Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child)

It's the end of an era here on the Halloween marathons. Each year for quite a while now, we've been revisiting a Nightmare On Elm Street film sequentially. Well, except for that time I jumped ahead and did Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but you'll understand that one is its own weird metafictional beast. We've still got one movie in the tank for next year, should we do this again, so this isn't the last Frederick Krueger movie we're covering. No, instead this is the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie I watched that I hadn't seen since first watching it in 2004 or so, in college, when I watched all of them sequentially as a fear-conquering exercise. Going in here years later, all I remembered were some of the unique kills. What, then, do we make of The Dream Child after all this time?

Holy fuck, guys, I do not fucking know with this movie. This is the one Nightmare movie I don't especially vibe with. The particular things I have enjoyed about this spooky dream murder series are the surrealist creativity of its dream murders, and the deeper interesting theme running through each movie that one can hang their critical analysis hat on and go "Yep, that's one fine hat hook this picture's got going-- Jesus Christ did that kid's muscle fibers just get turned into puppet strings? That's fucked up.". Let's shotgun through them real quick! Nightmare 1: the sins of the parent haunting their children. Nightmare 2: Fears and anxieties over one's own homosexuality. Nightmare 3: Mental health care is bullshit and doesn't help people in need. Nightmare 4: Grief and loss and how we remember those who we cared about who we've lost. With that in mind, what's Nightmare 5's cool hat hook? I... don't know. Oh, there are some at play, but I think the reason I didn't vibe with the movie is quantity over quality; instead of one big thematic hook that runs through the whole movie, there are like two or three half-formed hooks which only hang on parts of the movie. It's my job to talk about those shoddy hooks, apparently, so let's.

Okay, so the big premise of the movie is Alice from the previous movie getting pregnant, and Freddy returning to kill teenagers in fucked-up dreams by using her unborn baby's dreams as his anchor to the world. So, Alice becoming a mom. Parenthood and parental expectations of their children is happening in the movie! Alice's boyfriend Dan getting scouted for football, her friend Greta and her overbearing mom, the parents of Dan trying to take the baby from Alice after Dan dies and Alice starts screaming about knife glove hand man burn face kill friends. Interesting theme! There's not much else going on with it, unless you count the ghost of Amanda Krueger trying to help defeat Freddy. God, this. It kind of goes back to Nightmare 3's own weird half-formed theme of religion vs. science. This time it's half-formed religious symbolism, with Freddy bursting from stained glass and talk of transmigration, and some shots in the climax that made me think they were implying Alice's baby is Jesus and Freddy's the Antichrist? What? What the fuck? Is this what the movie was going for? It's in there, you can try and read it as such, but it's not running through the whole movie so who knows?

I'll close out by talking kills. It's surprisingly light! Three! Three innovative dream murders in the whole movie, and a fourth attempted. The comic book one is the most creative, although I'll give the makeup artists credit for their renditions of "motorcycle cyborg" and "force-fed Mrs. Creosole". I'd honestly admire the movie for being conservative if there were a lot more weight to each kill. Yeah, Dan's is given a lot of grief and all, but the other two are one scene of "OH NO THEY'RE DEAD THIS IS AWFUL DAMN YOU KRUEGER!". The last movie nailed this! Why didn't this one? In the end, The Dream Child is... It's not bad. Kinda muddled, some hooks for you to hang your hat on but no real big ones. It frustrated me that it wasn't giving me much to talk about, hence half the rambling of this post. It's a miss of a Nightmare for me, even if it isn't totally terrible. One would be better served with any of the preceding films. Ah well.