Best Horror Movies

Just as the first Nightmare film opened with the creation of Freddy’s infamous glove, New Nightmare opens with the creation of an updated, more sinister and sleeker looking glove. As the maker of the claws appears to chop off his own hand in preparation for attaching the claws to his own wrist, the other people on the set wince, and the director, Wes Craven, encourages the effects specialists to pump more blood. Soon he yells, “Cut! Print that Gertrude!” Heather Langenkamp with her husband, Chase, and their son Dylan, are wandering around the set of the new Nightmare on Elm Street movie.

Presently the claw, which was only a prop a minute ago, comes to life and starts maiming and killing the special effects crew. Dylan disappears into thin air, and as the claw advances to attack Chase, Heather screams waking up in her own bed in her own house with Chase, during an earthquake in San Fransisco. After the earthquake dies down Chase has a couple of scratches, which are the very same as he had received in the dream. This causes Heather to wonder if they were sustained in the earthquake or during the rough and wild dream. Heather reveals she has been receiving harassing phone calls from “someone who sounds an awful lot like Freddy” acting like Freddy, but they’ve stopped for the last couple weeks until now.

Heather is a guest on a morning talk show the very same day, where they discuss the 10th anniversary of the “Nightmare” films. Producer Bob Gaye asks Heather to visit his office at New Lines Cinema, and explains that Wes Craven has completed the script for the new and final “Nightmare” film. Heather is asked to reprise her role as main character “Nancy”, but decides against it with her own recent nightmares, disturbing phone calls, and disgruntlement over her son’s change in behavior. Bob explains that her husband Chase Parter is also working on the film and he is creating a scary new glove for Freddy, much to Heather’s dismay.

When she gets home, her son has an episode during which he warns her in a voice not of his own, “Never (to) sleep again!” Worried, Heather asks Chase to come home, however Chase falls asleep at the wheel on the way and dies in and supposedly of a car crash. When Heather goes to identify the body, it seems to her that there may have been more than meets the eye to the “crash”, as was made apparent by the claw-like marks on his chest. Dylan, now also grief stricken, continues acting even more strangely. When Heather takes him to a hospital, the doctors suspect her of being insane and abusing him.

She enlists Wes Craven’s help for making sense of what’s been happening. Craven explains that he does not know much more than she does. He dreams a scene or two each night and wakes up and writes them down. Craven goes on to tell her that in the script he’s been writing, pure evil can be temporarily defeated if its essence is effectively captured in a work of art that is able to allow evil to express itself. Craven explains that the evil has taken the form of Freddy Krueger because it is a familiar one. “Freddy” sees her as the gatekeeper who holds Freddy at bay, since Heather’s character Nancy defeated Freddy in the first movie. To Freddy it is Heather that gave the character of Nancy her fortitude. Freddy is attacking her at her weakest points, trying to break her down before confronting her, prompting her to leave just as confused as when she arrived. Freddy forces Heather to accept the role he wants her to play, while at the same time, he totally eviscerates the toy dinosaur Dylan believes has been protecting him and abducts him. The final showdown between Freddy and the mother-son combo occurs in a hot, steamy and water-logged dreamscape ruin, apparently Freddy’s home turf. Dylan finds Heather, only for them both to be attacked by Freddy, Heather is knocked out, Dylan is left in a state of defenselessness.

Freddy lures Dylan into a trap and tries to attack him vigorously, Heather wakes up in time to save Dylan, but Freddy makes his tongue extend and wrap around her face. Dylan gets out of the trap to save Heather by taking a large kitchen knife that she brought in with her, cutting Freddy’s tongue in half and making it go back to its previous size. The two succeed in killing Freddy, by locking him in a lit furnace where upon catching on fire, his true visage is shown admist a fiery blast, all the while Dylan & Heather flee said inferno, escaping back to reality, where they find the script of the film Craven has been working on, waiting for them. Dylan asks his mother to read some of it to him, which she does: “We open on an old wooden bench. There’s fire and tools, and a man’s grimy hands building what’s soon revealed as a glistening set of claws. And the claws are moving now as if awakening from a long and unwanted sleep…“

Since the events of The Dream Child, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has returned and succeeded in killing nearly all of the children in the town of Springwood, Ohio. The only surviving teenager, known only as “John Doe” (Shon Greenblatt) throughout the film, finds himself confronted by Freddy in a dream and brought to the town of Springwood’s city limits by Freddy Krueger posing as a bus driver. John is tossed through a supernatural barrier from within his dream to the ground in the real world and left there, unconscious, after his head collides with a large stone (giving him amnesia in the process).

