To quote Bushwick Bill, this year Halloween fell on a weekend. I’m sorry that I’m a few days late on my annual essay, but it’s like I always say: the veil should logically be just as thin a couple days after Halloween as it was a couple days before. So if we’re celebrating all October there should be no problem doing it in November.

This year I decided to write about not only one of my favorite horror movies, but the one I credit with making me fall in love with the genre in the first place. I can’t pinpoint when the fascination started; I remember watching THE SHINING at a friend’s house in elementary school without thinking of it as “my first horror movie” or anything like that. But I have this memory of hearing ads for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS on K-Plus FM when I was in sixth grade. Around this time I was also fascinated with Gumby, who had been revived as a surfer in the medium of puff-paint t-shirt, and I remember drawing a picture of “Gumby Krueger.” I think I got it wrong and gave him blades on both hands.

I didn’t see DREAM WARRIORS until video, but those ads must’ve been what inspired me to rent A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. I know I had seen and loved the first three by the next year when A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER came out, because that one was a theatrical event and a formative experience.

I really wasn’t a Jason guy or even (believe it or not) a Leatherface guy until my twenties. What captured my imagination about the genre when I was young was not as much death and sex and masks. It was crazy latex makeup effects: monsters and mutants, eyeballs and faces popping out of things, flesh stretching, transforming into other shapes. I would come to enjoy movies just about a guy with a knife chasing after people, but Freddy (Robert Englund, SLASHED DREAMS) and the ELM STREET movies gave me so much more. They were about bending reality, so they also had to be about art design and technical wizardry and clever gimmicks. Even at their dumbest they required so much more imagination and elbow grease than most of the other slasher movies.

That approach started with the first film, advanced with the second (“You’ve got the body, I’ve got the brain”), but it was part 3 that really established the template for the next three sequels, and therefore the bulk of the series. It was also the sequel most tied to the original, bringing back Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp a few years before TONYA AND NANCY: THE INSIDE STORY) and her father Donald (John Saxon, ENTER THE DRAGON) instead of just moving new characters into their house as part 2 had done.

Freddy’s creator Wes Craven returned this time as producer and co-story provider (along with novelist Bruce Wagner, who later wrote Cronenberg’s MAPS TO THE STARS). Their script was drastically changed by the time of shooting, but it introduced the most important components: the return of veteran Freddy-fighter Nancy, a psychiatric institution for teenagers, and the ability of characters to enter a dream together to fight Freddy as a team.

The director was Chuck Russell (who died earlier this year), and he rewrote the script with Frank Darabont. They were both hungry newbies, around 20 years younger than Craven; Russell had only written DREAMSCAPE, and Darabont had only written and directed a short film of Stephen King’s The Woman in the Room. They had first become a team to write the remake of THE BLOB, which ended up being their next film.

I’ve read that Craven’s script fixated on a ranch house said to be Freddy’s birthplace. I’m glad Russell and Darabont respected the title and switched back to using Nancy’s house at 1428 Elm Street as the iconic location. Now it’s a dilapidated house that Kristen Parker (first timer Patricia Arquette, later in PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS) keeps dreaming about. In the opening credits, while she eats instant coffee powder and listens to Dokken to stay awake, she makes a model of it out of paper mache and popsicle sticks.

But she has to sleep eventually, and a Freddy dream causes her to wake up with slashed wrists, so her mom (Brooke Bundy, EXPLORERS) sends her to the West Hills Psychiatric Hospital under the care of Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson, CARNY), his sterner colleague Dr. Elizabeth Simms (Priscilla Pointer, CARRIE), and orderly Max (Laurence Fishburne, still credited as Larry back then). When Kristen fights being sedated and screams about her nightmares it’s witnessed by the new intern therapist, Nancy motherfuckin Thompson.

Here’s one of the things that’s weird about me first seeing this when I was young: I never questioned Nancy being one of the adults now. It was years before it occurred to me that this was only three years after she was a babyfaced high school kid in the first film. (In the movie she says it’s six years later.) Nancy has survived Freddy, gotten an education, she has grown up clothes, grown up hair. Some mistake her white streak as a cheap way to age Langenkamp, forgetting Nancy got that from her supernatural encounter in part 1 (see also: Diane in POLTERGEIST, Ash in EVIL DEAD II).

It works for me. Nancy is still the one pushing supernatural ideas, but to the kids she’s a mentor. She’s been through it, she understands what’s happening to them, she believes them when no one else does.

