I Love Soul Food: Reflecting on ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master’ 35 Years Later
By the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master hit theaters in August of 1988, Freddy was already something of a megastar. For the first time in the history of slashers, the killer was the main draw, not the kills themselves. The previous entry, Dream Warriors, was a box office success that solidified star Robert Englund’s celebrity status. The Elm Street kids were now more expendable than ever and Freddy Krueger was about to go even more mainstream as the first true antihero of the MTV generation.
Usually, handing over the reins of a budding American horror franchise to a foreign director with little to no experience in Hollywood would have ended in disaster. Renny Harlin wouldn’t take no for an answer, however, and New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye finally relented after Harlin kept showing up to the office every day. It certainly didn’t hurt that Wes Craven’s initial idea for Dream Master included a nonsensical plot involving time travel inside of the dream world. That, and the fact that the WGA was about to go on strike. Sound familiar?
The script for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 eventually landed in the lap of Brian Helgeland who was tasked with writing something legible with only seven days to turn in a full script. Piggybacking off of the Matrix-esque ideas explored in Dream Warriors, Helgeland and his buddy William Kotzwinkle came up with the idea of a Dream Master powerful enough to take on Freddy on his home turf. Enter in the character of Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) who would go on to also star in Dream Child and become one of the most popular final girls of the 1980s and beyond.
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Once the writer’s strike hit, Harlin and his newly minted cast of actors had to fill in the gaps and try to string together an effective Elm Street movie that played to the series’ strengths. Harlin himself has gone on record saying most of the nightmare sequences came from his own sleepless nights as a child.
Nightmare logic already has the liberty of being generally nonsensical, which certainly helped seal up the cracks in the story. It also led to some of the more bizarre choices in Dream Master, starting with a possessed dog named Jason (synergy!) resurrecting Krueger in the junkyard by pissing fire on his grave. (If that dog looks familiar, you probably just watched Jack Sholder’s The Hidden.)
Inexplicably, the Elm Street franchise is always interested in jettisoning the teenagers from each film in favor of new souls for Krueger to vanquish. In Freddy’s Dead, the first to be directed by longtime producer Rachel Talalay, Freddy proudly proclaims: “Every town has an Elm Street.” Dream Master commits the biggest cardinal sin of all nine films by quickly dispatching Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) and Joey (Rodney Eastman) in the opening scenes. (Although Joey’s death by waterbed is glorious and serves as an updated, pubescent version of Johnny Depp’s waterfall of blood from Craven’s original.)
Getting rid of Kincaid and Joey so early on would have been unforgivable if not for the new batch of high schoolers introduced who all had their own distinct personalities. Alice, Rick, Sheila, Debbie, and Dan weren’t the troubled teens from Dream Warriors stuck in an asylum getting pumped full of Hypnocil. They all felt like kids you could hang out with at the mall. When Freddy tapped into Sheila’s fear of asthma by literally sucking the life out of her, it stung. When Rick fought an invisible Freddy in his dream dojo, it may as well have been my best friend on the receiving end of Krueger’s glove. (That scene only exists because the film ran out of money, but I still love it.)
Related: NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Fans: There’s a Real “Hypnocil” Type Sleep Aid called “Dream Warrior”
Of course, the pièce de résistance is Debbie’s Kafkaesque transformation into a roach that leads to what is arguably the most memorable one-liner in Elm Street history: “You can check in, but you can’t check out.” Dream Master already had some of the best special makeup effects artists in the business on board, namely John Carl Buechler whom Harlin had just worked with on Prison. But it was Screaming Mad George of Society fame, not surprisingly, who was mostly responsible for Debbie’s elaborate death scene. The Roach Motel sequence also effectively put an end to the workout craze of the ’80s in one fell swoop. The extended effects sequence during the finale was, and still remains, the most ambitious ending for any Elm Street film. The commitment to surrealist effects that had never been seen on that scale in an Elm Street movie was a key reason why Dream Master became the top-grossing slasher movie of the 1980s.
35 years later, it may be the soundtrack to Dream Master that has the greatest staying power. The hair metal band Dokken is forever linked to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 thanks to their title track “Dream Warriors.” Played over the opening credits in Dream Master, it’s Tuesday Knight’s dream pop horror classic “(Running From This) Nightmare” that directly taps into the sleepless teenage angst that truly defines the Elm Street legacy. Add in “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama and “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” by the late Sinéad O’Connor, and the track list suddenly becomes all the more tragic.
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