Meanwhile, at a shelter for troubled youth, Spencer (Breckin Meyer), Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) and Tracy (Lezlie Deane) plot to run away from the shelter. Carlos was physically abused by his parents, Tracy was sexually abused by her father, and Spencer simply does not want to conform to his father’s overbearing lifestyle. John, after being picked up by the police, becomes a resident of the shelter and a patient of Dr. Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane). Maggie notices a newspaper clipping in John’s pocket from a Springwood news article. In an effort to reverse John’s amnesia, she decides it would be best to go on a road trip to jog his memory. Tracy, Carlos, and Spencer stow away in the van in their effort to escape the shelter, but are discovered when John has a hallucination and almost wrecks the van just outside Springwood.

After encountering the adult inhabitants of Springwood, Maggie and John find out that Freddy Krueger had a child that was taken away from him. John begins to suspect that he is Freddy’s child, which to him, would explain why he has not been hurt. Meanwhile, Tracy, Spencer, and Carlos, after unsuccessfully trying to leave Springwood, decide to rest at a nearby abandoned house, which transforms into 1428 Elm Street (Nancy Thompson’s former home). Carlos and Spencer fall asleep and become prey to Freddy. Tracy is awakened by Maggie, but John, who went into the dream world with Tracy to try to help Spencer, is still asleep. Maggie and Tracy decide to take him back to the shelter. Freddy reveals to John that he was using him to get to his daughter, and then impales John on a bed of spikes. Before he dies, John tells Maggie that Freddy’s child was not a boy. When Maggie and Tracy cross the Springwood town limit, the supernatural barrier shatters.

Tracy and Maggie return to the shelter, but they discover that no one remembers John, Spencer, or Carlos except for Doc (Yaphet Kotto), who has learned to control his dreams. Maggie remembers what John told her and discovers her own adoption papers. That night, she falls asleep and encounters Freddy. He tells her that she is really Katherine Krueger, Freddy’s daughter. He explains to her that he used her to escape Springwood and now wants to start his killing spree in a new town.

Doc discovers Freddy’s power comes from the “dream demons” who continually revive him, and that Freddy can be killed if he’s pulled into the real world. Maggie decides that she will be the one to enter Freddy’s mind and pull him into the real world. Once in the dream world, she puts on a pair of 3-D glasses – the theatrical version of the film was in 3D during the climax – and goes into Freddy’s mind. There, she finds out that Freddy was teased as a child, abused by his foster father, inflicted self-abuse as a teenager (Tobe Sexton), and murdered his wife, Loretta Krueger (Lindsey Fields), in front of his own daughter. While being burned from Molotov cocktails thrown upon him by angry parents, Freddy was given the power to become immortal from fiery demons. After some struggling, Maggie manages to pull Freddy into the real world.

Both Maggie and Freddy end up in hand-to-hand combat against one another after Freddy tries to earn Maggie’s sympathy. While Maggie continues to battle Freddy she uses several weapons retrieved from patients at the shelter. Enraged by the knowledge of what he has done, she disarms him of his clawed glove to which he responds “Go on put it on, it’s in your blood!” Eventually, Maggie stabs Freddy in the stomach with his own glove while she is close to him. Doc then throws Maggie a pipe bomb. After she impales Freddy to a steel support beam she throws the bomb in his chest. Just prior to Freddy’s death Maggie plants a quick kiss on him, saying “Happy Father’s Day.” As she runs away from the impending explosion, Freddy looks into the camera and says “Kids,” after which he explodes. The three dream demons are then seen flying out of Freddy after the pipe bomb kills him, unable to revive him in the real world.

