The 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' Franchise

The teens of Springwood, Ohio have a dream, and it's nothing like Martin Luther King's. They've been having a shared nightmare of a shadowy figure wearing a fedora, a striped sweater and a glove with metal talons attached to the fingers. After much prodding and a few deaths, they discover that years ago their parents burned an acquitted child murderer alive, and now he's back for dreamy revenge. Thanks, Mom. After all of her friends are killed, heroine Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) finally defeats Freddy by...not being scared of him? A bit of a cop-out ending, but the original is generally considered to be a modern horror classic.

A decidedly inferior sequel, this film largely abandons the whole dream scenario by focusing on Freddy's efforts to materialize in the real world. He does so by possessing the son of the family that moves into Nancy's old house, and he even manages to crash a pool party in the process. However, the son, Jesse, eventually regains control and sends Freddy back to the netherworld. Until...

Realizing the error of their ways, the filmmakers return Freddy to his dream-killing M.O. They add a lighter, more fantastic tone as well, as the victims fight back by giving themselves super powers in their dreams. The story finds Freddy stalking the last remaining children of the mob that killed him. Not coincidentally, all of them have been committed to a psychiatric hospital. What is a coincidence is that Nancy from the first film is a doctor there. She helps the kids dispose of Freddy by burying his bones in sacred ground, although she dies in the process. Perhaps the best of the sequels, Dream Warriors is one of the only ones (along with New Nightmare) that benefits from creative input from series creator Wes Craven.

The tone of the series gets increasingly outlandish with The Dream Master, featuring over-the-top visuals and Freddy's penchant for bad puns ("Wanna suck face?" as he sucks the air out of a poor asthmatic gal's lungs). Freddy returns to off the kids who stubbornly insisted on staying alive in the previous film. He does so fairly easily, then moves on to a new group of kids, led by Alice (Lisa Wilcox). She eventually defeats Freddy with some mumbo jumbo secret weakness that the filmmakers make up for every sequel.

In a strange concept that didn't gel with many viewers, Freddy returns by haunting the dreams of Alice's unborn child. Through the baby, he's somehow able to torment Alice and her friends. However, the ghost of Freddy's mother, along with Alice's future unborn child (!) team up to give him what for. The Dream Child is darker and more surreal than the previous two entries in the series, but also features less screen time for Freddy and is, well, just too darn weird.

As you should've learned from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, never trust a slasher when it claims to be the last of the series. This "final" installment has Freddy tracking down his long-lost daughter, Maggie (Lisa Zane). She manages to destroy Freddy "for good" by dragging him into the real world, but only after the film flashes back into his childhood and detours into a gimmicky 3-D sequence. An ending unbefitting such a horror icon.

After sitting idly through the limp Freddy's Dead, Elm Street creator Wes Craven decided to give the series a proper sendoff in 1994. New Nightmare is a mindbender typical of his talent wherein Freddy haunts Heather Langenkamp (Nancy from the original film) in real life. He draws her and her young son into the dream world, but they eventually defeat him in this most dark, cerebral and "realistic" film of the franchise.

Of course, since Wes Craven doesn't own the rights to the Freddy Krueger character, his effort to put him to rest in New Nightmare proved fruitless when Freddy vs. Jason went into production. Merging with New Line Cinema's other struggling slasher franchise, Friday the 13th, Freddy vs. Jason finds Freddy recruiting Friday's Jason Vorhees to kill the children of his old Elm Street haunting ground in order to instill the amount of fear necessary for him to return from the netherworld. Of course, two such larger-than-life characters can't possibly coexist -- just ask Simon and Garfunkel -- so they end up at each other's throat. Shallow fun with promises of more to come.