[Editorial] Reviving Freddy: A Critical Reassessment of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare PART 1

Part 1 - A Tapestry of Self-Awareness and the Use of Different Media To Both Engage and Subvert

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is one of my favourite horror films - I think about it, I write about it and I sometimes wish I was in it. Ask me which entries I rate highest in the franchise and my answer is always - ‘the ones with Nancy in’ and in the following order: A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare. The sixth instalment, Rachel Talalay’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare has always managed to mysteriously fade into the background of my awareness and in escaping my attention it has become the Nightmare film I am least familiar with. I recently read a remarkable essay in a chapter written by Tosha R. Taylor in Women Make Horror [Book Review] Women Make Horror (2020) — Ghouls Magazine which noted that the film turns 30 this year, and therefore set my mind to thinking. Why does Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare attract such universally negative responses (currently 19% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes)? Why has it not been embraced with the same fondness as its fellow-entrants and has its lack of critical praise somehow played into my own willingness to overlook the film? Finally, has the passing of time made any significant impact on how it can be read and interpreted? 

With some research, I found that there are a lot of opposing facts surrounding the film. As a franchise, the Nightmare on Elm Street series champions final girls and strong female characters, therefore how is it that on the only occasion a female director took the helm (and is also credited with writing the story), it failed to impress audiences? Furthermore, while it might be the least positively received of the series, it also happens to sit in a comfortable position of 5th in the gross rankings ahead of (amongst others) the 1984 instalment. With this in mind, a reappraisal is long overdue. It’s time to revisit Springwood one last time to take a critical look at Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and determine whether it’s flatlining reputation is justified or if it has been undeservedly misjudged by many for far too long. 

Welcome to Prime-Time Bitch! A Tapestry of Self-Awareness

Contrary to opinion, Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare is not the first film in the series to be self-aware. In the opening credits, Talalay balances a quote from German philosopher Nietzsche with one of the most oft quoted lines from none other than the monster from all our nightmares, Freddy Krueger. The words ‘Welcome to Prime-Time Bitch!’ were immortalized forever in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, Dream Warriors and are divisive amongst fans for their self-referential tone. In using this famous line to open her film, Talalay shows that she plans to blend stepping outside of conventions with a constant strong awareness of the many cliches, tropes and quotations that make up the Elm Street series.  The film begins by informing us that ten years have passed, and Freddy has wiped out all the children of Springwood, Ohio, all except one - a teenaged boy named John Doe. Some might argue that the use of such a name eschews a relatability and evokes an emptiness. However, through this choice Talalay is simultaneously making her character universal (anyone could be John Doe and there are many John Does out there), while also commenting on his insignificance (he is merely a blank canvas for the audience to project onto).

It becomes apparent from the first scene that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare will not be the formulaic horror film we are expecting as John Doe falls from a crumbling aeroplane whilst screaming ‘it’s not fair, I was almost out’. He then wakes from a dream where, for a moment, familiarity is established - as seasoned Nightmare fans we know these patterns and we also know that now John is safe because he is awake. However, this assumption is subverted as we realise that John is in another dream and the house is suspended within a cyclone. Before long, John arrives at a shelter for troubled youths led by a therapist Maggie and a man simply known as, ‘Doc’. At the shelter, John strikes up a friendship with fellow-teens, Spencer, Carlos and Tracy. As part of his treatment, John is taken back to Springwood where both he and the group are taunted by Freddy. Soon, Maggie begins to realise she has a mysterious connection to Freddy which culminates in a final showdown between the pair. 

In addition to the myriad of pop-references scattered throughout, the film also contains numerous salutes to and echoes of the films of the franchise as a whole. This makes it an amalgamated tapestry of the series but also allows for it to be established as an individual and unique property. When a bong is found in Spencer’s room, his response to the supervising adults is that he was ‘teaching the kids some survival techniques’, a clear reverberation of both the book Nancy reads in A Nightmare On Elm Street and her assertion that: ‘I’m into survival’. The youth shelter where teenagers engage in therapy and which acts as the central location in the film, plays like a subtle reflection of the youngsters gathered in the hospital to undertake dream therapy in A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors. What’s more, the overall campness (through use of an exaggerated, playful and extraordinary style) of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare evokes its early predecessor A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, Freddy’s Revenge. The character of Tracy, a blonde teenage girl with a history of trauma, feels heavily borrowed from (if not, entirely based upon) Kristen, the final girl of Dream Warriors. To add to this, the infamous and questionable snake monsters of Freddy’s Dead are nothing if not a harking back to the giant, half phallic, half viper which threatens Kristen in the climactic scene. Recurrently throughout the film, a little girl in a pretty dress with ribbons in her hair appears, acting as an obvious reference to the skipping girls we see performing the rhyme in A Nightmare in Elm Street. 