Maggie manages to evade the blast and delivers the final line of the film: “Freddy’s dead.”

Taking place a year after The Dream Master, Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have now started dating and there is no sign of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Alice begins to have dreams of a young nun, with a name tag for “Amanda Krueger“, being locked away in an asylum full of maniacs. Upon graduating from high school, Alice and Dan plan their getaway to Europe. Alice has made some new friends: Greta (Erika Anderson), a supermodel in training, Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter), a future Olympic diver, and Mark (Joe Seely), a comic geek.

As Alice makes her way to work, from graduation, she finds herself back at the asylum. Alice is wheeled into an operating room on a stretcher, wearing Amanda’s uniform, and screaming in pain. As Alice looks around she sees Amanda Krueger (Beatrice Boepple) on the table, instead of herself, giving birth. As the baby is delivered, Amanda clamors to get to it. The baby breaks free from the doctors and escapes the room. Alice follows it into a church rectory, the same place that Alice defeated Freddy in. Before she can stop him, the baby finds Freddy’s clothes and quickly grows into an adult. Amanda shows up to help Alice, but she’s disrupted when Freddy slams the church doors closed on her. After these events, Alice finds herself at work, but four hours late.

Alice immediately phones Dan who leaves their friends and rushes over to the diner. Before Dan can make it he falls asleep and Freddy forces him to drive into another vehicle. Alice, after watching Freddy take possession of Dan, faints in the middle of the street. At the hospital, she is informed that she is pregnant with Dan’s child. While recouping, she meets a young boy, Jacob (Whitby Hertford). Yvonne later informs Alice that there were no children on her floor, nor is there a children’s ward at the hospital. Krueger begins to kill Alice’s friends one by one as they fall asleep. First Greta, then later he kills Mark. Alice requests an early ultrasound for her baby, and she soon realizes that Freddy is using her child to get into her friend’s dreams. Alice also discovers that Jacob is really her son. It’s only when Yvonne barely escapes Krueger, thanks to a little help from Amanda’s soul, that she accepts what Alice has been telling her.

Alice sends Yvonne to the abandoned asylum to release Amanda’s soul while she sets out to free Jacob. Krueger pulls her into a M. C. Escher-like labyrinth to try to slow her down. Freddy goes back into hiding inside Alice as she finally catches up to Jacob. Upon the revelation that Krueger has been hiding inside of her the whole time, Alice forces him out, but almost dies in the process. After being released by Yvonne, Amanda arrives and instructs Jacob on how to defeat Freddy. Jacob, releasing the power that Krueger has given him, forces Freddy to revert back to an infant. Before he can escape, though, Amanda picks him up and absorbs him back inside. Freddy begins to fight from within and the church doors close. A year goes by; Alice gives birth to Jacob, and is finally at peace from the nightmares.

Kristen (Tuesday Knight, who replaced Patricia Arquette), Joey (Rodney Eastman), and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), have been released from Westin Hills and are now living normal lives and attending high school. Kristen has managed to make some new friends: Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a young, bright girl who is a frequent daydreamer; Sheila, a brainy, quiet girl with asthma (Toy Newkirk); and Debbie (Brooke Theiss), a tough girl who hates bugs. She has also found herself a boyfriend, Rick (Andras Jones), who happens to be Alice’s brother.

Kristen begins to have bad dreams and feels as though Freddy has once again come back from the dead. During one of her nightmares, she pulls Kincaid and Joey into her dream. In school the next day, Kincaid and Joey confront Kristen about pulling them into the dream.

As it turns out, Freddy is indeed back. Kincaid wakes up one night, only to find himself locked in the trunk of an old junked car. When he opens the hood, he realizes that he is in a salvage yard – the same one that Freddy’s body was buried in. Kincaid spies his dog, Jason, digging and urinating in the ground nearby. The ground begins to shake and the plot where Freddy lies begins to sink deeper into the ground and open up. Inside the grave, the bones begin to grow flesh. As soon as Freddy is resurrected, a pile of junked cars comes crashing down on him. Freddy quickly recoups and kills Kincaid. A little later, as Joey is watching television, he begins to feel something moving beneath his waterbed. When he pulls back the sheets he finds a naked woman swimming in his bed. Before he can react, Freddy bursts through and kills him.

