It can be difficult to fathom in today’s cinematic landscape, but there was a time when superhero movies weren’t a thing. Prior to the turn of the millennium (when Bryan Singer’s X-Men turned out to actually be pretty great), there simply weren’t a whole lot of feature films about caped crusaders, and, with the exceptions of the Christopher Reeves Superman films and the Michael Keaton Batmans, the ones that did get made were pretty uniformly awful (Marvel began inauspiciously with Howard the Duck, and somehow managed to sink lower from there). While there are likely any number of reasons for this– notably the fact that special effects took many years to catch up to the imagination of Jack Kirby— a big part of it is that comic books just weren’t cool. While words like “nerd” and “geek” today get tossed around as points of pride, there was a time when an encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes would result in swirlies and wedgies, rather than seven-figure deals with Warner Brothers. Superhero movies were difficult to sell, and when they did get made it was frequently with an apologetic shrug, as if the filmmaker was saying to the audience “Yeah, I know this stuff is lame, but maybe we can still have fun with it, okay?”
One of the curious side-effects of this stigma is what I call the Stealth Superhero Movie: films which borrow the trappings of comic book adventures without having to lower themselves to all that silly tights-and-capes nonsense. These range from the sober space messiah of The Day the Earth Stood Still to the urban vigilante of Death Wish, to post-millennial auteur fare like Unbreakable and Donnie Darko. These films allowed moviegoers to enjoy superhero stories without admitting they were enjoying superhero stories– or, frequently, without even realizing it.
Such is the case with Dream Warriors, the third installment in the ubiquitous Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. On its surface, Dream Warriors is a quintessential ‘80s slasher film– which, to be sure, it is. But Nightmare was never the typical cabin-in-the-woods series: its central conceit of a dream-haunting maniac lent itself to flights of fancy, and Dream Warriors is perhaps the ultimate realization of its possibilities.
The warriors of the title are a group of troubled teens (led by Patricia Arquette, of all people) institutionalized and united by their shared history of vivid nightmares. Predictably, they start getting picked off in a series of increasingly elaborate set pieces; just as predictably, they turn out to be the next generation of youths marked for revenge by deceased madman Freddy Krueger. But what’s less predictable is the manner in which they fight back. Led by psychiatrist Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, returning final girl from the first film), they learn to harness dream-logic, gaining superhuman powers to use in the sleep realm against their attacker. There are no costumes or code names, but the final act is essentially an X-Men story, with the surviving protagonists using their outlandish abilities and over-the-top personalities to overcome evil.
As a film, Dream Warriors may not be the best of the series (that honor still probably belongs to the original, directed by series creator Wes Craven), but as a Freddy Krueger movie it might be the platonic ideal. At this point, the series was comfortable enough to stretch out into quirkier directions, without quite lapsing into the self-parody of the later installments (for a good example of its humor, see the infamous scene involving a killer TV set, cameos by Dick Cavett and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the deathless line “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”). Robert Englund is at his zenith as the iconic bogeyman, and the film boasts an unusual roster of talent (in addition to Arquette, the cast features a young Laurence Fishburne, and the script features contributions by Craven, genre maverick Bruce Wagner, and future A-lister Frank Darabont). And despite the inherent cynicism of the genre, there is a surprising warmth to the characters; unlike the casts of most slasher films, these kids are downright likable, and you may even feel something when their numbers start to diminish. We may be in a golden age of superpowered cinema, but there’s something to be said for the days when heroes hid behind Clark Kent glasses– and wound up being even more weird and wonderful as a result.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
1987
dir. Chuck Russell
96 min.
Part of the ongoing series: It Came From 1987
35mm!!
