A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is a 1988 American fantasy slasher film and the fourth installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The film was directed by Renny Harlin and stars Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, and Danny Hassel. Following the death of Nancy Thompson, Freddy Krueger reappears in the dreams of Kristen Parker, Joey Crusel, and Roland Kincaid. After completing his revenge against the families who killed him, Krueger uses Kristen's best friend, Alice Johnson, to gain access to new victims in order to sate his murderous needs. The film is a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and was followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989). It is often popularly referred to as "the MTV Nightmare" of the franchise.

The Dream Master was released on August 19, 1988, and grossed $49.4 million at the domestic box office on a budget of $6.5 million, which made it the highest-grossing film in the franchise in the United States until the release of Freddy vs. Jason, a crossover with the Friday the 13th franchise, in 1997. It received mixed reviews from critics. Plot

In 1988, a year after the events of the previous film, Kristen, Kincaid, and Joey have been released from Westin Hills and are back to their lives as normal teenagers with their families. However, Kristen believes Freddy Krueger will come back and when she dreams that she is in Freddy's old boiler room, she summons Joey and Kincaid into the dream. Kincaid and Joey are upset that she has reverted to her old ways back when they were at Westin Hills. To keep her calm, they take her to the boiler and show her that it is ice cold. Kristen had also summoned Kincaid's dog Jason into the dream. The dog jumps out of the boiler, bites Kristen, and they all awaken in their rooms. The next day, Kristen meets up with her boyfriend, martial arts enthusiast Rick Johnson (Andras Jones), and their friends—Rick's shy and quiet sister Alice (Lisa Wilcox), Sheila (Toy Newkirk), an asthmatic genius, and Debbie (Brooke Theiss), a tough girl who doesn't like bugs. Kincaid and Joey confront Kristen at school about the dream. They tell her to let it go, that their days of fighting in dreams are over, and if she keeps going at it she might accidentally bring Krueger back.

That night, Kristen stays awake to keep herself from dreaming, but Kincaid falls asleep. He awakens in a junkyard, where Freddy has been accidentally resurrected. Kincaid puts up a good fight against Freddy, but Freddy overpowers him. Kincaid screams for Kristen but Freddy reaches him and kills him. Joey watches MTV and listens to music in his room. He begins to fall asleep and discovers a model from one of his posters swimming in his waterbed. Freddy jumps out of the waterbed and attempts to drown Joey. Joey screams for Kristen to help him but Freddy stabs and kills him. At school the next day, Kristen panics when she notices that Joey and Kincaid are missing and accidentally knocks herself out as Rick attempts to calm her. Freddy tries to attack Kristen as the school nurse wakes her up. Kristen feels guilty about staying awake when she learns that Kincaid and Joey were found dead. She later tells Rick, Alice, and Alice's crush Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel) about Freddy. She vows to avenge Kincaid and Joey.

Kristen realizes that her mother has put sleeping pills in her dinner but falls asleep as she tries to run out of the dining room. Kristen starts to dream; Freddy overcomes her attempts to repel him and forces her back to his home. Since Kristen is the last of the Elm Street children still alive, Freddy goads Kristen into summoning on one of her friends into the dream, so that his fun can begin anew. She calls Alice into her dream, and Freddy throws Kristen into his boiler but before she dies, Kristen gives Alice her dream power. Alice wakes up with the sense that something is wrong and takes Rick to Kristen's house. When they get there, they see that Kristen's bedroom is on fire with her in it.

Later, Alice falls asleep during class and inadvertently brings Sheila into her dream. Freddy kills Sheila and makes it look like an asthma attack. Rick starts to believe Alice, but the following day, he has a dream where an invisible Freddy attacks him in a martial arts dojo. Rick fights him, and manages to knock his knife glove off. However, the glove levitates and stabs him, killing him. With each death, Alice changes—she gains the abilities and personalities of her dead friends. She makes plans with Debbie and Dan to fight and kill Freddy together, but when her father keeps her in, Alice falls asleep. Through Alice, Freddy stalks Debbie, transforms her into a cockroach, and crushes her in a roach motel. Using Debbie's temper, Alice tries to ram Freddy but collides with a tree in reality, injuring Dan. As Dan is rushed into surgery, Alice returns home and readies herself to join him and face Freddy.

