Every Nightmare On Elm Street Film Ranked Worst To Best

Sadly, the extra-goofiness of Freddy's Dead may be largely down to the failures of the preceding Nightmare movie. Working from a first draft script by esteemed splatterpunk novelist duo John Skipp and Craig Spector, 1989's Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child seemed set on making Freddy genuinely sinister again, with a darker, moodier approach than the previous two movies.

However, Skipp and Spector's vision didn't line up with what the studio wanted: i.e. something safe and familiar that audiences would pay to see. Extensive rewrites followed, with director Stephen Hopkins by all accounts working under a tight schedule with executives breathing down his neck, so it's hardly surprising that The Dream Child wound up one of the least coherent entries in the series.

As the fifth film, The Dream Child also suffers from the common problem of over-complicating things in the hopes of explaining and expanding on the backstory. Delving into Freddy's origins as the 'bastard son of a hundred maniacs,' it also puts a new, largely incomprehensible spin on his dream powers, somehow rooted in the unborn child of returning Nightmare 4 heroine Alice (Lisa Wilcox).

The Gothic production design is a nice touch, and helps lend some scenes a bit of much-needed creepiness, but this is undermined by the forced humour which by now the films felt obliged to pile on. The kills feel unnecessarily elaborate too, heavily reliant on extensive special make-up FX which, while often impressive, are frequently a bit too extravagant.