We heard the Freddy Krueger creation myth before, for the first time in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, I think. An earnest, well-meaning nun enters an insane asylum where she is gangraped by a hundred inmates. We see this reenacted in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child. One of the inmates is played by Robert Englund, and so I suppose that we are meeting Freddy’s father for the very first time. We see the mother throughout the movie, giving the heroine Alice some tips on how to defeat Freddy. Seeing the forces of pure good juxtaposed against those of pure evil, we’re reminded of Walt Disney ending the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Fantasia with Schubert’s "Ave Maria." It also reminds of that Mexican passion play with Santa Claus and the Devil that we saw on Mystery Science Theater. Freddy Kruger literally cringes and hisses at being exposed to the light of goodness.

There is a scene near the end of the movie where his mother in full, bright white penguin garb tells Freddy, “Your birth was a curse on the whole of humanity!” There was something in the back of my head that just couldn’t help but thinking, “That’s not a very Christian attitude." Am I being too much of a bleeding heart worrying about Freddy Krueger? If his behavior is the result of being fathered by a hundred maniacs, well, that isn’t something that he has any control over, is it? And assuming that crazy people are evil and nuns are good, a jump that I can make for argument’s sake, then Freddy Krueger has both a good side and an evil one. And so why and how did he get the evil end of the stick? Did he choose it? Could he have chosen the good? Is there still any goodness swimming around in him? The trailers for the next Nightmare on Elm Street movie show Freddy as a young boy being taunted for being the son of a hundred maniacs. It seems that Freddy’s wickedness may be explained by our good ol' friend, labeling theory. His genes aren’t evil; he’s just been told that they are. As a product of the modern age, I’ve always bought nurture over nature any way, and here it’s difficult to imagine that he couldn’t have even had a chance to have a normal childhood. He has his mother’s name, which means that for some reason or another he wasn’t adopted. Or if he was adopted he had to have the name Krueger and remind everybody that his mother was a nun gang-raped by a hundred maniacs. Well, we’ll wait and see what happens in Freddy’s Dead. We’ll wait and see, don’t spoil it for me. When Freddy’s Dead turns out to satirize child abuse as socializing serial killers, a la Rodney Dangerfield in Natural Born Killers, and not give us any answers to what happened, I’m going to be pissed. But don’t tell me anything yet.

I don’t think that I am reading too much into the film. The picture is inviting it. The thing about including a backstory in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie is that we don’t need it, but we instinctively want it. Freddy Krueger has always been one of the chattier classic movie monsters of the '70s and '80s. Leatherface, Jason, Michael Myers -- I guess Pinhead talks, but he was dry and British, wasn’t he? There is something human about Freddy, there is a consciousness in there, and we are curious to see what it is that makes him tick. When we get a backstory, when we get a peek at Freddy’s history, there is an implication that we will see what made him the way he is. Freddy’s history matters in a way that Jason’s and Michael Myers’s do not. Mind you, I don’t want my slasher movie monsters to be cuddly, and I just as much appreciate Jason as an unstoppable force of nature as I appreciate Freddy as the omnipotent anti-Christ. I can accept them on the level of icons, and there is certainly something horrifying about the certainty of the fact that they are gonna get you.

But human beings can be scary too. I took Takashi Miike’s Audition for another spin recently, and the picture is just as unnerving the second time. The killer in the film is a human being; and her killing has a reasoning to it, a logic, even a morality. We learn why she is the way she is: she was abused as a child, and so she becomes a monster to overcome her hated identity as child abuse victim. She becomes the perpetrator of abuse instead. The child abuse explains her, mind you; the violence she commits is so extreme that it can’t possibly be justified by the abuse. Watching the film, you’re thrown into all these contradictory emotions towards her; you sympathize with her and you never really hate her. At worst, you just feel repulsed, a lot like with the similarly sadistic but pathetic Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Just don’t go near her. The message of Audition is that apathy is the only solution. The sick need to die in the streets lest they make you sick too. Nobody wants a white knight, and so the only solution is to not give a shit. Now that’s frightening. Movies like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies are naturally dehumanizing against the mentally ill and child molesters. They are simply "evil." They are morally primitive, by which I mean that they aren’t worth a whole lot in terms of direct social comment. Audition argues in favor of dehumanization as a moral position.

I heard a disturbing but fully rational comment by Bill O’Reilly a while ago. He had a philosophy professor on his show that had a complex reason for why we should not label the terrorists as evil. O’Reilly said that moral relativism, complex codes of morality and perspective, are simply not functional in accomplishing what we need to accomplish. That makes sense I guess, but it seems hopelessly cynical. Winston Churchill once said, “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart, and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.” Not to be outdone, P.J. O’Rourke once said, “The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it.” In other words, with age and wisdom comes the realization that compassion is useless and does nobody any good. In a way we’re kind of lucky that the right has true believers like Dubya, who are bright-eyed idiots who believe they are fighting for a better tomorrow. I got another quote, by Dave Barry: “The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.”

