A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

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In 1989, 'The Dream Child' was released to the weakest box office numbers the Freddy franchise has really seen yet. While it still did okay, it wasn't exactly a "number one" among the fans like its two predecessors. It seemed abundantly clear that Freddy was a fast-burn character for the time. While Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers have legacies dating back several years prior to '89, Freddy was just 5 years old. It probably didn't help by tackling the sensitive subject matter it did.

In reality, the teen girls who were following along with this series were a little older now, and some very real things were coming into play like pregnancy and all that surrounds it. Writer Leslie Bohem wanted to do something scary aimed towards women, and thus the idea of the "Dream Child" was born. As though the idea behind accidental teen (or young adult) pregnancy wasn't scary enough, she mixed in the concept of a strange man trying to take a child away from his mother, combined with themes of possession. While today, the idea may be sort of intriguing, back then it added a serious note to what was known to be a fun horror romp by this point.

'Dream Warriors' and 'The Dream Master' were thrill rides with cool effects, memorable settings, and likeable characters with Freddy really coming into his own as the James Bond of slasher horror with his signature swagger and one-liners. But with 'The Dream Child', there always seemed to be a little something missing, that I could never quite put my finger on. Upon a few further watches of it, what I really landed on was the combination of the threat of Freddy invading peoples dreams being too directed at Alice (Lisa Wilcox), making her unborn baby boy his protégé, and the fact that it can get just plain confusing.

Taking place a year after the events of 'The Dream Master', Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel) have become a couple. Alice starts getting subtle hints that something is amiss in her dreams, and before long she finds herself face-to-face with Freddy once again. As Freddy's return has Alice genuinely confused, she soon discovers that the window for his return is through her new, unborn baby. Furthering the lore a little bit, it turns out Freddy can also manipulate reality around our new set of heroes through the dreams of the ever-sleeping unborn. But if that's too confusing, at least some of the kills are cool.

Some of the controversy behind this title has to do with pregnancy and sensitive subject matter like abortion. Even with Freddy trying to transform her child into a thing of evil, Alice is determined to keep her baby, which I see as a reference to a mother's constant attempt to steer her child in the right direction as opposed to letting the evils of society take his mind over, Freddy representing those evils. If you read deep enough into it, you might also see Freddy as a would-be abusive father, so some of the fear in this could come from bringing a child into a hostile environment. It kinda sucks that we had to go from the fun of the previous two films to what could be considered the horror representation of an after school special.

This all sort of brings me back to 'Freddy's Revenge' as well in that it plays with ideas of possessing the unborn baby to have some access to the real world (or at least that's what I took from it). Again, I just can't wrap my head around why Freddy ever would want access to the real world when he has such a cool and useful (for his purposes) superpower. I can give the film some credit for its creativity and trying something different, but it's a far cry from how enjoyable the last two films were, and I would have personally preferred the rules of dreaming to be simpler than what they established in this.

While some of the nightmare sequences here are decent, nothing particularly stands out either. If given the option between 'Freddy's Revenge' and this, I would still choose this, as I can appreciate a decent enough amount of what happens. But part of me feels like it's a chapter not quite meant for me and my tastes when it comes to the series. While I can respect it for what it is, I still see it as a massive dip from the previous two as the fun facto seems to have been sucked out of it, save a few of Freddy's one-liners. It's passable, but definitely not my favourite of the batch.

3/5

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