After last year’s 4K UHD release of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, they finally released the whole Freddy series in September. It took me until now to watch all six sequels but you still have time before Halloween! Freddy vs. Jason was not included. So, we already covered the original last year. Let’s look at the sequels.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge has certainly improved over time, thanks to the LGBTQ+ themes. It’s also sort of the only standalone sequel. It makes sense that another family moves into the Thompson house and it happens again. It has Nancy’s diary but none of the characters are connected the way they are in future sequels.
It looks great with bright sunny ‘80s high school and suburbia during the day. Boy, the house surrounded by deep shadow at night is ominous. And the side trellis where Jesse (Mark Patton) sees Freddy (Robert Englund) in the boiler room. On the bus, shadows obscure Freddy nicely. The pool party massacre is pretty bright, but it is late night above.
There are some surround effects with the runaway bus and balls bouncing around the locker room.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors set the template for Nightmare sequels. It let Freddy have bigger and bigger set pieces, defined by the victims’ greatest fears. It also brought back the Elm Street children and Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), and introduced the backstory of Freddy’s conception.
The institutional setting offers a lot of shadow opportunities like the isolation room and under the archways on campus. Amanda Krueger disappears into them. The junkyard finale is part of the real world, but the corners of the dream world like the Wizard scene and the stairway down to Hell are stark. Kristen (Patricia Arquette) papier maches against a pure black room.
The wall crumbles in full surround when the Freddy snake appears. Birds flutter when Neil (Craig Wasson) follows Amanda to the abandoned ward. The fire in dream Hell crackles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is my favorite, not just because it was the first I saw in the theater when I got brave enough to watch these movies and read Fangoria. It’s Alice (Lisa Wilcox), discovering her power. She never even looked at herself in the mirror. She covered it with pictures of her friends.
So when she’s absorbed all the dream powers, she takes down all the photos and sees herself ready to battle Freddy, I still get chills. I didn’t know the term yet, but I was a young feminist for a girl discovering her power.
Dream Master has some of the best nightmares and the decrepit Freddy house in the dark thunderstorm looks great. Opening the cold boiler and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) in the junkyard truck keep the darkness while other dreams get more flamboyant. There are some green headlights in the junkyard I never noticed before, but also some pixelation when Kristen (Tuesday Knight) knocks herself out in class, but that’s not a vital image.
Surround sound gets much fuller now with thunder and rain, more background screams, chains clanking, the ceiling dripping, even birds chirping in daytime. The canine resurrection flame fills the room. Kincaid’s scream echoes. The beach, the elevator ride, the windy movie theater are all as aural as they are visual.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child doesn’t really work but there are enough interesting ideas to go with it, and it continues Alice’s story. Freddy haunting the dreams of an unborn child makes sense, and it’s nice to see Alice’s dad (Nicholas Mele) sober. The most interesting idea is that the one person Freddy fears is his own mommy.
It’s not my favorite looking entry either but 4K captures it. The grimy asylum walls are full of deep shadow. Stained glass windows are really distinct in the grimy church. Alice running through the tower crosses a lot of shadow. Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter)’s high dive is through a pure void. Dan (Danny Hassel)’s last drive goes through pitch black night. The black and white sequence is cool with the color victim but it remains mostly gray.
Surround sound captures the driving, the flames crackling, comic book pages fluttering and sparks when Alice meets her fetus.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare is silly but it’s fun and still has some genuine kills. Mocking deaf Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) is pure Freddy, and the infinite map is nicely surreal. It benefits the most from not actually being the last. Now it’s just Nightmare 6, the height of Freddy’s pop culture zeitgeist.
It is a very shadowy movie and the 4K makes it look more stylish than ever before. There are good shadows in the youth center, the abandoned Springwood streets at night, the boiler room and more. A lot of the movie has Freddy against a pure balck sky.
It is cool they include 3D glasses in every edition of Freddy’s Dead. Just know that it never worked, not even in theaters. I recently saw it at the New Beverly so can confirm that’s not just my 34-year-old memory. But, I have to say 4K is the most 3D it’s every looked. Short of using modern technology to post-convert the film, this is the closest they’ve ever gotten. The red and blue makes big splotches and it still blurs and goes double, but you can see what they were going for in most of the scenes.
Surround also creates aural 3D effects of thunder, Jon Doe (Shon Greenblatt) rolling down the hill, the pins dropping in poor Carlos’s nightmare, and electricity in the finale.
When I heard Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was going to be about Freddy stalking the actors from the films, I was excited to see Freddy kill Englund. So I was disappointed when that didn’t happen but Craven was interested in something deeper than gimmicks. Scream would deliver more on the populist kind of meta.
Here, Craven was exploring how our fear manifests when we don’t give it an outlet. That’s the new Freddy. It’s also about Heather Langenkamp being legitimately stalked and authorities blame her movies instead of the stalker, unfortunately still relevant. And she’s grieving her husband. And she’s mother worried about her son (Mikko Hughes) also being dismissed.
Those are also the people Craven had to deal with his whole career, blaming horror movies instead of the real institutions that create real-world horror. This Freddy is coming for Heather’s son, the worst fear of any parent and the reverse of the other films. In those, the kids couldn’t trust their parents so had to band together.
Also, maybe an actor is tired of hearing about one movie all the time, although Langenkamp has continued supporting and exploring Nightmare.
As a mostly real-world based movie, New Nightmare in 4K vividly captures a realistic house, playground, hospital and studio offices. There is moody lighting in Langenkamp’s home at night, and the freeway scene captures the darkest night.
Surround sound is more subtle. I only caught glass breaking in earthquake scenes, and ominous whispers at the funeral.