A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

Freddy goes Pop Art. That's the best way I can describe A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and the main reason why I love it so much. Critic David DeMoss (a personal favorite of mine who runs And You Thought It Was...Safe(?)) detailed the many flaws in this candy colored series of vignettes; however, as justified as his criticisms were, I can't help but dig this bundle of Day-Glo horror. Part of the affection lies in my memories of 1988. I was six going on seven that year, leaving behind kindergarten to enter the first grade. My awareness of the world felt like it really kicked in around this time. I had become more of a social creature, no longer in my bubble of pre-kindergarten childhood. The world, to my eyes, expanded that year. I became more aware of people and cultural movements. One of those was the explosion of Freddy Krueger.

The year prior had seen the Nightmare series break through into the mainstream big time. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 made $44 million, which roughly comes to $87 million in today's dollars. For a movie that only cost around $8 million, this was a tsunami of cash for New Line Cinema, and the elevation of Freddy Krueger to cinema icon. The public went batshit for the slasher, and Kruger began to appear on any surface New Line could stick him on. The first two movies had slipped under my radar. My uber-liberal parents let me watch most anything, and few horror movies terrified me the way they did other kids. Freddy, though, was this new entity in my young life, and I didn't handle his appearance well at all. The repeated television ads for Nightmare 3 convinced me that this was the most evil, heinous, horrifying film ever made. I didn't believe Freddy was real (even though I was still convinced Santa was alive and kicking), but his cackling, leering face could send me into a panic. Old Universal monsters I could take because, well, they were old and that made them easier to digest. Jason Voorhees didn't chat, laugh, glare, or give evidence of any personality at all, thus making him a cartoon. (It would another few years before I took in Halloween, which terrified me in an entirely different way.) Freddy was a dirty old man, though. His lecherous disposition reminded me of a few of my dad's redneck relatives. There was an oiliness to these relatives that Freddy seemed to personify. I can't say for sure these relatives were pedophiles or anything, but there was a reason my mother didn't like that side of the family and kept me close to her whenever these cretins showed up to a family function. Often times they seemed to be looking at you as less of a child, and more as a slab of meat. Freddy would do the same. It wasn't death that frightened me; it was the pleasure Kruger took in prolonging the pain and fear.

The introduction of Freddy into my life was rather jarring. His profile only grew larger in 1988 with the arrival of Nightmare 4. New Line was ready this time, and they saturated the market with Freddy merchandise. Imagine you're a little kid who's deathly afraid of Krueger and every toy store, retail store, and even automotive store your parents drag you to has some kind of tchotchke with the dream killer's face on it. I didn't feel safe going anywhere. Around every corner lied a potential face to face encounter with Freddy. I had to close my eyes and hold onto my mom's hand whenever we entered Children's Palace or Toys R' Us. Both stores had an aisle you had to enter through, and these were the spots where the new arrivals and hot ticket items would go. For the majority of 1988, the shelves were lined with Freddy stuff, so, like a chickenshit, I would grab mom's limb, clamp my eyes closed, and have her lead me down the aisle like Helen Keller. Going over to a friend's house proved problematic when their older brothers would hang Nightmare posters on their walls. I would rush past their rooms to avoid the gaze of Freddy, and tell my friend we couldn't go in there to play Nintendo because...well, I pulled all manner of bullshit out of my ass, so much so that I don't even remember the lies I concocted.

