Editorials
31 Years Later: Revisiting ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child’ and My Introduction to Freddy
All of my memories of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child revolve around primetime network television and an eight year old me in 1991 tuning in to see what WPIX Channel 11 was featuring for the night. I’d grown up around the time where Freddy Krueger was still something of a cult icon for the whole family, so sitting down to finally see an actual Nightmare movie didn’t bother me much. Especially with my favorite show “Saved by the Bell” lampooning it just weeks earlier, and the availability of Freddy Krueger gum in my local grocery store; my uncle even had an Elm Street sticker album he carried around!
The Dream Child, now at the ripe old age of thirty one this year, was my introduction to Freddy Krueger, and it’s a movie filled to the brim with iconic imagery and disturbing deaths by the dream demon. WPIX didn’t always include the first film in their line up, so I’d only get to see The Dream Master and The Dream Child back to back and never really had the resources to seek out the other sequels. I didn’t get to see the first film until I was at least seventeen. And so my fascination with Krueger and my love for the character blossomed primarily out of The Dream Child, where Krueger was well into his saga of tormenting the children on Elm Street and was now seeking to begin his reign of terror anew with the birth of a child.
It never actually dawned on me how controversial The Dream Child was when I was a kid. It was only years later, watching the fantastic documentary Never Sleep Again, that I came to learn the film didn’t exactly hit the mark with fans or critics. Director Stephen Hopkins took an edgier overtone with Krueger, using his sequel as a means of exploring the ideas of abortion, unwanted pregnancy and the idea of Krueger instilling a new soul into an unborn child. The heroine Alice comes to grips with the idea of her pregnancy with Danny, her fellow survivor from The Dream Master. Although the script from Leslie Bohem doesn’t directly tackle it, Alice does grapple with the concept of abortion and this is where Krueger is somewhat allowed to interfere and use his presence as a means of destroying her sanity and building a new bloodline for his legacy.
The Dream Child also looks into the conception of Krueger himself, which involved his mother Amanda Krueger being gang raped in the asylum she oversaw, and inevitably giving birth to the “Son of a Thousand Maniacs.” Here, Krueger is filled with wrath when he’s reborn into Alice’s consciousness, as he’s given an almost renewed sense of power. He immediately begins wreaking havoc on just about every one of Alice’s friends, inflicting horrendous deaths on them all. The Dream Child features Krueger at his most vindictive, reducing aspiring model Greta to a waking nightmare of her own lack of self esteem and her tendencies toward anorexia. With Freddy serving, she’s forced to eat herself alive in the middle of a horrendous dinner with her shrill mother (who often discouraged eating of any kind).
Danny gets probably the most painful death of them all, as he’s literally merged with his motorcycle before his eyes, slowly manifesting into a hellish monster… much to Freddy’s delight. This dream would be the precursor to the death of Heather’s husband in New Nightmare, as both men fall asleep at the wheel and endure painful deaths by the hand of Krueger. As an eight year old, even in its chopped for network TV glory, Danny’s death was mind blowing, and though the kill scene is vastly reduced from director Hopkins’ original plans, it’s still one of the most punk deaths Krueger ever inflicted.
My favorite though is the death of Mark, the comic book geek and artist. Not only is he my favorite character of the movie, but he’s the closest we come to seeing an actual dream warrior emerge after the death of Kristen in The Dream Master. As an eight year old aspiring artist and rabid comic buff, Mark was my hero. He drew incredible works of art, and inadvertently spent most of his time manifesting Krueger into a fallible being as a means of taking away his power. When Mark has no choice but to fight Freddy, he gives him a very hard time, if even for a moment when he takes the shape of “The Phantom Prowler.” Only when Freddy takes the form of “Super Freddy” does he dole out the most creative death of the series, hacking poor Mark to pieces.
Fun kills aside, writer Bohem delves much deeper into the back story of Krueger and the idea of evil being nature or nurture. Can it be passed on? If Alice keeps Jacob will he become a person of moral character or someone like Freddy? Did Amanda Krueger’s gang rape really help create pure evil in Freddy? Or did the contemplation of an abortion put a stain on Krueger’s soul? Is the final scene an indication that perhaps Jacob is carrying on Freddy’s reign of terror?
The Elm Street series had dealt with weighty topics in previous films in the franchise, but The Dream Child is refreshingly bold in the way it uses the idea of abortion as a means of putting to question not just Krueger’s nature, but the all-encompassing nature of evil. The arguably polarizing plot point only enhances what many often consider a throwaway sequel to the series. At the end of Alice’s fight with Freddy, all she can do is hope that Jacob finds the right path, away from the clutches of Krueger.
And even after Freddy’s Dead established Krueger’s role as a father and his daughter’s ascension to helping children, all we can do is hope that Alice and Jacob lived happily ever after.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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