The following day at school, Kristen is concerned when her friends fail to show up for class. At home that night, her mother gives her a sedative to help her sleep. When Kristen falls asleep this time, on Alice’s advice, she tries to convert nightmares into pleasant dreams, to no avail. Even in her good dreams, Freddy appears and ruins everything. Kristen eventually finds herself in Freddy’s boiler room. It is explained that Kristen is the last child from Elm Street, and Freddy needs her help to get more children. When Freddy is about to kill her, she screams for Alice. Alice appears suddenly in the boiler room just as Krueger kills Kristen. Before Kristen dies, she sends her power, the power to pull people into her dreams, to Alice. Before the power can reach her, it passes through Freddy first, taking a part of him with it.

As Alice tries to understand what has happened, and who exactly Freddy is, her friends begin to die. First, Sheila and Rick are killed. While taking a test, Alice accidentally pulls Sheila into a dream where Freddy is waiting; the same thing happens to Rick later. After his death, Alice teams up with Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel), who was one of Rick’s closest friends. Together with Dan, Alice tries to get to Debbie, their last surviving friend, before Freddy finds her. Unbeknown to the two teens, Freddy is able to control their movements. Trapping Alice and Dan, Freddy is able to reach Debbie and kill her (by transforming her into a giant cockroach and trapping her inside a roach motel) before Alice and Dan intervene.

Following a car accident, where Dan is injured and rushed to the hospital, Alice returns home to prepare for one final battle with Freddy. Alice goes to sleep to help Dan before Freddy can kill him. As Alice and Dan search for Freddy, the doctors wake Dan and he is pulled from the dreamworld. Alice, facing Freddy alone, attempts to use all of her abilities against him. Nothing seems to work. It isn’t until she is reminded of the final verse of a children’s rhyme about the “Dream Master” that she is finally able to defeat Freddy, by making him see the evil that is inside. Alice releases the tortured souls that Freddy imprisoned. Krueger’s clothes fall lifelessly to the floor. The film ends with Dan and Alice at a fountain some time later. She tosses a coin in and makes a wish. As she and Dan depart, she decides to keep the wish to herself as Freddy’s image appears in the ripples left in the fountain from the tossed coin.

Taking place six years after the events of the first film, with no mention of Jesse Walsh (the protagonist in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge), Kristen Parker falls asleep and dreams of a young girl running into an old, condemned house, which bears resemblance to Nancy and Jesse’s house in the previous films. As Kristen follows after the little girl, she begins to realize that she’s in trouble. She finds the girl in a boiler room. As she hears someone walking above them, the little girl exclaims, “Freddy’s home!” Kristen wakes up in a panic.

Kristen is placed in Westin Hills, a psychiatric hospital after an “attempted suicide.” When a nurse tries to sedate her, Kristen fights back and cuts one of the orderlies, Max, with a scalpel. As she backs into a corner chanting a rhyme she heard in her dreams, new staff member Nancy Thompson suddenly appears in the room and finishes it for her. Nancy soon realizes that Freddy is not dead, and that Kristen and the other patients, Joey, Taryn, Kincaid, Phillip, Jennifer and Will, are the “last of the Elm Street children” – the last remaining children of the vigilantes who killed Freddy.

After seeing Freddy in a dream, Nancy realizes she has to protect the remaining children. Unfortunately, before Nancy can do anything, Freddy kills Philip by tearing the tendons from his arms and legs enabling Freddy to control him like a puppet, making him walk up to the top story, then cutting them to let him fall to his death. He also kills Jennifer by making the television grow arms, grab her, and smash her head into it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Neil Gordon, the psychiatrist who works with the kids, begins to receive visits from a mysterious nun, Sister Mary Helena. She informs Neil that Krueger was never properly buried and must be laid to rest in consecrated ground. Soon after, Joey is kidnapped by Freddy in his dream, who seduces him in the form of a sexy nurse, and in the real world he lies in a coma. Nancy and Neil are fired because they try to tell their superiors that the dreams are real; the remaining kids are forced onto a regime of nightly sedation. As Neil and Nancy’s father, Lt. Donald Thompson, embark on a journey to find Freddy’s corpse and give him a proper burial, Nancy and the kids attempt a group sleep session to try and go in and free Joey and get to Kristen, who was thrown in the “quiet room” and sedated against her will.

