"A Nightmare on Elm Street" focuses on a street no less.  Not a house, or anything deserted.  A nice suburban street.  The evil, horror, and fear lives in the dreams of the youth living on Elm Street.  Freddy Krueger was scary, very scary in this film.  He is ugly, cruel, and utterly insane, however, rather sadly his credit gave way to crappy one-liners and slapstick.  The only real horror film out of the series is this one.  It is tense, and really scary.

Freddy is the son of a bunch of insane asylum detainees, who raped a young nurse all winter, without anybody knowing she was locked in.  As such this gives Freddy a reason for his evil.  Though his negative reason, is the way that before dying he was a child molester, a really sadistic man who got pleasure knowing he was feared.  He met his end by the residents of Elm Street who decided to take the law into their own hands after Freddy was released without charge from prison due to a technicality.  He was burnt to death and vowed to kill the children where their parents could never save them.  In their dreams.

That's about it.  He kills in dreams, he also has a unique hand blade glove thing that slices.  He kills a lot of people with that.  It makes people scream and yell.
ITS A GLOVE ! ! !
Its not a scary weapon. Anyway, apart from that the film is Really good and though I now see Freddy as a novelty item that is used to flog plastic knife fitted gloves to five year olds, I remember this film fondly and count is as a pinnacle of horror art.