It is difficult to discuss the work of Wes Craven without acknowledging the wider American socio-political context as a central thematic concern of his stories, spanning across multiple decades and films. The integral role of horror to the expression of social and political commentary in cinema was perhaps most famously expressed by the late Robin Wood in his concept of “The American Nightmare.” Wood's conceptualization of the American nightmare as the “return of the repressed” argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the American horror film offered an avenue for expression of that which was repressed within society. Wood connected the horror films of this period directly to the concurrent issues in American society, such as the Vietnam War and the fallout over Watergate. The author would view later horror films, of the 1980s, as representing the failure of the revolutionary potential of the genre a decade earlier, mentioning how an “astonishingly abrupt shift” saw “the progressive, exploratory, often radical late 1960s–70s” turn into “the reactionary and repressive […] Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger—they did not develop out of the characteristic monsters of the 1970s, but represent a refusal of everything embodied earlier.” Thus, this chapter aims to address Wood's assertation that the later work of filmmakers such as Wes Craven, specifically the Freddy Krueger figure, no longer represents The American Nightmare. Indeed, I will argue that A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984—from herein Nightmare) can be seen as a “progressive” and even “radical” expression of the social and political context of American society of the time, as expressed through personal experience, particularly that represented by Heather Langenkamp's Nancy Thompson character. I propose that although Nancy's “active resistance” to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has been described as a feminist formulation of the “final girl”, it more specifically expresses the rampant individualism and dissolution of social structures such as the family in 1980s America, directly relating to the popular Reaganite ideology of the time. However, rather than rejecting the presence of feminist ideology in Nightmare altogether, I propose alternative expressions of feminist thought within the film text.