A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Quiz

Answer: A boiler room

The film opens with Tina, a high school girl, who finds herself in a dark, dank boiler room in her nightgown. She feels as though she's being watched as she traverses the narrow catwalks. The screeching of metal on metal pursues her through the room before a shadowy figure emerges behind her.

That's when she wakes up. Looking down she sees that her nightgown is torn, almost as though she was clawed by something.

Tina, Nancy, and Glen head to school in the morning and Tina tells the couple about her dream. They assure her that everything will be okay. That evening, the three decide to spend the night at Tina's house and have a good time so that they can put her mind at ease.

Answer: Extends his arms to reach the width of the alley

When Tina and Nancy have a chance to talk, Tina says that she can still remember everything and she feels as though she can still hear her assailant's metal fingernails from her dream. Nancy is shocked -- she says she can remember her dream too; she was pursued by a man in a dirty red and green sweater and he wore glove almost like finger-knives. That's when they hear something out in the backyard, almost like screeching. When they go out to check, they find it's none other than Rod, Tina's boyfriend. They immediately head up to the bedroom while Glen and Nancy lock the doors and head to bed themselves. Later that night, Rod admits to having a nightmare of his own. He and Tina go to sleep.

Tina wakes up to hear something at the window; someone is throwing stones at the pane. When she gets up to look outside, one of the rocks nearly goes right through. Someone whispers her name from outside. Meanwhile, an ominous figure stretches through Nancy's bedroom wall and disappears when she wakes up. She finds a crucifix in her hands; it fell off the wall in the night.

Tina nervously goes outside to investigate the noises. When she goes out into the alley behind her house, that's when she sees him, the man in the green and red sweater. He extends his arms to scrape the metal fence with his claws and she prays for her God.

Answer: Police chief

Tina flees from her pursuer and returns to her yard. When he appears right behind her, she watches as he slices his own fingers off. She tries to open the back door to the house but he tackles her to the ground. She screams for help as she tears his face off with her hands, revealing the skeleton beneath.

Rod wakes up to find Tina thrashing about in the bed. When he pulls the covers off he sees her stomach get slashed, almost impossibly, before she is hurled around the room and along the ceiling. By the time she drops to the floor, she's dead. Nancy and Glen break into the room to find that Rod has escaped out the window.

The police believe that something like a razor is the murder weapon; Rod must be the killer since he fled the scene. Nancy's father, a police chief, asks her what happened and she believes that Rod couldn't have done it. She tells her parents that Tina dreamed this would happen -- that's why they were there.

The next morning, Nancy wakes up and heads to school. Her mother suggests that she stay home, considering the previous night, but Nancy feels it would be better to keep busy. On her way to school, she encounters Rod hiding in the bushes down the street. She asks if he did it and he says he never would have. That's when Nancy's father appears. As Rod makes a run for it, he's captured by the police; they find a switchblade on his body.

Answer: A hall monitor

Nancy heads to her English class and ends up nodding off during a presentation. As she turns to look at the door she sees Tina in a bloody bodybag. She looks away and turns to the door again to find the bag gone, but a bloody streak along the floor. Getting up and following this, she sees the bag being pulled by an invisible force. When she races around the corner she inadvertently runs into the hall monitor who, while wearing a red and green shirt, brandishes a clawed glove.

Nancy heads into the basement to find the boiler room and here she finally comes face-to-face with Tina's killer. He traps her amongst the machinery; a wall appears where there wasn't one before. When she seems cornered she takes drastic actions by burning her arm on a nearby pipe. This causes her to wake up screaming in her classroom. She rushes home.

Nancy later heads to the prison to talk with Rod. He says that someone was definitely in the room with them when Tina died -- he saw her get cut by something invisible, something with four razors. He admits that he had the same dream of the man with knives for fingers and he probably could've saved her.

Answer: A bathtub

At home, Nancy takes a bath and slowly nods off to sleep. A claw starts to appear from within the water but it disappears when Nancy's mother comes to the door. When she leaves, Nancy is once again at the mercy of a nightmare -- she's pulled underwater, almost as though she's trapped under a sheet of ice. Nancy is able to get out of the tub before her mother can unlock the door. Going to the medicine cabinet, Nancy takes a caffeine pill.

While in her bedroom, Nancy is met at the window by Glen who sneaks in. Nancy asks Glen if he's been having nightmares and he says no. She then convinces him that she can find someone in her dream if he stands guard.

When Nancy falls asleep she walks down her street and through a broken door to find the police station. Looking into a lower window she finds Rod sleeping in his cell. When the door to the room opens, she watches as the man from her nightmares phases through the bars of the cell. She calls for Glen and turns around, but the man disappears from the room. Instead he appears behind her.

Nancy runs to her house and gets stuck running up the stairs -- something is making her sink into them. She gets to her room to find Glen asleep before the man bursts through the door and struggles with her on the bed. The only thing that saves her is the alarm clock sounding on her nightstand. She wakes up and yells at Glen for falling asleep. He was supposed to wake her if she looked like she was in a struggle.