I was too young at the time to properly explain and comprehend what I was feeling, but the sociological perspective fascinated me. It was difficult for me to fathom just why everyone seemed to be going gaga for something that sent a true blue shiver through me. The cruelty of Krueger, which I had only glimpsed, was beyond the pale to me. He was taking our culture, the everyday sayings and background noise, and rubbing them in our faces right before he murdered us in a grandiose way. Freddy was self-aware in a way few movie monsters were at the time, putting his personality on the same level as those creepy relatives of mine. They could both reference AT&T's "Reach Out and Touch Someone" commercial campaign. The glut of wisecracking slashers may have put a damper on Freddy's quips, but this was still fresh in 1988 and chilling to my six year old self. The AT&T campaign might seem like a throwaway bit of business, but when coupled with Freddy's overt fictional violence and my relatives implied sexual violence, it becomes a tool of mockery. The familiarity with facets of pop culture places the victim on the same ground as the killer, except by uttering a popular phrase before a violent act, the killer is showing that they are removed from society's norms, the very norms that are supported by AT&T commercials. I eventually got over my fear of Freddy around the release of Freddy's Dead in 1991. I convinced my dad to take me to see it (one of the few times he and I ever did something together that wasn't court mandated), and became a tad bit obsessed with the Nightmare movies. Okay, so I might own a metal replica of Krueger's glove...and some action figures...and a roughly sixteen inch talking Freddy...and the posters for Nightmares 1, 3, and 4 hang on my wall. Yeah, all right, I suck. I get it. Grown man and I still buy Freddy Krueger shit. I'm getting that 'Loser' tattoo on my forehead next week. Don't have to remind me.

The Nightmare series was the fluke in the horror genre: a franchise whose entries would make more money than the last. Audiences ravenously ate up Nightmare 4, propelling it to a $49 million gross, which translates to $93 million today. It was #1 for three weeks straight, and hung in the top ten for another three weeks. Freddy's presence grew even bigger, leading to more memorabilia, toys, video games, and a goofy T.V. show called Freddy's Nightmares. Looking back, we can see this is where the slasher wave crested. In 1989, audiences became suddenly indifferent to the very movie maniacs they had adored the year before. Nightmare 4 represents the peak of the mania, a deconstruction of the genre specifically, and American culture more broadly. Few, if any, horror killers can maintain the initial germ of menace and fear. It was inescapable that Freddy would lose his shadowy villainy. This was the eighties, after all. Where there's money to be had, there's a line of businessmen looking to drill for that cash. The public loved Freddy, and New Line wasn't going to tailor their most popular product to suit future horror fans. Yeah, we now can look at Nightmare 4 with a quizzical eye, wondering just how the series went from the nihilism of Wes Craven's original to Renny Harlin's Duran Duran version of Krueger. At the time, though, it seemed like the right thing to do, and most of the world approved.

To use a cliché, hindsight is 20/20. There's always the 'What If?' factor: What if New Line had stayed with a darker tone? What if Craven had come back to make one of the early sequels? What would the series have turned out like? We'll never know any of the answers to these questions. What we have is Harlin riffing on American culture through the guise of a slasher movie, and even if some of the riffing is stale or wonky, it's still a better picture than it should be. When I referred to it as a series of vignettes, I wasn't kidding. Nightmare 4 was assembled during a Writer's Guild strike, meaning that the script had to be hastily assembled or the production would be postponed until the strike passed. Stuck with a 'just okay' screenplay, the producers began to piece the movie together by focusing on the dream sequences first. Each murder was handled as its own little movie, the characters being little more than ducks in a shooting gallery. Every special effects studio in Hollywood was hired to create fantastical set pieces would disguise a threadbare script.

Once the deaths were figured out, Harlin and the producers began to try and tie all of the pieces together by choosing a simplified coming-of-age story. Alice (Lisa Wilcox) would be the lone character of any depth, a mousy girl who comes to find her place in the world as her friends die all around her. To carry on with the teen survivors from Nightmare 3 meant that more story would be needed. Hanging around with Kincaid, Joey, and Kristen would involve a meatier, more dramatic tale, and there simply wasn't time for that. The casual manner with which they are disposed of may rub some viewers the wrong way, but I always found the deaths rather alarming, almost moving. In some ways, it affirms Craven's gloomy message from the original. There ultimately is no escape from death, no matter how righteous one might be. The errors of the parents led to the slaughter of a street full of children. Some went before others, but they are all gone. Emotionally, this is honest in acknowledging the limits of good will.

It also buoys Alice, who Freddy eventually acknowledges as the titular character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll's world of bizarre, inexplicable madness melds quite well in Freddy's domain. Where the Queen, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the others were deformed versions of Alice's real life, the deaths of Alice's friends are also bent mockeries of day-to-day life. Whether it's her asthmatic friend Sheila being sucked empty by Krueger, her brother Rick killed doing the martial arts he so loves, or bug-phobic Debbie being turned into a cockroach, the murders are powered by the same elasticity found in Carroll's stories. Barring Kincaid, Joey, and Kristen, the remaining kills in the film were less emotional by design. The future of Sheila really isn't in the interest of the filmmakers or the audience. Like Wonderland's Alice, Springwood's Alice is the focus point. Her growth is what matters, and the deaths are merely there to explicitly show how much she changes.

