Nightmare is definitely a product of its time as a circa-1980
slasher film. In such a film, a couple having graphic sex in an alley can't really
complain if someone comes along and finds them. This includes the
audience gaping at the indulgently gratuitous nudity (and those round
vaccination scars anyone who doesn't have one has probably forgotten about
by now). The couple is, however, allowed to be startled by a high-heel
wearing slasher. To sum the plot up in one run-on sentence: a young girl is traumatized by inadvertently causing the death of her sexually active mother then grows up to be an actress in a theater production where all the understudies are getting promoted because someone is killing off the leads. Could these two things be connected? Well, not to spoil things up front, but there's no real mystery to the proceedings. Helen (Jenny Neumann), our protagonist, spends most of her screen time flashing back to either a death scene or yelling at herself behind closed doors. When a film doesn't bother to have you guessing whodunnit, the shots from the killer's point of view seem more appropriate to an experiment in first-person character study.
