.
Conclusion: The True Nightmare
Every frame of A Nightmare on Elm Street insists that evil persists where vigilance fails. The script, the performances, and even Craven’s production notes align on this truth. The parents once did right in at least some sense of the word; they simply stopped watching, stopped protecting. Nancy finishes what they once began. The looped ending reminds us that the task will return again, and that it likely won’t fall on the shoulders of the prior guardians.
So no—the film is not about sexual repression or the guilt of the parents. It is about endurance. It forces us to confront a hard truth: to fail to fight evil is itself true sin; to fight it imperfectly is unfortunately human; to keep fighting it anyway—that is gracious virtue. Nancy’s victory, fleeting or not in the long run, still matters in the most absolute sense. She chooses clarity over comfort, watchfulness over numbness, duty over desire. In a genre that often rewards cynicism and lust for darkness, Elm Street insists on the opposite: that surviving the nightmare requires moral endurance, perseverance, genuine virtue, purity, often sacrifice or loss, and grace above all else.
Watching it today, with all the noise of reinterpretation and unfounded eisegesis stripped away, the lesson feels sharper than ever: Stay awake.
If you enjoyed this editorial, head on over to my article: What Everyone Gets Wrong About John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).
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