A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)

“One of the executives was pregnant… picture Freddy clawing his way out.” This was Leslie Bohem’s pitch for the next Nightmare on Elm Street. “No one liked my idea.” Though that sequel became A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), by the time a fifth entry was in the works, producer Sara Risher was then pregnant and unable to forget the chilling image.

This could certainly be the darkest Nightmare since Wes Craven’s 1984 original. Yet in just five years, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was dealing with an identity crisis. With the sudden rise to superstardom bolstered with TV spin-offs, video games, MTV music videos, and other merchandising aimed squarely at kids, returning to his roots seemed a pipe dream.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) struck box-office gold mining the pop culture Freddy phenomenon as director Renny Harlin set his sights on the consumerist MTV generation. No wonder adults were confused—a chargrilled child predator was now “dangerously close to becoming a game show host or a breakfast cereal mascot” according to new screenwriter John Skipp.

Flush with success, New Line Cinema should’ve been confident in the franchise’s direction. And yet, the fifth entry was rushed into production with an open call for any ideas. Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), George R.R Martin (Game of Thrones), Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps), Stephen King, and Frank Miller (RoboCop 2) were all approached. A very avant-garde marketing trick given they had zero involvement and yet I’m nevertheless name-dropping them to make Elm Street 5 appear more prestigious. Instead, it would be directed by British-Australian Stephen Hopkins in his American debut.

The first writers involved were Skipp and Craig Spector, with a revolutionary approach to “make Freddy scary again”. Harking back to Craven is no bad idea. The horror legend infused his childhood fears with the academia of Russian philosophy to conjure a “predatory animal” who derived pleasure from torturing children with their deepest insecurities. An ambiguously queer sequel, a pop culture course correction, and the reframing of our villain into the slasher genre’s Deadpool had now rendered A Nightmare on Elm Street as inscrutable as any dream.

Skipp and Spector attempted to make sense of it all and “wrote a Nightmare on Elm Street movie like Stanley Kubrick would do it”, according to New Line. When Skipp responded “Cool, huh?”, their answer was “No”. They were dismissed after working on Bohem’s pregnancy concept, who himself would receive the call, “Remember when you wanted Freddy to have a baby? Well, we like that idea now. What if Alice was the mom?”

Alice (Lisa Wilcox) was the Final Girl and titular Dream Master of the last sequel. Having survived with boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel), the two were now considering the future with a new group of victims, or rather, friends. Teenagers growing up with the franchise were now young adults. That once absurd quip from Nancy of looking “20 years old” with her streak of grey had become the waking nightmare for so many fans.

Risher believed “it needed to have those themes of abortion and birth and motherhood”, which tormented poor Alice, caught between the surreal threat of Freddy and an unplanned teenage pregnancy. “I was consumed by my child, who could very possibly be the Devil,” Risher’s anxieties merged the two stories with Freddy feeding his victims’ souls to the unborn child. Freddy murdering high-schoolers was old hat, but grooming a baby for his own wicked purposes? “The story was controversial for some people.”

No pop music, no jokes, just sweaty and intimate sex. This is how the mature Nightmare starts. When the naked Alice is freed from her flooding shower into a dark industrial labyrinth, what brief titillation exists is overtaken by genuine vulnerability. A hellish asylum surrounds Alice with a hundred maniacs. All men, including a grinning Englund sans makeup. She’s at least dressed now, in a nun’s habit which doesn’t stop their leering advances in the slightest. A recreation of Freddy’s conception, he weaponises this violation against another poor girl.

The worst comes after. Alice wakes beside Dan, only for Freddy to spring up and pin her down. Only for a moment, she wakes up for real. Intended as a child molester, there have always been harrowing allusions to rape in the perversities of Freddy abusing the sanctity of our bedrooms.

Dream Child leads audiences to assume that Dan is the father, but this legitimately distressing nightmare builds on the dream demon’s potential powers over reality. Horrific enough that Alice only learns she’s pregnant after the father is killed in a tragic ‘drink-driving accident’. It would be too traumatising for our heroine to contend with aborting the potential rape baby of an undead serial killer. It doesn’t help when the foetus’s dream state is affecting her when she’s awake, while a haunting young boy (Whit Hertford) keeps giving her the cryptic cold shoulder.

