The first film, much like any Wes Craven project, was a conceptual masterpiece with nuanced and intelligent themes. Luckily it was spared a flawed on-screen depiction like many other great Wes Craven concepts. The end result was a creepy, truly haunting horror film about vigilante justice, supernatural vengeance, survivalism, poor parenting, and the deeply harmful effects of lies and secrets. It asks the audience what the cost of vigilante justice truly is when it only creates a bigger threat than the one the parents of the Elm Street children were trying to snuff out. It shows how the continuous, pathological lying of parents to protect their children only ends up hurting them or getting them killed in the long run. Fred Krueger's murder spree was an unpleasant memory that they tried to bury after killing him for the greater good, but keeping his existence a …show more content…
The only main character that ends up surviving ends up doing so by having the dark secrets finally revealed to her, thus allowing her to combat Freddy. The only right parenting move in the entire film happens when Nancy's mother decides after getting irrefutable proof of her daughter's interaction with Freddy to tell Nancy about what her and the other parents did to him, thus finally freeing herself of all the lies that led her to drink herself into a state of deep depression over the years. Without this happening, it seems likely Nancy wouldn't have been able to fully comprehend who she was trying to fight, which would have eventually led to Freddy killing her just as he'd killed all of her close friends. Aside from the asinine, producer-forced ending that set up a sequel, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street by