Get ready for Freddy. Recurring Nightmares is a 10-week look at the entirety of the Nightmare on Elm Street series that started on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022, and runs through Halloween 2022. Yeah, only nine movies, but also one TV series; the rhyme does go, Nine, ten, never sleep again ,after all. It will run parallel to other series we’re running in late summer early autumn, including another round of No Sleep October essays. Every week will feature an essay about a piece of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in chronological order, written by Midwest Film Journal contributors and staff writers. Some have seen the whole franchise. Some are novices and neophytes, jumping into the movies without watching the rest of them to offer unvarnished thoughts or, as Freddy would say, How sweet. Fresh meat.
Five years after its initial installment, Freddy Krueger’s franchise had essentially become a farm team for filmmakers eager to prove their chops for bigger projects. Director Chuck Russell followed up 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors with 1988 s remake of The Blob. Renny Harlin’s reward for 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, then the series’ highest-grossing entry, was 1990’s Die Hard 2.
So it was with similar hopes that British-Australian filmmaker Stephen Hopkins signed on for 1989’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 The Dream Child. It’s arguably the franchise’s most direct sequel and to its biggest hit, too, continuing Dream Master character arcs in full without a laborious, half-hearted, even re-cast effort to return surviving Dream Warriors in 4.
What Hopkins got was four weeks to shoot and four weeks to edit, an experience he described thusly a year later to Fangoria: The film had a rushed schedule without a reasonable budget, and New Line and the Motion Picture Association of America came in and cut the guts out of it completely. What started as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore. Of course, Hopkins was promoting his work on Predator 2 at the time of the interview and went on to direct Judgment Night, The Ghost and the Darkness and a number of 24 episodes. Like Russell and Harlin before him, Hopkins came out of this just fine.
The austerity proves auspicious in a sequel that’s neither secret success nor franchise nadir. Frozen take: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is worse. Warming-up take A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy’s Revenge is the best sequel. Hot take: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the second-worst sequel. Freddy exploding from the TV take: Dream Warriors is not far behind those worst ones, either.
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