The kids are tough guy Kincaid (Ken Sagoes, later in INTOLERABLE CRUELTY), who gets put into solitary for his outbursts; plus silent Joey (Rodney Eastman, later in DEADLY WEAPON), heroin addict Taryn (Jennifer Rubin, later in RED SCORPION 2), wheelchair-bound D&D nerd Will (Ira Heiden, later the voice of the Mini-Pufts in GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE), aspiring actress Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow), and sleepwalking puppeteer Phillip (Bradley Gregg, STAND BY ME).

There’s a real appeal to the characters being so troubled and/or misunderstood that they’re locked up and have to do therapy sessions together. Teen angst is built into the premise. They’re the last of the Elm Street kids, Freddy chased them here, and now they’re all together. More than just high school friendships, they have a camaraderie like dorm mates.

But they’re sitting ducks. In one of the most memorable parts of the series Phillip falls asleep and one of the marionettes hanging on his wall turns into a stop motion animated Freddy which then grows into a giant apparition of Freddy that tears the arteries out of Phillip’s limbs to use as strings to puppeteer him. In the waking world it looks like he’s sleepwalking, and Will and Joey see that he’s going to jump out a window. But they’re in a separate building with bars on the windows, Will can’t walk and Joey can’t talk. Joey runs and bangs a tray on everyone’s doors to get their attention – a valiant effort, but all they can do is yell and watch helplessly as Freddy kills their friend. A classic horror sequence.

But if you had to name the most iconic part of DREAM WARRIORS it would be a different nightmare: the one where Jennifer falls asleep in the TV room, the Dick Cavett Show gets invaded by Freddy, mechanical arms come out of the side of the TV screen and pick her up, Freddy’s head pops out of the top and taunts her before bashing her face-first into the screen, leaving her hanging there, electrocuted. Crazy shit. I love you Jason, but you never gave me a scene like that.

And there’s other great nightmare imagery: the melting tricycle, the faucet handle that turns into claws, the faces of Freddy’s victims popping out of his chest, the JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS style animated Freddy skeleton, Freddy turning all his fingers into syringes and making Taryn’s track marks quiver like hungry little mouths, the giant Freddy snake that almost swallows Kristen whole. They did that one by building a 14’ long animatronic. I like computer animation, I like what they do with it, but it’s so much more impressive when you can see that someone physically built it and got it to perform on camera.

That’s also the crucial scene where Kristen yells for Nancy and pulls her into her dream. Eventually their plan will be for her to pull them all in together for a Freddy hunt. They discover during group hypnosis that they all have abilities or alter egos in their dreams: Kincaid has super strength, Will can walk and also shoot magic lightning because he’s “the wizard master.” The most useless, and my favorite, is Taryn: “In my dreams I’m beautiful…” she says, showing off her giant mohawk, then pulls a switchblade and says, “And bad!” Also Kristen can do flips. I have always said I support any movie having people do flips.

I love that Freddy’s weapon against the Elm Street kids is also what empowers them. In their dreams, Joey literally finds his voice.

A big part of the evolving Freddy mythology that has been credited to Russell comes via the mysterious nun Sister Mary Helen (Nan Martin, DOCTOR DETROIT), who tips off Neil that Freddy was conceived via gang rape by patients at the hospital, giving him the biologically dubious nickname “son of a hundred maniacs.” As an adult I’m not sure I like having that information, but it does seem like the kind of urban legend bullshit kids spread around trying to scare each other, so it works on that level. The Sister also tells him he can stop Freddy by giving his remains a proper burial. There will be a cool bit with holy water burning him, but I prefer Craven’s mysticism to using this Catholic/Christian stuff like he’s a vampire. Oh well. I forgive it.

The closest this series comes to the sex = death subtext accidentally unleashed by HALLOWEEN is horny Joey. He has a crush on the nurse Marcie (Stacey Alden, GROTESQUE), so he imagines her coming onto him and then turning monstrous. But Freddy’s nightmares don’t seem to be chiding kids for their sins, just tormenting them by turning their interests against them. Joey’s interest is naked ladies.

One aspect that seems kind of progressive when I look at it now is that there are two male authority figures in the movie who are crucial to stopping Freddy, but they never move beyond sidekick status. Saxon is billed as a “special appearance.” They’re sent on a subplot mission to find Freddy’s remains, but rarely does the movie seem to think “oh shit, the people want to know what Donald and Neil are up to!” Donald is a cop, but that’s not relevant to anything he does – what’s relevant is that he knows where they hid the bones, and that he believes his daughter this time. Neil’s importance is that he also believes Nancy, despite his expertise in real science.