As soon as the kids fall asleep, Freddy separates them and kills Taryn by injecting her with a massive amount of heroin from his claws, and Will by making his wheelchair grow spikes and attack him, then stabbing him before the others can save them. However, Kincaid manages to fight his way through Freddy’s barriers and reunite with Nancy and Kristen. Kristen had initially found Nancy after she was separated from her and put back into the film’s opening dream sequence, only this time featuring Freddy decapitating her mother, holding the head up to Kristen, and preceding to speak to her about ruining it for mom every time she brings a man home.

Nancy, Kristen, and Kincaid find Joey dangling above a huge fiery pit. Nancy manages to save him while Kristen wrestles with Freddy. Nancy realizes that Freddy is stronger than he once was, to which he replies “the souls of the children give me strength.” It becomes clear that Freddy does not simply kill his victims; he holds their souls gruesomely captive. Kincaid tries to take Freddy, but is overpowered. Before Freddy can kill Kincaid, he realizes that his bones are being disturbed – Neil and Nancy’s father are about to bury Freddy in a true grave, near an old junkyard. Freddy takes possession of his bones and fights off Neil; he throws Lt. Thompson onto the tail fin of an old car, killing him.

Freddy returns to the children but is again foiled, this time by Joey. Nancy and the kids rejoice at their apparent victory. Nancy’s father visits her in the dream world as a spirit, explaining that he has “crossed over”. He apologizes to her and hugs her. As Nancy and her father embrace, Nancy is stabbed by Freddy’s glove. It wasn’t her father after all; it was Freddy. Kristen tries to save Nancy, but it’s too late and Freddy grabs Kristen as well. Just as he is about to finish her, Nancy takes Freddy’s hand and stabs him with his own glove. At the same moment, Neil awakens and pushes Freddy’s bones into the grave. He brandishes a bottle of holy water and begins to fling it upon the bones. In the dream world, the holy water is burning Freddy and bright light pours out from within his body. Neil takes a crucifix from his pocket and places it on the skull. A cross shape is burned into Freddy’s head, killing him.

Nancy, however, is beyond any help and dies. At the funeral, as others are weeping in silence over the loss, Neil sees the nun that helped him. When he goes to thank her, she vanishes. He is left standing by a gravestone. On the stone there is a name, Amanda Krueger, just below that is another name, her name in Christ: Sister Mary Helena, showing that the nun was the spirit of Freddy’s mother. At the end, Neil falls asleep with a toy house next to his head, and the lights suddenly come on in it, just before the credits roll.

It has been five years since the events of the first film. A new family, the Walshes, have moved into the former home of Nancy Thompson. The Walshes son, Jesse (Mark Patton), happens to move into Nancy’s old room. He eventually begins to have nightmares of Freddy (Robert Englund) demanding that Jesse kill for him and using Jesse as a host body to come back to life in the real world.

Lisa finds Nancy’s old diary in Jesse’s closet in which she had been keeping track of her nightmares and her encounters with Freddy, which struck a chord on Jesse as he is experiencing similar nightmares himself. He goes to his parents in a panic, but they argue and Jesse storms out. Jesse finds himself walking the streets late at night. One night, he walks into a bar where he runs into his gym coach, who takes him back to the gym to run laps. The coach has Jesse hit the showers, while he goes back to his office. While he is in his office, the shelves begin to come alive, hurling balls and other sports equipment at him. Two ropes grab him by the wrists and drag him into the shower. The shower fills with steam and we see Freddy’s silhouette in the background, clawing the coach’s back. As everything comes into focus, Jesse is the one with the glove on his hand.

