Here’s where things go a bit dark. The Dream Child is the
Nightmare on Elm Street’s series attempt at tackling abortion and teen
pregnancy. The film has a noticeably darker tone, with darker lighting and a
grimier feel. It’s still silly and ridiculous at times, particularly with its
nightmare sequences, but the subject matter is noticeably more adult than the
usual fare – though ANOES3 did look at Freddy in the guise of suicide. It has a
much better pace than part 4, which was quite gung ho. Instead here we return a
bit more to the slower, more brooding pace of the original, with a more natural
progression, slowly building up to each kill. Those who preferred the more kill-happy
rollercoaster that was Dream Master might find the comparatively slower, creepier
movie a change of pace.
The kills are still completely ridiculous though. There
aren’t many at all, but they all get a good amount of build-up and since we get
to know the characters a little more than usual they have more impact. They’re
also tailored to the character’s personalities. While they’re still as silly as
you’d expect, they’re mostly pretty horrific. The movie also looks more at
Freddy’s origins, bringing back his origins that were mentioned in Dream
Warriors. All up I don’t mind this one. It has a nastier edge, and lacks the
dumb, mindless fun of Dream Master, but this brings things back to the darker
horror origins of the series, even when it gets silly.
Dream Master Alice and her boyfriend Dan graduate from high
school and look to their future together. But Alice starts to have nightmares
about Freddy’s birth, and finds that Freddy has returned again, this time with
a plan to come back to life. When Dan is killed, Alice finds out that she’s
pregnant and that Freddy has designs on her unborn baby. While dealing with all
the stress and anxiety of teen pregnancy, Alice needs to fight back, enlisting
the aid of her friends, and the spirit of Freddy’s mother, Amanda Kreuger, to
find a way to stop Freddy and save her child.
There are some pretty blunt looks at serious issues here,
regarding teen pregnancy – abortion is briefly considered, while Dan’s parents
plan on getting a court order to take custody away from young Alice once the
baby is born. These are pretty big things to bring into a horror movie
actually. Sure the movie gets silly at times, what with evil baby Freddy and
its more outlandish nightmare scenes and kills, but the film at least gives its
darker theme a darker treatment, with darker lighting, a blue tint to some
scenes and a generally creepier atmosphere than the more colour-heavy previous
instalment.
Alice is back (blonde this time) and I don’t mind her as
much this time. She’s still pretty useless until the finale, but here we have
an excuse – she’s preoccupied both with Freddy killing people and with her
pregnancy and what it means for her life. While killing off boyfriends is a
common thing in horror movies – it almost always happens so the main heroine
can tearfully fight back – this time there’s more weight to it, since Alice is
left alone to deal with both Freddy and the looming responsibility of being a
young parent. Now it’s more than likely I’m overanalysing things here (it’s
pretty much definite) but that’s a more interesting direction to take things,
especially for a character who previously was just a dumb guppy standing around
doing nothing. The rest of the cast feel more personable – there are fewer
teens, really only Alice, Dan and her three friends, but they’re closer than
most other gaggles of teen buddies, especially since they’re there to support
Alice, both with the pregnancy and the looming threat of Freddy. We learn a
little about each character, usually superfluous stuff, so their deaths hold a
bit more weight.
With fewer characters that means there are fewer deaths than
last time, but they’re more personable and horrific than usual. Dan gets killed
when he falls asleep while driving hurriedly to Alice. This scene is pretty
cool, and horrific, but also really insane – Freddy takes over the car, which
becomes a living thing as Dan drives, the insides warping into a hellish
industrial monster car. Dan manages to get out of the car (in the nightmare) but,
that idiot, then gets on a motorbike (which is always more dangerous than a
car) which Freddy possesses, and then things get into freaky body-horror when
the bike begins to connect itself to Dan, it’s wires and cables digging into
his skin until he becomes a disgusting fleshy robot man fused to the bike. Dan,
in the real world, inevitably just crashes his car into a truck, his mashed up
corpse getting burned up in the wreckage. It’s all intricate and horrific, and
a bit ridiculous. I actually really like it.
The aspiring supermodel chokes to death when Freddy force
feeds her food (and her own insides) when she falls asleep during a dinner
party. The scene is gross, as Freddy stuffs her face and she chokes. The comic
book nerd is dragged into a comic book (it’s all black and white apart from
him) and Freddy attacks him (while riding on a skateboard of all things). The
nerd becomes a try-hard generic ‘badass’ comic book hero (caped guy with guns).
