From Scream Queens To Warrior Women: The Women of Nightmare on Elm Street: Alice Johnson
Lisa Wilcox as Alice Johnson — A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 The Dream Master — New Line Cinema
When it’s all you have, you kind of become an expert. Alice Johnson
At the end of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, the children of Elm Street lost its most powerful warrior when Nancy Thompson lost her life in her final battle with Freddy. It was implied the Kristen Parker, one of the three survivors would pick up Nancy’s fallen torch but the Kristen we meet in A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 seems much weaker and has become a prisoner of her fear of Freddy’s imminent return. She knows she and her friends Joey and Kincade are the last children left of the people who killed Freddy and he will not rest until his revenge is complete. Once Kinkade and Joey are cut down she knows soon it is going to be her turn but in the meantime she has met someone who may possibly be her only chance of survival, a shy young girl named Alice Johnson, the younger sister of her boyfriend with a dream power that Kristen desperately needs. While Kristen is able to pull others into her dreams to assist her, Alice can control her dreams, a skill she learned from her mother. Alice uses her control of her dreams to escape her unhappy home life. She loves her brother Rick dearly but their father is a drunk and verbally abusive to Alice. Alice tells Kristen that since her dreams are all she has, she’s become something of an expert on them.
When Kristen’s mother makes the mistake of giving her sedatives, she is pulled into the dream realm for what she is certain will be her final battle with Freddy. She’s determined she is going to be his last victim. Freddy, however, has other ideas. The more souls he collects, the more powerful he becomes in the dream world but he cannot collect more souls unless the new kids of the town know about him. Kristen has warned her circle of new friends about Freddy and unfortunately opened the door for them to be drawn into his dark world. In his final battle with Kristen he weakens her enough that she pulls Alice into her dream. It is Kristen’s turn to the pass the torch and now it falls into the hands of Alice Johnson. Kristen not only passes Alice the torch, she gives Alice her dream power. Freddy is now ready to use her to lure the rest of Kristen’s new friends in. He claims her friends Sheila and Debbie and Alice’s brother Rick and after each death Alice begins to change both physically and mentally as each victim’s power passes to her. She inherits Sheila’s mathematical and mechanical skills, Debbie’s physical strength, and Rick’s martial arts skills. Gone is the shy young girl and in her place is a warrior ready to fight to the death to save herself and the final member in their circle of friends, Dan.
Alice enters the dream world and forces Freddy into battle, using every one of her new found powers against him but it seems they just aren’t enough to send him back to Hell because he still has their souls. Just when it seems Alice has lost the battle she remembers a rhyme her mother taught her as a child and releases the souls of all Freddy’s victims.
Alice returns in A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 and has locked Freddy out of her dream world but she is horrified when she discovers he has found a way back in but she doesn’t know how until Freddy kills Dan and their other friend Greta while she is awake, using the dreams of the child she is expecting, conceived some time before Dan’s death.
In Nightmare 4 Alice was fighting to protect herself and her friends but this time the stakes are much higher. She is now fighting for the soul and life of her unborn son Jacob too. Jacob appears to her in her dreams much older as her guide in this second battle with Freddy. Freddy is passing all his powers onto Jacob in the womb and if their souls are merged when Jacob is born, Freddy will be able to move between dreams and reality freely again as he did through Jesse in Nightmare 2.
As Nancy and Neil did in Nightmare 3, Alice has assistance from the spirit of Amanda Krueger, Freddy’s mother. Amanda knows Alice cannot defeat Freddy on her own this time and she appears to tell Jacob their only chance is for him break Freddy’s hold on him, a hold fueled by doubts that Alice really wants him. In doing so he also frees the souls Freddy has taken, including the one of his father, Dan. The power of Alice’s love for him has triumphed.
We are to assume Alice and Jacob locked Freddy out of their lives for good but I recently discovered that in one of the original drafts of Nightmare 6, Jacob was supposed to be the John Doe character that was the sole child survivor of Springwood and he and Alice would eventually join Freddy’s list of victims. Although part of me wishes Alice would have survived, I honestly believe that if New Line went with this plot line Nightmare 6 would have been a much better film.