With a dead mom and a bitter alcoholic for a father, Alice is a naïve girl left to fend for herself in the world. Brother Rick can only do so much, and Alice's insistence to covering her mirror with pictures of her past only prevent her facing the harshness of life. Again, like Carroll's Alice, the Alice here eventually makes her way through a mirror to enter the backwards version of reality, with Freddy almost functioning as her Jabberwocky. The vignette nature of the movie matches up with the style of many fairy tales. A journey in those tales isn't one long trek, but a series of interactions with colorful characters. It's a form of storytelling that stops and starts on purpose. In an purely accidental move, Harlin managed to tap into this form, so while the movie may not move as fluidly as the others, it works in its own odd fashion by adopting the manner of a fairy tale. Freddy's reference to Wonderland and Alice's jump through the looking glass may have been intentional, but the way the story unfolds was pure accident. Had it not been for the Writer's Strike, Nightmare 4 would have been more streamlined and quite possibly an entirely different movie.

How Alice gets involved with Freddy is also worthy of note. Kristen, being the last Elm Street kid, has to carry around the burden of survivor's guilt for a small portion of the movie. The violence is personal between her and Freddy. When the maniac tosses her into a boiler, Kristen passes her powers (i.e. her memories and guilt) onto Alice. The way in which the horror spills into Alice's life serves to act as a maturation-promoting factor. Around the same time I became aware of Freddy, I was also becoming more familiar to the true terror of the world. This was the eighties, so the nightly news was a parade of homelessness, HIV/AIDS, crack, yuppie cocaine, Satanism, and kidnappings, all shown with that smeared quality of eighties video tape. Like Alice, I had existed in a bubble, aware that bad things were around, but never grasping them fully. With the development of self-awareness came the realization that the world wasn't such a grand place. People suffered, and I would eventually suffer as well. The insular world I had dwelled in prior to kindergarten was built by my mother, designed to ward off as much negativity as possible. This is what most parents do, and the hairline cracks that begin to appear in that protection are always creepy. Alice, though absent a mother, has been a passive voice, someone who could rely on her role as the 'quiet one' to get her by. When the problems of others enter into the picture, she's pressed to either remain passive (becoming another victim) or engaging in the world. This is a rather impressive move on the film's part. The horrors of the world can't be isolated to only a few; everyone feels the stings and repercussions of ill choices, apathy, and cruelty. Though the formal series only lasted another two entries, this pivot from the Elm Street kids to a whole new world of suffering sets up a more complex philosophy. The violence is no longer bound to rational motivations, like revenge. It thrives on bloodthirstiness removed from reason. Lisa Wilcox is a solid actress and capably handles Alice's growth. I don't just say this because I'm a goddamn dork and met her at a horror convention last year. (Still a beauty, by the way.) One of the great things about the Nightmare series are the heroines, all of whom have more personality than the majority of Final Girls. With her soulful eyes and meek voice, it seems unlikely that such a wallflower could handedly defeat Krueger, but by the end of the film, gone are the dowdy dresses and soft tenor, replaced by an authoritative tongue and a straight shouldered assertiveness.

Did she autograph my poster with, "You are one major league hunk."? Yes. Yes, she did. Am I a fucking lame-o? Yes. Yes, I am.

Freddy's defeat is the most well-done in the series, even topping his religious burial at the end of 3. There is a finality to the murderer's end, and if the series had stopped here, it would have climaxed on a hell of a note. In the Never Sleep Again documentary, Harlin explained the religious and metaphysical inspirations for the scene, which involved divine exaltation and the expunging the corrupt from the world. The souls of Freddy's victims prying their way out of the killer's body is one of the purest and most cathartic demises of any villain ever. To this day, whenever I write the death of a antagonist in one of my stories, I still try to match the feeling I had when watching Freddy's death in Nightmare 4. The grand nature of his offing served to confirm just how much Alice had been through and how great the stakes were. It's big, it's bold, and it's brilliant.

