Actually a very frightening film
While it seems people regard the film as poor (from what I hear) it's substantially better than the rest of the sequels. The sequels after this are something approaching a horror comedy with too much surrealism.
This film however is very real. The actors are even superior to the one's in the first film and there is a tone of realism. This seems like a real family, nothing over the top at first apart from the nightmares. The ''haunting'' (if you could call it that) in the house is subtle. The heat, what happened with the birds all built up tension. When the ''events'' start actually happening (freddy showing up in the real world) it was quite the appropriate reveal.