Number2:Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors
I’m going to go back to that night — the one I mentioned in the introduction. Because the first Elm Street I ever saw, taped off Sky onto a VHS, was Part 3: The Dream Warriors. It’s remained a favourite, and it came close — really close — to being as good as the original.
The opening scene sees Kristen falling asleep while making the matchstick house she keeps seeing in her dreams. Freddy’s house. I remember an eerie guitar riff here, but I’m glad to see my Blu‑ray restores the true “Into the Fire” track by Dokken — the rock music she uses to stay awake.
Her falling asleep leads to a very frightening (to my thirteen‑year‑old brain) run through Freddy’s house of horrors. It’s easy to see now that the little girl she tries to save is a puppet, but back then it was terrifying. When Kristen wakes, everything seems fine. She heads to the bathroom — and jump scare. He’s in the mirror. Never trust a mirror in a horror movie. The taps morph into razors and slash Kristen’s wrists just as her mother walks in to ask what she’s doing.
At the time, I hadn’t seen anything like it. I didn’t have the words. Freddy is staging these murders to look like suicides. The adults can’t see the threat. They see cries for attention, and later tragedies of the teens’ own making. It’s clear Freddy is a metaphor for depressive mental illness.
Luckily for the teens, someone does know what they’re going through, as we’re reintroduced to Nancy from the first film.
This is the first Elm Street to use the psychiatric ward setting. And despite what might sound doom‑and‑gloom so far, the film pivots from horror to dark fantasy. To defeat Freddy, our Dream Warriors use a psychiatric drug and have to find their inner powers (the depression metaphor really keeps coming, doesn’t it). The X‑Men film New Mutants would later credit this movie as a heavy influence.
I actually loved this change. It’s perhaps the last Nightmare film where you’re rooting for the teens, not the killer. There are a couple of very memorable kills — one where he takes out a Harry Potter lookalike years before that was a thing, using a wheelchair (it’s bizarre). And of course, the iconic moment where he pops out of a TV and, after slamming his victim’s face into it, quips: “Welcome to prime time, b%tch.”
It’s with this line that you can trace the steady decline. Once the monster starts taunting his prey with one‑liners, a layer of mystique is lost. But in my opinion, this film is darn near perfect anyway.
We do lose some key characters. Nancy is killed in the story — though, as you already know, this isn’t her last appearance. But overall, the film is surprisingly hopeful.
If you wanted to see the best this franchise has to offer, you can make an unofficial trilogy of Wes Craven’s films: the first, the third, and New Nightmare. Everything from the soundtrack, those really dark subtexts, and the practical visuals make this a classic.
But that just leaves one. The one that started it all. Meet me on Elm Street. This Halloween.