The film-maker’s 1984 shocker gave pop culture a new, physics-defying villain in the misshape of Freddy Krueger

From the beginning of his career, when he reworked Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring into The Last House on the Left, one of the nastiest (and smartest) exploitation horror films of the 1970s, the director Wes Craven had the unique ability to reconcile high-minded ideas with low-down genre kicks. In person, he had a professorial air because he was once, in fact, a professor, teaching English and the humanities at various north-eastern colleges before picking up a 16mm camera. He would turn The Hills Have Eyes into a cannibalistic shocker that doubled as a stark class critique and give the villainous couple of The People Under the Stairs the unmistakable echo of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He understood as well as anyone how horror could be a vessel for larger themes, so long as it delivered the goods.

Forty years ago, Craven hopped aboard the slasher movie trend that had started with Halloween and Friday the 13th and transformed it to his own typically shrewd and thoughtful ends with A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Which he would then deconstruct in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and piece back together in the Scream franchise, as if following an ingenious long-term course he’d set for himself.) Craven was not the first film-maker to imagine a dreamscape that infiltrates the real world – the random appearance of a goat in the film was his hat-tip to Luis Buñuel’s infamous, surreal fake-doc short Land Without Bread – but his boogeyman isn’t some dead-eyed, sociopathic monster. He’s the ghoulish sins of one generation being inherited by another.