10 Reasons Nightmare On Elm Street 3 Is Secretly The Best Freddy Film

7. Exposition That Doesn't Suck

As the rest of the horror industry would go on to prove in subsequent years, continuously re-opening and re-corking a story for the sake of revenue is generally going to yield ridiculous results. The Elm Street sequels themselves became a shining example of this concept as they wore on, deploying such compelling plot devices as nursery rhyme limit breaks and intra-uterine ecto-containment. So it's refreshing in hindsight (and maybe a touch surprising) to notice that all of the story expansion in Dream Warriors was done with a pretty steady hand. We got an explanation as to why Freddy's soul is still around offing people, which follows logically into how to stop him for good, and there's also a brief bit of back story that manages to make him even darker. Before the credits, you got either an easter egg or a mild ego boost, depending on whether or not you figured out Sister Mary Helena's secret. There's just enough to expand the story in a satisfying way, instead of just throwing more Freddy at audiences with some miscarried plot, which would have been fine at the box office but would have been utterly un-replayable as of roughly 1989. Wait... what am I saying, "would have"?