Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The trouble with a great many slasher movie sequels is that the more you explain the unstoppable villain at the heart of a franchise, the more you risk robbing that villain of the mystery that drove the fear in the first place. It’s something the Halloween franchise, for example, struggled with for years as it attempted to expand the mythology surrounding Michael Myers, until the 2018 Halloween sequel simply cut decades of sequels out of the equation. Yes, Halloween H20 still rules, but the larger point is that sequels shine an ever-widening spotlight on shadowy characters, and the brighter the light, the fewer the shadows.
This is not necessarily a problem, though, if the sequels know how to wield that brighter spotlight, shining it on things you didn’t know you wanted to see. The best sequels are often the ones that grow the franchise in directions we didn’t expect new limbs to sprout from, surprising us with their ingenuity while also never going so far afield that we no longer recognize the core elements. Spend enough time digging through horror’s great and small franchises and you’ll find numerous examples of this, but if you’re looking for the slasher sequel that pulled it off better than any other contender, you need A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
After A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (an admittedly still-underrated sequel that Decider once described as “the gayest horror movie ever made”) took fans back to the exact same house on the titular nightmarish street, Dream Warriors opted to go in a different direction, and it’s right there in the opening iconography. Nancy Thompson’s house on Elm Street appears in the opening sequence of the film as a papier-mache and popsicle stick model glued together by Kristen (Patricia Arquette), a young girl crunching down coffee grounds and chasing them with soda because she’s scared to go to sleep. Even in its opening minutes, Dream Warriors seems to declare that the past films are merely children’s playthings compared to what’s coming.
Dream Warriors loves to play with the scale of the franchise like that, from the team of Freddy-fighting kids right there in the title to the death sequences to the way it grows the mythology. Freddy’s not just in your dreams, but towering over them, as he does in the film’s legendary first murder sequence in which he makes a puppet-loving kid named Phillip into his own personal Pinocchio. Nancy Thompson’s not just back, but leading the charge against Freddy, armed with a new knowledge of psychology and dreams and prepared to do whatever takes to get rid of him for good. The kids at the heart of the story aren’t just unwilling pawns, but determined fighters who by the end have formed a superteam of anti-Freddy warriors. Then there’s Freddy himself, who’s no longer just a vengeful spirit, but “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs” born out of an ocean of pain and sickness and neglect and rage.
Yes, the movie just seems to expand and expand, right down to including the ghost of Freddy’s mother popping up throughout the story to ultimately tell our heroes how to kill him, but swirling within this grander sense of scope is a real sense of heart. You see, the misfit kids who become the Dream Warriors are all confined to the same mental institution because they’re all terrified of the same dreams about the same man. They are, we learn, the last surviving Elm Street children, the objects of Freddy’s quest for vengeance, haunted by the specter of their parents’ thirst for blood. They are part of a dark legacy they never asked to be involved in, and as a result the world labels them crazy and locks them away, unknowingly dooming them to die. With Nancy’s help, and Kristen’s convenient ability to pull other people into her dreams, they are able to turn this bloody legacy into newfound power.
In that way, the greatest addition to the franchise Dream Warriors makes – the one that keeps our hearts and minds invested in the film even as the awesome visual effects keep our eyes glued to it – is the way it expands on the nature of dreams in Freddy’s fictional universe. The preceding two films proved dreams are a place where you can fight back against your fears, but this film made those same dreams into a place where you don’t have to be alone. It’s a potent metaphor for mental illness, for addiction, and for plain old pain of any kind. If anything can happen in our dreams, up to and including death, then why can’t we reach out and dream allies into existence? The delivery system surrounding that metaphor is blood-drenched and perhaps more than a little campy, but it’s still there, and it still works while also delivering the horror goods. The mythos around him may have expanded, but Freddy is still Freddy, and that’s why this film just might be the greatest slasher sequel ever made.
And if all of that’s not enough for you, you’ve still got that rad Dokken song from the closing credits.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.