In a dream, Alice rescues Dan, and the two find themselves in an old church. Dan gets injured in the dream which prompts his surgeons to wake him up. Alice now has to face Freddy alone. Freddy has the upper hand due to his experience, but she uses her friends' dream powers against him. When he is about to win, Alice remembers a nursery rhyme called "The Dream Master". She recites it and forces Freddy to face his own reflection which causes the souls within him to revolt. The strain tears Freddy apart. Alice's friends' souls are released and leave Freddy as a hollow husk. Months later, Dan and Alice are on a date when Dan tosses a coin into a fountain. For a moment, Alice sees Freddy's reflection in the water, but she ignores it. Dan asks her what she wished for, but Alice does not tell him as they walk away from the fountain.

Cast

Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger and nurse (without make-up)

Lisa Wilcox as Alice Johnson

Danny Hassel as Dan Jordan

Tuesday Knight as Kristen Parker

Ken Sagoes as Roland Kincaid

Rodney Eastman as Joey Crusel

Andras Jones as Rick Johnson

Brooke Theiss as Debbie Stevens

Toy Newkirk as Sheila Kopecky

Nicholas Mele as Mr. Dennis Johnson

Brooke Bundy as Elaine Parker

Linnea Quigley as soul from Freddy's chest

Robert Shaye appears uncredited in a cameo role as Alice's teacher talking about a positive and a negative gate of dreams.

Development
Franchise originator Wes Craven presented his own pitch for the fourth Elm Street film, but producers Sara Risher and Robert Shaye turned it down, instead going with the 'Dream Master' pitch as a progression of the Dream Warriors concept from the previous film. Risher explained that

Shaye felt that Craven's idea did not have the impact the producers were looking for. Craven and his writing partner Bruce Wagner were later contacted about doing rewrites for the script, but turned down the offer as Craven felt that they should have been approached as artists of the original material. Brian Helgeland was at New Line Cinema around Christmas 1987 about a script named Highway to Hell, a pitch that was turned down by them and would not be realized until 1992; the company was desperate to get Nightmare 4 going as they lacked both a script and a director for the film at the time. Mike De Luca begged Helgeland to have a try at it and come up with a script within two weeks; he went to his parents' house and finished the script within nine days, sending it to New Line Cinema with FedEx. Helgeland's script was a rewrite of William Kotzwinkle's original script. Ken and Jim Wheat were brought in next for further polishes; the Writers Guild credited the shooting script to the Wheat brothers. In an interview with Midnight’s Edge, director Tom McLoughlin said that after completing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, New Line offered him the job on The Dream Master. His one caveat was that he wanted creative control. The studio couldn’t adhere to the demand, specifically because they had already begun filming without any director. McLoughlin said,

Eventually, the director's work was given to Finnish-born Renny Harlin, who had previously directed only two low-budget feature films: a Finnish action film Born American in 1986 and an American horror film Prison in 1987. Rachel Talalay claims that she and the other producers felt that since the audience was so familiar with Freddy at this stage, it would be harder to replicate the scare factor of the first two films; instead they decided to continue in the same vein of Dream Warriors rather than focus on pure horror. Harlin felt that Freddy had become the James Bond of the series, the one the audience roots for, saying

Rick Johnson was originally slated to die in a Freddy-induced elevator accident in the dreamworld. According to the producers, this scene had to be cut for budget concern reasons and was rewritten with the infamous karate dojo scene seen in the theatrical picture.

Casting
“They asked me to come back for 4 but at that time I was starting to break into kind of meatier roles. I had just done a movie of the week about teen pregnancy called Daddy and I was really liking getting deeper with my work. I love the horror genre and the Freddy franchise but I was chomping at the bit to try other things as an actor.”