Answer: A hat

Nancy and Glen race to the police station to speak to Rod, who they think is unsafe. Little do they know, Rod is asleep and a blanket is being twisted around his neck. Nancy is able to convince her father to let them in for a visit, but it's too late. Rod is hanged and dies when his neck is snapped.

After Tina's funeral, Nancy tells her parents that someone else is responsible for the murders, someone with a red and green sweater, a weird hat, and knives for fingers. Her father recommends getting her home for a few days; her mother says she's getting her professional help. This turns out to be a sleep clinic.

The doctors monitor Nancy's brainwaves as she goes into the dream state but the experiment is cut short when she begins thrashing in terror. By the time her mother wakes her up, they notice that some of her hair has turned grey and she has a deep cut on her left arm. Nancy also shows her mother that she pulled the man's hat from her dream.

Answer: A child murderer

Back at home, Nancy hears her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen and heads in. Nancy hasn't been sleeping and the doctor says it will only make it crazier. Her mother says she threw away the dirty hat, but Nancy finds it in a drawer. The assailant's name is on the hat: Fred Krueger. After Nancy comments on her mother's drinking habits, she discovers that Fred Krueger is dead. Her mother insists it's just a nightmare.

On a walk, Glen tells Nancy about the Balinese way of dreaming. The culture creates its art and literature from dreams and finds strength in their imagination and subconscious. If they create something undesirable, they simply turn away from it and it disappears, otherwise they are consumed by it. When he finds that Nancy is reading a book about booby traps, she says she's 'into survival'. She heads home to find the windows barred; her mother says it's security and tells her to come to the cellar.

Downstairs, her mother opens the furnace and shows her inside. She says that Fred Krueger was a child murderer-- he killed twenty children in the neighbourhood. When they caught him, he was freed on a technicality, so the parents hunted him down, found him in an old boiler room, and burned down the building. She pulls a bundle from the furnace to reveal the glove of knives inside.

Answer: He's pulled into his bed.

Nancy gives Glen a call and they look at each other through their windows. Nancy has been awake for seven days at this point. She tells Glen that if Freddy gets her, he'll probably be next. Her new goal is grabbing the killer and pulling him out of her dream, just like the hat. She warns him not to fall asleep.

Nancy's mother puts her to bed and empties her room of coffee mugs before turning out the light. Nancy quickly rushes to a freshly made pot of coffee under her bed and takes a drink. Before she can leave her room, Nancy spies her mother taking a swig from a bottle of vodka in the linen closet. She decides to give Glen a call but his mother picks up. Handing the phone to Glen's dad, he hangs up and leaves it off the hook. That's when Nancy receives a phone call -- it sounds like screeching metal. When she pulls the phone out of the wall, it continues to ring. She picks it up once again and it's none other than Freddy. He claims that he's her boyfriend now. When Nancy rushes downstairs, her mother, drunk on the couch, says that the entire house is locked up.

Across the road, Glen falls asleep. At midnight, he's pulled down into his bed. A fountain of blood shoots from the hole into which he fell. His mother comes inside to witness this shocking torrent.

Answer: Bear trap

Nancy's father arrives at the crime scene with the whole emergency response team. Nancy calls the house and says that she knows what happened. She makes a proposition to her father. She's going to go into her dream and get Fred Krueger. She says to break the door down in exactly twenty minutes and she sets to work creating booby traps in the house. She then sends her mother to bed.

When Nancy falls asleep, she prays. It doesn't take long for her to nod off. In her dream, she heads to the basement and finds the furnace. The glove is missing from its bundle inside. When she finds a hidden door, she heads inside to find the boiler room below...and so begins the search for Krueger. This brings her to a final furnace where she finds Glen's headphones...and Freddy. Jumping off a balcony, she lands in a flower garden and rushes back to her house to grab Freddy before her alarm sounds.

Answer: She turns her back on him.

Awakening in her bed to the sound of the alarm, Nancy discovers that she has brought Fred with her into reality. He tries to chase her but finds himself caught up at every one of her planned traps. She's able to signal the police across the street and they come running as she makes her way to the basement. Here, she douses him in kerosene and sets him ablaze, leaving him in the cellar to die once again.

The cops head to the basement but Freddy isn't there. They follow a trail of flaming footsteps around the house and up the stairs to Nancy's mother's bedroom to find Freddy overtop of her. It's too late though -- her mother is dead. She sinks into a hole in her bed and disappears. Nancy's father has no choice but to believe her.

When he leaves, Nancy stays behind and the door mysteriously closes. Freddy reappears from under the covers but Nancy refuses to face him. She says that it's too late -- she's turning away because it's all a dream and he's not alive. She takes back her energy and leaves out the door.

When Nancy exits the room she emerges in the sunlight; her mother follows her out. Nancy asks if she's alright and her mother says she's going to stop drinking -- she just doesn't want to anymore. Glen, Tina, and Rod pull up in Glen's convertible and Nancy joins her friends. Before the kids drive off, the top to the convertible closes on its own to reveal a red and green roof. The doors and windows lock as they're forcibly driven away. Nancy's mother stands at the door and watches as they leave before Freddy's arm breaks through the window and pulls her in.