Jesse’s girlfriend Lisa begins to do some digging and uncovers information about Freddy, including the location of the factory where he brought his victims. Meanwhile, Freddy visits Jesse’s younger sister, but when she wakes up, it’s actually Jesse standing there, with the glove on his hand. Jesse enlists his other friend, Grady, to watch over him while he sleeps. Once Jesse falls asleep, Grady turns out the lights for himself. As soon as Grady is asleep, Jesse awakens and begins to scream in pain – Krueger is coming out and Jesse cannot stop him. With the door jammed, Grady is helpless against Krueger, who impales him on his own door with his glove. When Krueger looks in the mirror it turns out that it was Jesse, with Krueger staring back at him from the mirror.

Jesse runs to Lisa’s house where she is having a pool party. However, Freddy takes control of Jesse and attacks Lisa. Lisa is able to fight off Freddy, who runs from the house and out to the party. Most of the kids run for the fence, only to be confronted by scorching hot metal. Everything begins to heat up, including the pool, burning anyone that is near. Some of them try to take Freddy down, but are killed immediately. Freddy has them all cornered against the back fence; he exclaims, “You are all my children now!” After Lisa saves him from being shot by her father, he vanishes into a fiery wall.

Lisa runs to the old factory, thinking she might save Jesse there; she finds him and tells him that she loves him and that he can fight from the inside. Freddy begins to lose control. As the factory begins to burn to the ground, Freddy himself starts burning. After he dies, the rest of the factory suddenly extinguishes. Just when Lisa thinks it is all over, Freddy’s burnt corpse begins to move. Jesse begins to crawl out of Freddy’s ashes.

The following Monday, Jesse goes back to school. He climbs the bus, finally relieved that it is all over. But something is wrong: The bus is traveling too fast. Jesse panics and jumps up, only to find out there is nothing wrong; the bus is coming to its regular stop. As he and Lisa rest at ease, Freddy’s glove bursts through their friend’s chest and the bus speeds off the main road and into the open land, just like in Jesse’s nightmares.

In the early 1980′s, a psychopath named Freddy Krueger – known as the Springwood Slasher – murdered several children with a glove outfitted with straight razor blades attached to the fingers. When a foolish decision by a judge sets him free, Krueger is burned alive in the boiler room where he worked by an angry mob of the parents whose children he terrorized & murdered. Years after his death, the children whose parents were responsible for Krueger’s death – including Nancy Thompson, daughter of the police officer who arrested Krueger – are experiencing terrifying nightmares involving a burned man wearing a glove with razor blades on the fingers. The ghost of Freddy Krueger is haunting their dreams, and when Nancy’s best friend Tina dies in her sleep violently during a dream confrontation with Krueger, Nancy realizes she must find a way to stop the evil psychopath’s reign of terror – or never sleep again…

Freddy Krueger is in hell – literally. It’s been nearly ten years since Krueger, one of the scariest horror movie characters of all time, invaded peoples’ dreams to exact his deadly form of revenge and murder. But now, his memory has been systematically erased by a town determined to put an end to Freddy once and for all. Potential victims have been drugged to prevent them from dreaming, rendering impotent the master of nightmares. They’ve eliminated their fear of Freddy, absolute torture for an egomaniac psychopath who’s a legend in his own mind. Like an inmate with a life sentence, Freddy’s been reduced to plotting a fantastic revenge that will never happen.

Until, that is, Freddy resurrects Jason Voorhees, an equally iconic madman. Jason is the perfect means for Freddy to once again instill fear on Elm Street, creating a window of opportunity for him to emerge from his purgatory. Recognizing how easily manipulated Jason is, Freddy tricks Voorhees into journeying to Springwood to start a new reign of terror.

But as the bodies begin to pile up on Elm Street and Freddy’s fearsome reputation assumes new life, he discovers that Jason isn’t willing to cease his murderous ways and step aside so easily. Now, with a terrified town in the middle, the two titans of terror enter into a horrifying showdown of epic proportions, alternating between the world of dreams and the harsh reality of the living world.