The role of Kristen Parker in Dream Warriors had been the debut role for Patricia Arquette, but was recast with actress Tuesday Knight for the sequel; producer Sara Risher said she was disappointed at the time that Arquette could not reprise her role, commending her as an "integral part to Nightmare 3" and as well-liked by the rest of the crew. In Assault of the Killer B's: Interviews with 20 Cult Film Actresses it is stated that "Patricia Arquette reportedly fought the [horror genre] label, turning down a hefty offer to reprise her heroine role, instead favoring more dramatic roles and becoming a respected thespian in the Hollywood community". Knight had been the first new actor to be cast for the film other than the four returnees from the previous film. Returning actors Rodney Eastman and Ken Sagoes expressed disappointment that the character of Kristen had to be recast and of the defaulted reunion with former co-star Arquette, while Knight on her part has admitted to having felt out of place due to the recasting. On the auditioning for Alice, Lisa Wilcox recalls that "I did a screen test with Tuesday Knight, who'd already been cast as Kristen Parker. We did the scene where we're sitting outside the school talking about having matching luggage. Then I did another screen test with Brooke".

Over 600 actresses auditioned for the role of Alice, which was eventually given to Lisa Wilcox. Wilcox had previously auditioned for a role in the previous film, Dream Warriors, but failed to land it. In Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, director Harlin describes that he and the producers were looking for "somebody [he] could make seem timid and vulnerable in the beginning and who can then in a believable way become kind of like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens or something like that", and that "[he] found lot of sort of hardcore tough chicks but [he] could never believe they could be weak and vulnerable – then [he] found a lot of mousy girls that when they try to be tough and strong capable, they fell on their face." According to Wilcox, the casting directors failed to find the right actress initially, and so went through the pile of rejects that she had been put in. The reason for this first rejection, as she was told initially by the casting manager, was that she looked too much like "a cheerleader", and was deemed too pretty to play the part of the introverted, mousy girl Alice started off as. Wilcox then countered by toning down her looks as much as she possibly could:

Ellie Cornell has claimed that she was in line for auditioning for a lead role in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in 1988. In Horror Films of the 1980s, she describes that New Line Cinema was looking for an 'Ellie Cornell prototype', a 'girl next door', but she had already landed the role of Rachel Carruthers in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers shortly before the auditioning for the role in Dream Master took place. Lezlie Deane, who later starred as Tracy in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, also auditioned for roles in Dream Master and Dream Warriors.

Filming
The creative process was bogged down by the untimely 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, running from March 7 to August 7, 1988, forcing Harlin and the producers to improvise much during the filming. Lisa Wilcox and Andras Jones wrote their own dialogue for Alice and Rick after the death of Kristen while watching their old home videos, such as “I saw it happen in my dream”. Many of the nightmare scenes were made up from ideas that Harlin came up with rather than from the writers' script.

This film features the car junkyard set from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. This set was conceptualized by production designer Mick Strawn, who worked as art director and handled effects on the previous film. Strawn also came up with the truck crash scene and the kaleidoscope hallway. The junkyard set is the only set used in more than one film. The set was built and filmed at a landfill in Pacoima, California.

Box office
The film was released on August 19, 1988, on 1,765 theaters in North America. The film ranked number one on its opening weekend and grossed $12,883,403. On the second weekend, the film still ranked number one and grossed $6,989,358. It was in first place on the third weekend, then at second, fourth, and sixth in the next three weeks until it dropped out from the top ten list on the seventh weekend at number eleven. The film grossed $49,369,899 at the US box office and was the 19th-highest-grossing film of 1988. It was the highest-grossing Nightmare on Elm Street film until Freddy vs. Jason was released in 2003. It is currently the third-highest-grossing film in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

Reception
“Nightmare 4 contains my favorite sequence in the entire franchise, and I'm not even in it! Alice is locking up for the night at the Crave Inn diner—get it? ... Crave Inn? ... Craven? ... Wes Craven? ... Weren't we clever?—then she and Dan walk out to his truck, open the doors, and get in, and then ... the sequence repeats ... and repeats and repeats in a time-disorienting, continuous loop. The first time I saw it, I was spooked because it reminded me of how my nightmares tended to function. That repeating exit was the most hypnotic, disturbing, and accurate depiction of a dream I'd ever seen.”

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 53% approval rating based on 30 reviews, and an average rating of 5.02/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master marks a relative high point in this franchise's bumpy creative journey, although the original remains far superior." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 56 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Upon its release, critic Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised the story line, performances, and special effects, stating that the film

While criticizing the plot for being derivative of the previous films, critic John H. Richardson of Los Angeles Daily News eulogized the film's special effects as "downright brilliant, matching and even improving on the amazing effects in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors."