This paper investigates a range of medial references, imitations and projections in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series produced between 1984 and 1994. As has been argued by, among others, Bruhn (2016) and Elleström (2010, 2014), all media contain traces of, and references to, other media. Such intermedial phenomena not only make any strict distinction between media difficult but often also serve different aesthetic and political purposes. Intermediality in this sense concerns not only the border crossings between media conventionally thought of as distinct from one another, but also the aesthetic and political implications of such crossings. From references to William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to medial projections of videogames, music videos and comic books, the Nightmare films present the viewer with a complicated web of various intermedial strategies. This paper investigates such strategies, arguing that they function as an exploration of the ideological underpinnings of filmmaking in general and horror cinema in particular. More specifically, this paper will argue that the intermedial strategies found in the Nightmare series articulate a profound unease with the coalescence of commodification and authority associated with the cultural mainstream of 1980s America. Even while exploring the possibility of subversive creative resistance to the dehumanizing and disempowering effects of this coalescence, the films ultimately remain distinctly ambivalent in regards to the culturally subversive potential of the Nightmare series itself and horror cinema more generally.