I’ve seen the first A Nightmare on Elm Street (the “good” one), and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (the gay one), and that was always as far as I’d been willing to go with the series. I think I like the idea of 1980s slashers more than the reality of them, and the first few Friday the 13th movies were more satisfying, to me.
Sure, even before they started resurrecting and re-resurrecting Jason and having him basically fight Carrie White1Which is still an absolute banger of a movie idea, and I can’t believe they found a way to ruin it, he was basically a supernatural super-villain. But at least he had to stay a little more grounded with his tools and the basic laws of physics. The Elm Street series, on the other knife-hand, used “dream logic” to justify whatever nonsense they wanted to throw onto the screen, leaving me with nothing to get even a little bit invested in.
That might be why I kind of almost liked A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It sets some basic ground rules and mostly sticks to them: Freddy can only kill people in dreams, except of course unless he wants to possess cars and reanimate his own bones in the real world. And it gives the hapless teens a way to fight back, by having a girl who can pull others into her own dreams.
There’s a scene where the kids all first get together in a shared dream, and each of them gives an explanation of their special dream powers they’ve always imagined having. It’s so charming and so inherently 1980s that you can almost ignore the fact that all of their special dream powers are hell of lame.
Patricia Arquette can do sick kick flips! The young woman in addiction recovery dreams of being one of the punks from Return of the Living Dead, with exactly two tiny switch blades! The tough black guy who don’t take no shit from nobody has the strength to bend prop chairs that already have bent legs at the start of the shot! And the wheelchair-bound nerd can both walk and be a non-copyright-infringing RPG wizard, complete with unspecified particle effect powers! It’s not immediately clear how any of this is going to help them against a knife-wielding dream demon, but it’s fun anyway!
In addition to Presto’s Amblin-esque sparkle powers, the scene starts with the balls from a Newton’s cradle magically hovering around the room, and it really is charming in the way that the best 1980s fantasies were. You can really tell it’s the 80s because the TV remotes are huge and chunky, Laurence Fishburne is still being credited as “Larry,” there are a couple of genuinely cool stop-motion animation sequences with Freddy as a puppet and as a Jason and the Argonauts skeleton, a traumatized mute kid gets seduced by a nude sexy nurse2I was happy to learn that that teen returns in the fourth movie after mysteriously transforming into Sidney Prescott, and the whole thing is kind of offensive even by trash horror standards.
The movie casually tosses around elements of mental illness, disabilities, self harm, drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual harassment, and violent sexual assault, with a sloppiness that both reminds you of how backwards the 80s were and also seems incongruous with something that’s trying to play as fun, campy horror. Having a drug addict in recovery see her needle marks scream at her and then be stabbed with a bunch of syringes — that feels like the kind of image that was intended to fit with a fun, over-the-top horror tone of “murdering hapless victims in ironic ways,” but in reality was just bad taste.
It’s a fine line to walk, and maybe a movie with more nuance might’ve been able to show Freddy being the Ultimate Asshole by turning kids’ addictions or disabilities against them without its feeling like careless tastelessness on the filmmaker’s part.
This isn’t a movie that works on nuance, though. It’s a movie with trained medical professionals finding the body of a young woman a few feet off the ground with her head smashed through a wall-mounted CRT TV screen and declaring it a suicide. And it’s a movie that tries to add a layer of horror to Freddy’s backstory with a lurid story about a young woman being locked into a psych ward and assaulted to the point of death.
Which feels like gross and sophomoric upping-the-stakes instead of playing into the fun fantasy horror vibe that everything else has. But also: I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve gotten so “woke” that I can’t still appreciate a scene where a ghost nun describes Freddy as “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”
It’s a shame, because while this isn’t what I’d call a good movie, and a lot of the performances hover somewhere between porn and soap opera in quality, there are long stretches that feel more fun and imaginative than anything else in the series. And there are homages to better movies that are evident throughout — in addition to the Ray Harryhausen-inspired stop motion mentioned earlier, there’s a scene that is not-at-all-subtly referencing both Vertigo and The Birds, and a car junkyard that might be referencing Christine. It feels like there were people involved in this movie who cared about making something good, or at least were well aware that they were making highly skilled trash.
I wonder if Dream Warriors would’ve been much better if it hadn’t been part of a franchise, and had just been released on its own as a late-1980s fantasy horror. The concept of using dreams to fight against a bad guy is undeniably pretty cool, and I was much more invested in how it all “works” than I was in either of the two earlier movies.
My alternate-universe version has it never getting attached to the Elm Street franchise, so it’s just a kind of whodunnit horror movie where someone in the hospital (obviously either the head doctor or, in a surprise twist, the firm but kindly orderly Max) is picking off people in their dreams, one by one, until a troubled young woman is admitted with the power to let the kids band together and fight back.
As I understand it, Freddy only gets goofier from this point on in the franchise, so if the first three movies are him at his peak, I’m going to have to call it: Freddy Kreuger just isn’t cool, guys. Maybe nobody in the Voorhies family could swallow a teen whole, but I’m still 100% Team Jason all the way.3And don’t even try with that Michael Myers business. He only kills like three people in the first movie.
Comments
2 responses to “Dream Warriors, or, One, Two, Eighties Coming For You”
I remember in college a friend had a boxed set of the first 5 Nightmare movies and we binged through them in a couple nights one time. I remember 3 as my favorite and one of the few we watched multiple times after the full binge.
I don’t remember exactly why it was my favorite at the time. I’m sure some of it was the lore of it. Freddy’s lore was inconsistent and all over the place in the first two films, but the third coheres it, and most of the rest take 3 as a canon given. I don’t think the rest would exist without 3. It’s 3 that elevates Freddy from just another scarred weirdo serial killer to a full blown Boogeyman (and starts the debates if Freddy is The Boogeyman of modern horror). 3 sets him apart from Mike Meyers and Jason Voorhees and gives him a legitimate unique threat (to the point where he can share movies with Jason and they fill very different roles in those movies, whether or not you think those movies are actually any good, and we watched most of those in other college binges.)
You suggest it might have been better as a standalone, but I think it’s kind of more interesting as the franchise definer (and sort of franchise peak) for Freddy. I don’t think the first two would be considered as much classics if the third didn’t try to make sense of their conflicted lore and take it to weirder places, they might not have stood the test of time quite as well, unlike either of Jason or Mike’s first outings.
Yes, and I might have a different opinion if I liked the franchise more! Also I think I didn’t see the first one until I was way too old to be in the target audience for it, while I saw the first three Friday the 13th movies when I was still a very impressionable adolescent.