This doesn’t result in a feature-length torture session; quite the opposite. Alice is plucky and resilient, continuing her story arc of self-confidence from Dream Master. When most Final Girls rely on luck and callisthenics, she displays some real creative intelligence in one-upping Freddy at his own game. Chasing a friend into his comic-book nightmare, a stick figure doodle with her name written above it is enough to pull Alice into the scene. If this resourceful dream logic permits the audience not to ask too many questions, it certainly allows for some narrative shorthand.

The opening mystery of Amanda Krueger is flatly exposited by Alice in the first act as she gets her friends up to speed. They want to talk about the baby and think Alice is too hung up on Dan’s ‘accident’. She neglects to mention her friend group last semester was all murdered. Hell, it’s easy to forget that Alice had a brother, Rick, in the last film. He was the unfortunate soul who got karate kicked to death by an invisible Freddy. Best left forgotten.

Graduation is a great time to introduce our promising young casualties as they contemplate bright, long lives. Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter) is a skilled high diver who spends far too much of the runtime arguing that Freddy isn’t real. Mark (Joe Seely) is a keen illustrator, though his grief never amounts to much. Greta (Erika Anderson) is an aspiring model who goes out early. For all the depth of our central plot, the audience still bought tickets for entertaining dream kills.

Despite some nice sentiments towards the baby and brief nudging about alternative options, the supporting cast is never more developed than your standard slasher fare. The sheer amount of time spent with them given the scant death toll should give way to some deeper development. Alas, they’re defined by their introductory traits, so we’re just waiting for them to die in an obvious ironic fashion. Greta’s force-feeding is exceptionally nasty.

When Alice is not thinking aloud to blatantly set up the story beats, the real questions are left oddly unexplored. That the dream child is Alice’s is clear, but less so how a foetus is portrayed by an 11-year-old child who can speak. He has abandonment issues and hasn’t even been born yet! This dark and ‘controversial’ discussion ends up like a Christian made-for-TV special where Alice is guilt-tripped into keeping the baby… by her own baby. Get Freddy a visit with the Pope—he’s just proven life begins at conception.

If that sounds silly, Dream Child struggles to stay serious. The spectacular first act takes its time before culminating in the literal rebirth of Freddy as some grotesque foetus freak. A far cry from the surfs-up Freddy introduction last film. Fun aside, Bohem would do uncredited rewrites on Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), in which Jason becomes some grotesque foetus freak. Once it crawls from the blood-soaked delivery suite into a decrepit church for full blasphemy points, good old Freddy is back and screaming “IT’S A BOY!” and using “bitch” as punctuation so often it puts Jesse Pinkman to shame.

Englund, in a frank talk with Fangoria promoting the film, casually admitted, “I don’t know if this is going to be a scarier film.” He deserves the screen time and effortlessly breathes life into the droll one-liners thrown at him. But here it is evident in his performance that he is relishing the few opportunities to bring the monster to a darker, nastier place.

This tonal inconsistency can likely be rooted in the fact that production was entirely rushed. The credited writers may make the pregnancy plot sound carefully considered, but Fangoria reported as many as nine drafts were written. And much like Elm Street 4, the tinkering didn’t stop once the cameras were rolling. Joe Seely confessed he never memorised his lines as he would be handed all new pages on the day of shooting. That explains how there is so much talking and yet much of it is forgettable.

Dream Child is disappointing due to how many of the concepts successfully introduce intrigue. From Freddy’s return to Alice’s relationship with her unborn baby, they simply go nowhere as the fantastical set pieces and one-liners take precedence.