Dubya, God love him, is the Democrat who tries to change your tire and ends up burning down your car. (If the Republican knew how to fix your tire you would never know as he would be at the country club. I suspect that a true Conservative would recognize that the tire is unfixable and thus he shouldn’t even try. A true conservative would liquidate destructive and well-meaning human compassion, going into office only long enough to destroy it.) Compassion, much like God and the soul (an immortal consciousness affected by behavior), is an irrational, potentially destructive concept. Arguing against any of them is then justifiable but depressing. That’s what a good horror film does. It confirms the things that you wish weren’t true. (Republican theists don’t frighten me, and Democratic theists and atheists don’t frighten me. Republican atheists do. The conservative atheist argues that it’s every man for himself.)

Well, I went off on another long tangent just like I did with my review of Freddy’s Revenge and The Dream Master. What did you expect, for me to review the movie? Going back a bit, why did I begin wondering about Freddy Krueger’s childhood, about why he became a monster? Well, part of it is because of the fact that we see his backstory. More of it comes simply from the premise of the picture. The heroine from the last film, Alice Johnson, discovers that she is having nightmares in a waking state. It turns out that she’s pregnant and Freddy is going into the dreams of her baby and controlling her that way. Simultaneously, Freddy is feeding her baby the souls of the people he killed and making it more like him. Alice worries that she will give birth to the spawn of Satan. After going through the dreams of her baby, Freddy is able to attack all her friends.

Mike Bracken, the King Kong Roger Ebert of horror film critics, wonders in his review why Freddy needs the baby at all. Well, the best defense that I can give is the Exorcist defense. Lots of stupid people asked why Satan possessed Linda Blair instead of somebody important. The reason, of course, is because Satan’s goal isn’t to destroy all of mankind. Just one of them at a time. The movie was saying that good and evil exists purely on an individual level. I think that this film may be trying to get at something like that. Freddy is going for a second round against the bitch that killed him, and invading the womb is his way of showing her he can get her where it hurts. The real horror for Alice isn’t that she is going to die, but that Freddy is corrupting her unborn child. The Dream Child is essentially a Rosemary’s Baby remake. Rosemary’s Baby always struck me as perhaps the first horror film for the pro-choice movement. The pregnant Rosemary’s baby, her body, wasn’t her own. It belonged to somebody else.

All arguments about abortion are doomed to fail, as both sides have adopted a different definition of what the issue really is. Pro-lifers believe it’s about the life of an individual human being; pro-choicers believe it’s about the sanctity of a pregnant woman’s body. When I use the term pro-life, I’m talking about that mindset, that philosophy (which is fundamental to feminist politics), not the decision as to have an abortion or not. Rosemary should have gotten an abortion, of course. Push that fucker out and sink an ice pick in its skull. I don’t think the subject ever came up in any case, and the film ends with the triumph of the bad guys, Rosemary reduced to the level of a whore and a breeder. The subject of abortion comes up in The Dream Child. Alice’s friend says that there is one way to get rid of Freddy: don’t go through with the pregnancy. Alice doesn’t get mad of this; she takes a beat and says (this is not a direct quote), “No, I want to keep him. I’ve seen him and know that he’s growing in me. He’s part of Dan [her boyfriend who Freddy had murdered previously].” Her friend smiles and says, “OK, we’ll find another way.” I really loved that scene. It shows that Alice is a pro-choicer, she knows that abortion is a real choice and a sane and functional one, and she chooses to have the baby. There’s another scene where she talks to her father, a recovering alcoholic whose son was killed by Freddy in Part 4. She asks him if he is disappointed in her. “No, I’m not,” he says. He responds just as she does to the abortion; he understands why she asked it. He says that he isn’t disappointed and that as a matter of fact he had wanted to hear the sound of a boy in the house again. There is something so damn optimistic about the Choose Life philosophy. The film is the ultimate idealization of teenage motherhood; they aren’t having the baby out of necessity, or to fulfill some quaint middle-class fantasy of a nuclear family. They don’t want kids for their aesthetic purposes. They are having this baby to build a better future.

But going back to sympathy for Freddy, I can’t help but wonder how he sees this child. He seems to see it only in terms of destroying Alice. This serves a purpose, but it’s awfully limited. Does Freddy believe that this kid is going to be a freak like him? Is there a deep sense of self-hatred in Freddy in regarding making this kid like him a corruptive act against Alice? (A scene early in the film suggests this when the nun gives birth to a baby that is burnt just like Freddy. Alice is seeing the birth the way that Freddy wants her to.) The “Son Of” monster movies always struck me as being about the freaks building a future. Their own families, their own societies, rejected them and so they decide to build their own. Such ties are bound to be stronger than those of the normals as they have a lot more invested into them. And certainly it gives a great hope for us weirdos on the other side of the screen. My eyes are seriously watering thinking about a public service announcement where Godzilla tries to teach his son Tadzilla how to breathe fire but the little tyke can only blow smoke rings ("It Takes a Man to Be a Dad" goes the PSA’s tagline.) It’s the right image for the ad. Who else is going to teach young Tadzilla to breathe fire but his Dad?

