"Ten years after 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' first scared the daylights out of audiences, Wes Craven returns to his now classic horror premise and takes it to a new dimension. With equal debts to Pirandello and P. T. Barnum, Mr. Craven brings his prize creation, Freddy Krueger, out of the realm of Halloween masks and into the so-called real world. Realism is fundamental to the "Nightmare" series. Mr. Craven does not deal chiefly in phantasmagoric demons; he deals in terrifying extensions of everyday experience, the stuff of which true nightmares are made." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times