A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is Wes Craven's horror landmark, and you can watch it online on iFILM. In the quiet suburb of Springwood, a group of teenagers keep having the same dream. A burned man in a striped sweater and a battered hat chases them through a boiler room, swinging a glove fitted with knives for fingers.

It starts as a shared bad dream. Then the kids begin dying in their sleep, and to everyone awake it looks like suicide. Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) digs up the truth: the killer is Fred Krueger, a child murderer the town's parents once burned alive. Now he comes for their children in the one place with no rules, their dreams. To fight back, Nancy and her boyfriend Glen, played by a teenage Johnny Depp in his first film role, try to drag the monster out of the nightmare and into the waking world.

Craven built a villain you can't simply wake up from, and in doing so handed horror Freddy Krueger, brought to life by Robert Englund in one of the genre's most recognizable performances. The film spawned a long run of sequels and still sets the standard for fear that lives on the edge of sleep. Watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) online on iFILM.