A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III (Chuck Russell, 1987)

Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III (Chuck Russell, 1987) sees Wes Craven’s return to the franchise, along with Nancy (Heather Lagenkamp) and Donald Thompson (John Saxon). Craven’s initial suggestion was for the film to be about a supernatural menace on the set of a slasher movie, but clearly that would never fly. Instead the scene shifts to an asylum.

As the first two films in the franchise show, the most significant ideological crucible of youth is the family home, followed closely by the school. For those who don’t conform there is a fate worse than death — the army, the police station (and cells), the prison, the hospital, the asylum. In the construction of the norm as sane, law-abiding, healthy, clean, heterosexual, there are heterotopias to which the abnormal may be exiled. Here we have a group of traumatised teens, all children of Krueger’s killers, fearful of sleeping lest he come after them. Nancy arrives to help them, suggesting they band together to fight back.

Each of the teens has their own secret identity, their ego ideal to fight against Freddy’s id, and at times it is unclear whether the film is laughing at or with them. Meanwhile a doctor (Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson)) and an ex-cop (Saxon) act as policing forces to give Krueger’s corpse a proper burial with what will pass for a proper rite.

There’s a moral here about collectivity and solidarity, although perhaps this can still be seen as trumped by patriarchy, whether in the form of the good doctor or the bad father who needs to be redeemed.