Ultimately, I guess I was watching another movie. This stuff is too fertile to just personify Freddy Krueger as evil incarnate. It’s provoked too much emotion, too much thought in me. All the same, I have to reflect that this film, while far inferior and not as complex and interesting, still strikes me more emotionally than last week’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2. It’s simplistic, but with simplicity comes clarity. The Bride’s reunion with child isn’t as strong as the birth of the healthy baby in this film, as we know that Freddy Krueger is evil, but we sympathize with Bill and we have lots of contradictory emotions going around. Yes, I know I praised contradictory emotions earlier, but that was for horror. What I guess it comes down to is that ambiguity is good for horror movies, but clarity is good for tear-jerkers. And I guess tear-jerkers then don’t reflex the complexity of real life. There you go. As for how good the film is, I think that it ultimately ranks near the bottom of the Nightmare on Elm Street films.

There is a strange contradiction between Bracken and the also always readable horror critic John Fallon. Bracken says that director Stephen Hopkins’s style is pedestrian. That there isn’t any style, that it’s all click-and-shoot. Fallon says that he has plenty of style, but that the film is torn between two styles, a jokey one and a somber one, and it feels like it’s been rushed. I agree much more with Fallon. The film has an ice-cold Adrian-Lyne look to the early scenes, and there is a terrific shot early on where the camera swims around with the hundred maniacs, and the one played by Robert Englund glances directly into the camera. One of the kills in the movie is really sick, and by really sick, I mean kind of brilliant. A teen played by the gorgeous Erika Anderson argues with her mother about food. She has to watch her figure except when they are entertaining guests. Freddy ties her to a chair and we seem to see her in baby doll garb. She is then force-fed until she chokes, at one point being fed her own guts. The kill is more Marquis de Sade than Bosch like in The Dream Master (as she chokes, Freddy hugs her and strokes her hair), but it still fits into the Freddy persona. The kill is visceral, sexy in a wrong way, subversive I think. I also really adored the ultrasound sequence, which exploits the growing fetus for its alien appearance. The film finds horror in the body, which is a convention for the highly Cronenbergesque Nightmare on Elm Street series.

You can’t really quantify style, but I think Hopkins has one. The film is certainly spotty, however. None of the other kills come even close to the force-feeding one. The film most infamously has Freddy take his victim into a comic book, turns him into a drawing and “rips him to shreds." All the color then leaks out of the poor guy’s drawing and forms a puddle on the floor. The writers don’t know how to write teen bonding dialogue. I don’t think they ever learned how, but it’s especially lame and forced here. Alice sees her child grown into age six or seven in the film. He’s played by the child actor Whitby Hertford, who my wife recognized as the fat kid in Jurassic Park. The boy can’t act, it’s probably a good thing that he gave it up, but he can mug. You should see him try to do a Freddy Krueger impression, at the very point where it is intended to be frightening. His dialogue is some of the most groanworthy in the film, especially the moment when he describes Krueger as "my friend with the funny hand."

What I think that Bracken is really reacting to is this hollow feeling of emptiness in the film. It just feels mediocre, like the filmmakers aren’t trying anymore. Bracken complains that Hopkins just stole Harlin’s style from The Dream Master, which you can certainly argue WAS a style. They look like they belong in the same visual universe, but I don’t know what The Dream Master had that this didn’t. I think it comes down to a better soundtrack for one; the soundtrack for The Dream Master was genius. The Dream Child ends with some rap songs that don’t seem to have anything to do with the movie. It’s more like they are put there as the result of a marketing deal, that the songs’ producers were promised to be featured in one of the studio’s major productions. Something like that, I guess.

The Dream Child was released in 1989, the same year as Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. Chris Hicks of The Deseret News, one critic I never thought that I would be referencing, talks about how glad he was to see that the receipts for Jason Takes Manhattan were so low that Paramount was thinking of stopping production of further Jason adventures. He theorized that something like that would happen with The Dream Child. He describes a half-empty theater filled with fans who remarked that it wasn’t as good as the original. Hicks’s predictions were pretty on the nose. Both Freddy and Jason’s next films were their official last. The problem with The Dream Child isn’t as much that it is illogical, or badly acted, or that it’s funny even. I think it may come down to the mindset. The filmmakers seemed to see it as a copy of a copy, and much like poor Freddy it seemed, the film opted to fulfill the prophecy. The picture is ultimately unsatisfying. Still, I kind of have affection for it, and I feel that if you’re collecting Nightmare on Elm Street movies you ought to collect this one and coddle it and love it. The Dream Child is a failure as a horror movie, but it succeeds in other ways and it’s overly simplistic to say that it isn’t a Nightmare on Elm Street film (it’s Freddy’s Revenge that wasn’t a Nightmare on Elm Street film). I guess I’m unsatisfied, but I can’t really say I’m disappointed.