Nightmare 4 captures a particular moment of time in the culture. Unlike the mute Jason and Michael Myers, Freddy could function as a sieve, the problems and hang-ups of American society passing through his gloved fingers. Harlin nails a satirical tone that, while not brilliant, is still rather clever. The movie takes the styles, attitudes, music, clothing, and fads of the day and twists them to skewer our lifestyles. The soundtrack, which ranges from Sinead O'Connor to The Fat Boys to The Divinyls, signifies that it's no longer the metal and new wave kids Freddy is after; everyone else is on the chopping block. Remember, AIDS doesn't just infect homosexuals. The shooting style varies from a Billy Idol video to a Doublemint commercial. Joey's death, in particular, is scored to Idol's "Fatal Charm," suitable since Freddy takes on the form of bikini pin-up Hope Marie Carlton and appears nude in the kid's waterbed. One half expects Idol to kick in the bedroom door and sneer out his lyrics to a horny Joey and a wet Carlton. Freddy dresses up his murders with the fashions of the day and shoves them down unwitting teen throats. The culture was heading toward that neon phase where we all wore eye-blinding colors on our fanny packs, hats, and shirts. This was just two years shy of M.C. Hammer pandemonium, which caused everyone (including me) to buy multicolored genie pants. Harlin brings this style into the movie, which is why it's so bright. It wasn't dark and smoky 1984 anymore. We had entered into Paula Abdul's America.

I don't deny that some of the stuff here doesn't make much sense. When did Kristen figure out she could pass on her powers? Did she just yell out "You'll need my powers!" and hope something would happen? Rick's karate death is pretty corny, something everyone in the production acknowledges in Never Sleep Again. I would have loved to have seen the remaining Elm Street trio last a bit longer, but I still think the early deaths aren't sacrilegious. Alice more than makes up for a lack of Kristen. There's a few other odds and ends that don't quite gel, but I don't think they detract from the picture. This was the last time the world really cared about Freddy Krueger. The entries after this only really appealed to hardcore fans, and that's including Freddy Vs. Jason. This particular horror cycle went as far as it could go, ending on the Pop Art note of Nightmare 4. Everything that had to be said was said, and the public's appetite was satiated. It was time for the culture to move onto the next wave of life. Freddy may only matter now to genre enthusiasts, but for a moment he was a major part of the cultural landscape. This picture was tailored for its time, yet still holds up, partially as a document of the past, and partially as just a really good flick. It's funny, creative, gross, sexy, literate, and a blast to watch. If David DeMoss ever reads this, I'm sure he'll be slapping his forehead.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

Trending Articles

Practice Sheet of Right form of verbs for HSC Students

Download: FK ft Shenky – Nakuyewa ”Prod by: Shenky”

How to win at Markstrat (Markstrat Tips and Tricks) – Vodites

Ominde Commission Report and Recommendations – Ominde Report of 1964

Bureau of Internal Revenue: Regional Offices (Directory)

GO 53 on Enhancement of Ex-gratia upto 5 Lakhs Toddy Tappers in Telangana

Cakewalk CA-2A Leveling Amplifier v2.0.1.97 WiN, v2.0.1.96 OSX Incl Keygen

Mp3 Download: Mdu - Kunjenjenjena

How the kill the job , when DTP request running for long hours.

Microsoft Intune から展開しているアプリのアップデートについて

18-year-old girl was beaten for half an hour by two Northampton men in 'an...

Car crash in Dunton Bassett leaves driver in critical condition

Macky 2, Two Others In Road Accident

Application log 00000000000000089514: Could not convert queue DLVST90CLNT

Detroit mafia: D’Anna Brothers agree to plea deal

Delivery block field greyed out using VA02

Muloraki Au

【個人撮影】スマホのプライベート映像♪「中に出さないで///」カラオケ屋での生ハメ撮りが流出ｗ【リベンジポルノ】＠PornHub

BREAKING NEWS: Diamond Platnumz Is Reported Dead After Ghastly Car Accident

FIAT 500 B0111 B0112