A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

“Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I loathe them”: that quote (attributed to Edgar Allan Poe) opens the third entry in the “Nightmare” saga, signaling New Line Cinema’s intention to return the film to its origins. Basically, they plan to refocus the story on sleep – and its ensuant nightmares. With his own script in hand, Craven returns on a mission to restore Freddy to the oneiric dimension where he belongs, a dynamic the prior film undermined with its bizarre demonic possession theme.

The result is a high-quality figurative work – one of the most well-received of the series by critics and fans alike – although it’s not without its weaknesses. First, the choice to ontologically contextualize Krueger within a Christianizing horizon brings the religious component to a far more prominent and pervasive level than in prior installments (consider for example the fact that the monster turns out to be the son of a young nun who had repeatedly been raped, and that the only way to stop him is to consecrate his remains and bury them in hallowed ground to bring peace to his restless soul).

Second, Russell’s film marks the precise moment when Freddy’s personality takes a grotesque turn down a path that will gradually turn contemporary cinema’s most famous boogeyman into something of an infernal smart mouth. For example, he smashes an aspiring actress’s head against a television after sarcastically quipping: “This is it, Jennifer, your big break in TV. Welcome to prime time, bitch!“.

From an artistic viewpoint, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” offers a fair amount of enjoyment, especially when it comes to the surreal sequences that creatively and imaginatively recreate dreamlike situations: time gets compressed and protracted, events repeat and recycle, locations abruptly shift, and the logic is anything but Aristotelian.

Makeup and special effects, effective as usual, are further enhanced by a macabre verve sparkling with some original visual solutions (the murder sequence with Freddy using poor Phillip’s own tendons as puppet strings remains imprinted in the memory, as do the entertaining – and somewhat nostalgic – stop motion scenes). The cast includes a wealth of familiar faces, including the welcome return of the Langenkamp/Saxon duo, the legendary Laurence Fishburne, and a nineteen-year-old Patricia Arquette making her film debut here.

Box office: bigger budget ($5 million), exponentially bigger take ($45 million in the US alone).