Retrospective Film Review

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) • 35 Years Later

A psychiatrist familiar with Freddy Krueger helps teens at a mental hospital battle the killer who is invading their dreams.

Wes Craven made his bed and laid in it with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). A rough pun but not entirely inaccurate as the writer-director had reinvigorated the slasher franchise, and horror as a whole. You can’t even fall asleep now or Freddy Krueger will kill you. He was a new bogeyman haunting a generation unlike anything seen before. Not a silent masked maniac like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, or even the human monsters of Psycho (1960) and The Last House on the Left (1972), Krueger was a repugnant child killer who ascended after death to become a devil of dreamland. Then came a metamorphosis Craven never saw coming: Freddy became loved by those he originally scared.

New Line Cinema may have been crippled by the $1M budget for Craven’s strange new horror movie in ’84, but a $57M return christened the studio ‘The House That Freddy Built’. A Nightmare on Elm…