“Hopkins takes off like a shot, cutting a straight line to the stairs, taking the steps two at a time to the ground floor, at a second unit scene that demands his attention. Second unit business doesn’t usually require the director to work up a sweat, but two things make this different: The scene involves gross-out FX, and that’s Freddy Krueger. Hopkins likes what he sees, calls a print and charges upstairs to continue his first unit duties.”– -Mark Shapiro on location, Fangoria #85

Understandably, Hopkins never had time to iron out these details when he was on such a tight schedule. All the more remarkable that Dream Child pulls off so many visually striking images. The special effects run the gamut of technical wizardry; matte paintings, stop-motion, even 2D animation. The Gothic aesthetic lends majesty to Freddy’s dreamworld with an MC Escher maze of entangled staircases, contrasted with the stark stylings of Mark becoming a shredded paper figure with coloured ink running out like blood. How much was Hopkins able to personally oversee when Fangoria noted this was “another five-unit show”?!

One aspect that seems cheaper is the most egregious—Freddy himself. Not the performance, of course, but his scarred visage. Gone is the textured network of mottled skin and gooey exposed flesh, replaced with what fans have dubbed his ‘pizza face’.

“The eyes are a bit more sunken, and the nose more melted and droopy. He’s more jowly, and we’ve even given him what passes for a double chin,” admits David Miller, who returned to the makeup department after having worked on the first Elm Street. While inferior to the sequels’ standards set by Kevin Yagher, Miller did illuminate his changes as creative rather than practical. “What happens to Freddy in this film, in terms of ageing, is what’s going to happen to all of us.” This consideration might have been more effective if the idea had been emphasised by any of the writers or the director.   

What happens to Freddy at the end of Dream Child would be concerning if it happened to any of us. With four increasingly esoteric ways found to defeat him, the theme of motherhood is resolved by saving Mama Krueger’s soul. A perplexing hodgepodge of prior climaxes occurs: Yvonne finds where Amanda died sans the burial of bones à la Elm Street 3, Jacob tricks Freddy with some hammy acting and spits his evil back at him roughly like Nancy rebuking his power in Elm Street 1, which then causes the souls to tear Freddy apart, less impressively than Elm Street 4.

One might notice that Alice has no involvement in any of that. Aside from a bizarre effect where Freddy splits from her mitosis style, Alice really just watched the ghosts of a nun and a foetus save the day.

Freddy devolves back into his insidious infant form and is then reabsorbed back into his mother. Is this Freud’s nightmare? Only then does Freddy’s claw burst from Amanda’s stomach, who will presumably wrestle his evil into eternal purgatory. Both a strangely grim resolution and the most transparent begging for the audience to come back next year.

They might have balked at both the desperation and weak ending, or not had any reaction. Dream Child only brought in $22M on an $8M budget, less than half the box office of Dream Master. Unable to stick with the evocative darkness of the original nor pull off the pop culture entertainment of the rampant franchising, Dream Child starts with a gang rape nightmare and ends with a Kool Moe Dee diss track about LL Cool J. Though with lyrics like “you’re just a sucker, and it’s funny how you never ever had a drop of juice in New York” could be from Jason, who in the very same month was failing to take Manhattan.

“I had no choice. When I agreed to do 4, I had to sign a contract guaranteeing I would do 5. It seems like we never get to start fresh. There’s always this rush to get them out. We finished the last one in July; here it is April, and I’m starting again. That’s a little close.”—Robert Englund, actor.

Both New Line and Paramount were high on their own supply, knocking out sequels like there was no tomorrow. Yet in the same year, they released entries that were clearly, even to audiences at the time, the beginning of the end. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) would bank on the dream finally being over. Something that makes the penultimate sequel all the sadder. Just when they were celebrating Freddy’s rebirth, they had no idea this was the final nail in the coffin of his death.

USA | 1989 | 90 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Stephen Hopkins.
writer: Leslie Bohem (story by John Skipp, Craig Spector & Leslie Bohem; based on characters created by Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, William Kotzwinkle & Brian Helgeland).
starring: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Kelly Jo Minter, Erika Anderson, Danny Hassel, Whit Hertford, Joe Seely, Nicholas Mele, Burr DeBenning & Clarence Felder.