Freddy on the other hand transforms into Super Freddy, a barrel-chested, cape
wearing super murderer. Faster than a bastard maniac, he shrugs off bullets and
slashes the nerd to paper threads (because they’re in a comic). These are
basically it for the kills, but each one is built up and more intricate than
most other kills in the series to this point. I will say that this is one of
the few times in a horror movie where the black character (Alice’s friend
Yvonne) doesn’t die – she survives her nightmare attack, and helps save the day
by recovering Amanda Kreuger’s remains so her spirit can be freed to help Alice
defeat Freddy.
Alice starts to interact with her unborn child, Jacob, in
her nightmares. The boy is an ugly little brat who looks like the antichrist
(because this is a horror movie and that’s the one type of kid in horror
movies). He’s pisses off because Alice was considering abortion, and that she
doesn’t like his ‘funny friend with the glove’. Freddy himself has been
influencing the unborn kid, feeding him the souls of the people he’s been
killing and teaching him that killing is fun. In the finale Alice and the
spirit of Amanda Kreuger confront Freddy in a nightmare world full of M. C.
Esher staircases. Freddy is defeated when Jacob uses the spirits of Alice’s
dead friends to attack him, turning Freddy back into his creepy child form.
Then Alice accepts Jacob as her son, taking him into her womb (it’s just
flashing lights, nothing creepy) and the spirit of Amanda Krueger accepts
Freddy as her son, absorbing him, sealing his evil away forever (or at least
until the next film).
We get more origins on Freddy, this time going back to the
details of his birth, mentioned briefly in Dream Warriors. Alice has a
nightmare while showering where she essentially plays out Freddy’s conception –
she finds herself in a creepy asylum full of maniacs, dressed as Freddy’s nun
mother, Amanda Krueger. It’s got to be the absolute worst run asylum ever since
they’ve just left the hundred crazy inmates loose and just leave them there
with no order or organisation. She gets left behind in the asylum (what she was
doing down there with the patients is beyond me) and the maniacs assault her
(including one that’s just Robert Englund in plain clothes). It’s pretty heavy
actually, since it’s basically playing out a story of horrific rape. The
uncomfortable sexual implications are there through the movie, which gives it a
much harder edge than the other films. Later on she has a nightmare of
witnessing Freddy’s birth, where Amanda gives birth to a little monster Freddy
baby (it’s seriously stupid) which runs off into nightmares, ending up at the
cathedral from the ending of Dream Master, where he enters Freddy’s dead body,
reviving him. Freddy then attaches himself to Alice’s unborn child, using the
baby’s dreams to hunt and kill Alice’s friends.
Freddy is creepy here (except when he’s a monster baby),
though his quips and jokes do take the bite out of things. By this point,
because of the Dream Master taking things a bit too silly, Freddy’s film
persona has basically become the quipping killer, which, while funny, does take
some of the menace out of it. I will say that it’s still a really unique and
bizarre take on a killer in a horror movie – he’s not brooding and silent like
the masked killers, he’s vibrant, loud and ridiculous. It’s what makes the
character memorable, even if he’s not particularly frightening. His dream-based
powers are still horrific, even when they get a bit cartoonish (literally with
Super Freddy). The last film very briefly looked at the idea of day dreams
bringing people into Freddy’s nightmares (I didn’t mention it, because it
didn’t really add anything or have any impact on the film), and this film does
something similar, with Alice’s unborn baby’s dreams drawing people into nightmares
for Freddy to kill. It’s mentioned maybe once and that’s it. It doesn’t change
anything at all, but it’s still an idea. At this point the threat of sleep has
basically been abolished, especially since the Dream Master, where nightmares
just happened anywhere at any time.
The Dream Child is an interesting sequel, if only because it
meshes the darker tone and visuals with the familiar weirdness of the last few
ANOES movies. I’d say it’s one of the better films in the series, if only
because of the darker feel and pace. It’s not as bright, fun and ridiculous as
Dream Warriors or the Dream Master, but I’d say it’s one of the more effective
and creepier entries in the series. The slower pace is a plus in my book,
letting it sink in instead of having a parade of fun, but goofy, kills like the
previous film. The Dream Child also kind of marks the series’ last stand before
things got completely ridiculous.
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