Respect for the Dream Master

It’s the perfect time of year for horror cinephiles to not just talk about the films they love, but get the attention and respect those films deserve. When author and fellow horror film lover Lowell Greenblatt asked Michael Melamedoff to contribute his thoughts about NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, he happily jumped at the opportunity.

Those thoughts are now featured in Greenblatt’s new book, Nightmare Autopsis: A Return to Elm Street. Melamedoff describes his admiration for the Elm Street series, with an emphasis on The Dream Master in a way that hasn’t often been explored. An excerpt below:

I've always admired the way the original Elm Street movies constantly reinvent themselves; they're like a great band that's tinkering with their sound album to album, pushing into new modes. The original Nightmare is a gritty fever dream that offers a nihilist response to the vigilante justice films of the 70s and 80s; the second installment is gender bending body horror that feels maybe even more relevant today; the third imbues the series with a fantastical comic book quality... look at the Freddy of Dream Warriors and the MCU's Thanos and tell me that Freddy hasn't influenced scores of comic book baddies. This sense of experimentation and play with format continue all the way through the postmodern elements of New Nightmare. Of course, Robert Englund as “Freddy” is the thread that holds the series together, but his performance continues to evolve as well, reaching its apex in The Dream Master. That film, with its slapstick infused set pieces, gives rise to a Freddy Krueger no longer constrained to clever one-liners…instead he becomes horror’s most gruesome MC and insult comic, fully in control of the room and his victims’ psyches. The Dream Master may not be the “best” of the series, but it’s a film I have a particular soft  spot for; after all, it gave us the version of Freddy that holds firm in the popular imagination.

Want to learn more about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise? Pick it up here! Lowell dives deep into the nuances of the series, and shares a perspective on how well-made and intelligent these films are that will turn even the most casual film-goer into a diehard Elm Street fan.

Special thanks to Dustin McNeill and Harker Press for publishing such incredible horror stories.

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