When John Doe arrives at the youth shelter, his first requests are for coffee, caffeine pills or cola, a knowing wink to the coping methods used by the victims of Elm Street-past. Rather than the ‘1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you’ rhyme, the teenagers in the shelter sing a version of ‘99 Bottles Sitting on the Wall’ in an attempt to stay awake. Just like Freddy, who also embellishes well-known quotes and phrases, Talalay has them change the words to ‘4567 bottles of beer’. When therapist Maggie and John Doe take a trip to Springwood in the hope of triggering repressed memories, fellow troubled-teens Tracy, Carlos and Spencer emerge unexpectedly from the back of the van and with this group assembled, the Dream Warriors dynamic is recreated. Upon arrival in Springwood, the group encounter a country-style fair.  We see a brief shot of a pizza crawling with cockroaches, a homage to both the tongue-in-cheek moment when a cluster of Freddy heads cry out from a pizza and the transformation of fitness fanatic Debbie into a roach in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, The Dream Master. When the trio attempt to leave Springwood, they are taken in multiple and continuous circles around a condensed area, evoking a scene from the aforementioned Part 4 where the central character Alice, finds herself in the same scene stuck on a loop. 

When video game enthusiast Spencer falls asleep in front of the television, Freddy appears on screen beckoning the teenager to: ‘trip out’. Not only does this serve as an example of the film engaging with the popular medium of television but it reminds us of the brief appearance Krueger makes on television in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, Dream Warriors.  This culminates in a wave of blood gushing up through the television set and spurting out into the living room in a moment recollective of Johnny Depp’s death as Glenn in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In perhaps the most direct and intertextual reference, Johnny Depp (with the help of a frying pan and an egg) delivers the words: ‘this is drugs, this is your brain on drugs’ as part of a television advert which Spencer watches once he has unwittingly fallen asleep. This inclusion serves as a reminder of where the franchise started (Depp played clownish school -boy Glenn in A Nightmare on Elm Street) and to Depp’s own troubled relationship with fame. Perhaps there is even a cheeky insinuation that without the series he wouldn’t be a star). Furthermore, Talalay has managed to take a well-known 1987 anti-drugs advert 1987 Classic "Brain Frying Pan" + "From You!" Drug PSAs TV Commercial - YouTube and reappropriate it for her own purpose. This speaks to the multitude of interactions that take place between different mediums within the zeitgeist and reminds us that they all feed into one collective commentary.  

When John Doe is eventually killed by Freddy, he disappears via a flashing light which dissolves his body into thin air, much like Marge in A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Soon after this, therapist Maggie has a revelation when she remembers that John's last words were ‘it’s not a boy’, a clear subversion of Freddy’s memorable declaration of ‘it’s a boy’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, Dream Child.  Upon returning to the orphanage where she was raised in order to find out more about her parents, Maggie enters shouting ‘Mother! Mother!’ in an aggressive and feisty tone just as Nancy does when coming home to her drunken parent in the 1984 film. We also hear extracts from Bernstein’s original score demonstrating that the old can be blended successfully with the new. In a tense and emotional scene which sees Tracy face off with her father (who is in fact Freddy), she burns her wrists on the cooker to wake up and on another occasion, we see the Doc wake up to a beeping alarm watch; both of which Nancy does in A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

In one of his many scenes of confrontation, Freddy lists the various methods in which his victims have tried to kill him and playfully cuts off his fingers for each attempt: ‘First they tried burning me, then they tried burying me but this is my favourite - they even tried holy water, but I keep on ticking’ laughing wickedly, he cites the events of the former films. Perhaps he is also pointing out that as none of these methods have been successful, there is in fact no way to finish him off for sure and read in this way, even the film’s title becomes (at least for the fans), a self-knowing private joke.   