Nancy is forever my favorite final girl, I love how she’s this doe-eyed girl-next-door with pretty sweaters who figures out it’s time to go to the library and learn how to make booby traps to smash a guy’s head in with a sledge hammer. Most of the other characters who created the trope had to run from their slashers – she was the first to say “Fuck this” and go get him. So I love that she got this second chance to appear at a different stage of life, a different type of character, but still a true heroine. And she gets to experience the weirdness of going to meet Kristen’s mom and happening to see, in Kristen’s bedroom, the model of her own childhood home.

It’s sad that she dies, but maybe it’s better than stringing her along for a couple more and getting repetitive. She dies a hero, because they actually thought this was gonna be the last one! A trilogy. But it turned out to be a horror blockbuster, leaping from part 2’s gross of about $30 million to almost $45 million. Its opening weekend was a record for independent films at the time and according to Box Office Mojo it was the 20th highest grossing movie of 1987, above other movies we still talk about including SPACEBALLS, THE LOST BOYS and THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

As the sequels continued they loosely followed the DREAM WARRIORS formula to set up more and more elaborate nightmare set pieces, and I’ve often laughed about how simplistic the characterization starts to seem. I work out and hate bugs, so my nightmare is about working out and turning into a bug. I’m a comic book artist, so I get turned into drawings and killed by Super Freddy. It’s so silly and transparent, but increasingly I find something endearing about it. Throughout life, but especially when we’re young, we have ideas of ourselves we try to put out into the world. Our hobbies and passions really are important to our sense of identity. I don’t want Freddy to turn my veins into bass strings and solo on me, but I like people knowing I love funk music. How many people has Jason killed where we couldn’t tell you one think they enjoyed in life besides beer and tits? But we know Will is the wizard master.

Today I see DREAM WARRIORS as a hopeful message for all ages and eras. Yes, we’re in a bad situation, with lingering problems caused or exacerbated by previous generations. But we have each other. We’re different from each other, we all have our own things going on, but we recognize that we’re locked up together. And we have our own talents, our own powers. We’re beautiful and bad, we wear our mohawks and wizard robes proudly, and we’re gonna win. For now. And maybe Freddy will come back, but we’ll figure out another way to do it, like Nancy did.

P.S. Other important notes:

1. One of the things Kincaid enjoys in life is Run DMC, judging from the various pictures on his wall.

2. Springwood recently got their first Thai restaurant. That never comes up again I don’t think but we learn that in this one.

3. DREAM WARRIORS brought some exciting new artists to the series. Angelo Badalementi did the score, fresh off of BLUE VELVET. The cinematographer was Roy H. Wagner (MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE, NINE DEATHS OF THE NINJA, PRAY FOR DEATH), who would one day do a classic of another genre, BLOOD AND BONE. Art directors C.J. & Mick Strawn became production designers for part 4, and Mick stayed on for two more after that, while C.J. did LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III and NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW.

Part 2’s Kevin Yagher and Mark Shostrom returned to do Freddy’s makeup, and legend has it that it was Shostrom who borrowed one of Freddy’s gloves to put in the basement of EVIL DEAD II, filming at the same time. They added Greg Cannom for special makeup effects sequences. He would later win Oscars for BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, MRS. DOUBTFIRE, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON and VICE (a horrible movie with brilliant makeup).

The stop motion was done by Doug Beswick, who had worked on STAR WARS and THE TERMINATOR and did EVIL DEAD II around the same time. Storyboard artist Pete von Sholly came out of G.I. Joe, Pound Puppies and GoBots, his only live action experience being VAMP. He’d go on to work on part 4, DARKMAN, and almost the entire Chucky franchise all the way from CHILD’S PLAY to the tv series.

The second unit director was Dan Perri, who had designed the incredible title sequence for the first film, not to mention THE EXORCIST, NASHVILLE, TAXI DRIVER, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, motherfuckin STAR WARS, SORCERER, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, THE WARRIORS, AMERICAN GIGOLO, THE STUNT MAN, AIRPLANE!, BLOOD SIMPLE, this film, and many other classics. Damn – what a career!

4. There was later a PC game called A Nightmare On Elm Street that was specifically based on part 3, which I played. It was really hard. I don’t think I got very far.

5. My past Halloween essays:

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
THE HILLS HAVE EYES
THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
INFERNO
THE THING
HALLOWEEN H20
DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “A Nightmare On My Street” vs. the Fat Boys’ “Are You Ready For Freddy”
TOOLBOX MURDERS and the reclamation of Tobe Hooper
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
NIGHTBREED