Pop Goes the Culture: Employing Different Mediums to Engage and Subvert

The use of different media formats to both convey story and subvert the conventions of the genre are often employed and create a more active and participatory experience for the audience. Just like many of the characters, having witnessed five Nightmare films we are wise to Freddy, to the pitfalls and to the tropes. Not only does Talalay use this to engage with viewers in terms of specific moments and plot turns, but she also references the Nightmare series itself with frequent regularity. The use of different media, frequent time jumps and dreams within dreams also adds further layers, challenging audience expectations. The film begins by showing a map of Springwood Ohio which gives a (albeit instantly outdated) contemporary edge for the time. The importance of media is not reserved for modern technology as a newspaper article bearing the headline ‘Krueger Woman Missing’ is also of great importance and this in turn becomes connected with another alternative media form, a scrap book that will help connect the past and the present. 

We are first introduced to troubled teen Spencer through his love of video games. While he enjoys playing on his handheld console and on arcade machines his father (who is more interested in his own career than visiting his son at the shelter), views these activities as time-wasting. Spencer maintains a fondness of screens and devices as he passes time watching television whilst getting high. After falling victim to Freddy, his friend Carlos appears on the screen urging Spencer not to fall asleep. Unable to heed this advice, Spencer becomes absorbed into the television and we find that he is now inside his most treasured medium of all, a computer game. The game is watched and controlled by Freddy and within the game, a man with a frying pan appears, declaring ‘be like me, be like me’ an obvious pixelated stand-in for Spencer’s father. Freddy controls the makeshift father character choosing to hit Spencer with the frying pan. In response, Spencer hits back but Freddy increases the size of his character which towers over his shrinking teenage victim. Freddy is able to use a power glove (an obvious supplement for his glove of knives) to game his way to victory where he celebrates a high score. Here Talalay uses the medium of video games to create the sense of power Freddy has (as controller) and to illustrate that he enjoys and engages in playing these games (unlike Spencer’s father). This in turn, evokes an aura of ‘coolness’ around Freddy’s reputation and also acts as a remark upon how, as a global commodity, Freddy can interact with and spill over into all forms of media.  

In Talalay’s film, Freddy frequently embodies a range of different characters in the real world but the director takes it one step further by having Freddy embody one of the characters most closely associated with wickedness in cinema - The Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. In a terrifically camp and ostentatious scene, John becomes Dorothy for a moment as Freddy flies past his window on a broomstick. Shortly after, he appropriates the witch’s well-known catchphrase and amends the end of the line to fit his own context: ‘I’ll get you my pretty and your little soul too’. The effect is two-fold, not only does this demonstrate Talalay’s quirky propensity to reference pop-culture from across multiple decades, but also comments upon how the phenomenon of Freddy has become so far reaching that he is now able to twist a line in one of the most beloved films of all time. 

Through the use of flashbacks in the film, we are given an idyll of American life that is most frequently tied to the works of Director David Lynch (in particular, Blue Velvet). The white picket fence and a blooming garden sit beneath a bright blue sky but like Blue Velvet, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is interested in the ugliness that lurks beneath this perfect veneer. Whilst at the Springwood fair, the group are approached by a suffocating woman only known as Childless Mother played by Roseanne Barr who wants to take care of the teens. A household name at the time, Barr’s cartoonish cameo speaks to both the pop culture referencing and the alternate off-beat campiness of the film. The bizarre encounter leads Spencer to declare ‘we’re in Twin Peaks here’ just in case we didn’t make the connection. Ordinarily this direct allusion to the wonderfully surreal tv show Twin Peaks, might be read as heavy handed but in the context of this highly self-aware film it is entirely in-keeping. In addition to cameos from Roseanne Barr and Johnny Depp, the role of Freddy’s foster father is played by Alice Cooper, otherwise known as the ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’. At the time (and to this day) Alice Cooper held a huge worldwide fanbase. The decision to cast Cooper (and the aforementioned actors) then points to Talalays’ willingness to establish an on-trend dialogue between the film and its audience.

While the director works to break the mould, she also embraces certain conventions that have proved popular in the past such as having a strong female character who prevails over Freddy and playing about with the thin but blurred line between fantasy and reality. What has become evident through this exploration is that while on the surface, Freddy’s Dead might appear to be no more than a throwaway, short-lived experience with little credibility, it is in fact executing a number of sophisticated techniques that speak to Freddy’s place in popular culture. There is no denying that Freddy’s Dead is a problematic film but, as the only Nightmare instalment to have been directed by a woman, the approaches and perspectives tied up within it, beneath the campy humour and odd choices, hold hidden depths waiting to be explored and it fully deserves to be discussed with a more critical eye in the future.  

Part 2 coming soon…

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