A Nightmare on Elm Street altered the language of horror fiction for so long. Freddy Krueger ripped his way into the monster pantheon of Nosferatus and Grendels and Frankensteins and Invisible Men and ghost’n’goblins. His barbecued visage lurked in rap music videos, hand soaps, action figures, and Halloween dog costumes. In each new slice’n’dice outing, Freddy grew quippier more cartoon crazy until he became the cackling predatory main attraction.

The original Nightmare, a smart and unsettling suburban gothic chiller that feels visceral and raw and real and razor claw deep in the rot of Reagan America, birthed a pop cultural phenomenon. Who knew? Freddy scarred the world so bad; he spawned a whole cottage industry of burnt soul sucking dream invading hat doffing knockoff horror villains. Take a gander at some of the Sharp Hand Joes, Nightmare Feddys, and Fedora Franks ripping through cinema!

Brainscan

Rating: 👹👹👹

An inventive cyberthriller slasher starring Edward Furlong as a Fango gobbling gamer creep who tape records his neighbor changing. I really liked the mid-’90s stew of grunge fashion, Tad, impossible manservant screen savers, evil CD-ROM computer games, studded leather jackets, and a score that sounds like a bunch of cybergoths covering the Twin Peaks theme. Brings me back to a more innocent time as an elementary schooler who played JRPGs in my basement and sipped Snapple and rode bikes around with my friends who played Magic: The Gathering. Oh, the ’90s! What a time to be alive!

Brainscan kind of drags after introducing its fire central premise: a bargain bin Freddy Krueger, The Trickster, pops out of a video game and forces Edward Furlong to kill. Cops interrogate and go through the motions while Furlong evades them to clear his name. More Trickster and FMV giallo glove murder simulations and moody horror obsessed teen scenes, please! Too bad convention snaps Brainscan back to reality as the body count rises.

Slumber Party Massacre II

Rating: 👹👹👹👹👹

A PERFECT movie that combines amazing New Wave fashions, female gaze dream fantasies, Diet Go-Gos LA garage pop, crazy ramshackle set design (those wobbly pink walls and cat paintings!), and a murderous rockabilly Nightmare Feddy who tickles an air piano and pesters any doomed teen within earshot to hear his latest “hit.” Who cares if there’s no slicing and dicing until the final act? So what if sub Stray Cats guitar-driven music videos pad the barely feature length run time? I wanted all the girl rock band shenanigans and junk food pigouts and krazee blood-splattered dream sequences to continue forever and ever like a fire record loop.

Move over, Jason! Take a hike, Angela! The scariest slasher villain of all time might be this breakdancing Lux Interior/Diceman abomination. What’s his deal, anyway? What’s his story? Did actor/musician/Little Caesar’s Pizza heir Atanas Ilitch really dig deep to figure this guy who kills with a drill guitar out? Are we as an audience supposed to know who he is? Why does a look of horrified recognition creep across his victims’ faces as the power tool/rock instrument whirs closer? In a just and proper world, we would get an entire series expanding on the Slumberverse and “The Driller Killer’s” sordid backstory. In my ideal present, SPM 9: Bloodlines, a prequel exploring The Driller Killer’s granduncle who plays piano in Kansas City, would hit theaters on Halloween. But as the original Mr. Killer says as he fades in Part II, “YA GOTTA LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH.”

Shocker

Rating: 👹👹👹 1/2

I always forget how SLICK post-Hills Have Eyes Wes Craven movies look. The man’s a true professional capturing slashings and bludgeonings and shockers on Shock Street with an almost chilly focus and precision. And I always like the unique horror voice Craven brings to the chopping block with his obsession with familial perversion and malaise. The good li’l Christian boy wrestles with his demons through pulp scares.

Shocker does jump the third rail with its premise(s?) of traveling through people and electricity and television sets. What are THE RULES for this supernatural death row inmate, exactly? Hell if I know. But at least this Sharphand Joe knockoff contains some playful set pieces and enough out-there ideas to fill an entire series. You can’t blame Craven for trying (and plagiarizing himself)! And Shocker is good humored and punchy and polished enough to fly faster than 2,000 volts in the electric chair. Too fun!

Hallucinations

Rating: 👹👹👹 1/2

The things twin horror-fiend tween brothers with dirt ’staches can do with a surplus of ideas, a camcorder, and some fun and inventive low budget gore effects! I like how ambitious Hallucinations feels. It pretty much takes place inside of one wood paneled house, but contains amazing set pieces like a nerd shitting a knife, a Nightmare Feddy, a penis worm-creature straight out of some gay panic nightmare, a weird festering mummy person with a raspy kid-demon voice, and gratuitous use of a cute cat. Loved those closeups of The Polonia Brothers gazing teary-eyed at a pet photo!

And is it just me, or is there some serious Freudian subtext (unknowingly) being explored here: family trauma, a surplus of shirtless scenes, tightie whities soaked in blood, a knife tearing through a real kid bro family photo, that PENIS MONSTER? I guess you could say the Polonias are true auteurs. It’s entirely their vision on the screen and their own fears and desires being played out through grotesque horror dress-up. Bless you, Bros, for inspiring us goofy jabronies to chase our crazy dreams with nothing but a nickel and some Big Ideas.

Doctor Sleep

Rating: 👹👹👹

Hats off to Mike Flanagan and Rebecca Ferguson for making a bunch of psy vamps vaping Jacob Tremblay’s soul seem legit terrifying. She’s the best part of this pulpy call back pseudo sequel and sells the goofiest Kingisms with menace and perverse satisfaction. I BELIEVED shine smoke mouth swapping gave her life and visceral pleasure! Sure, Doctor Sleep looks flat and evenly lit like some Netflix miniseries. And the runtime stretches way too long for a movie featuring 19273636 shot reverse shot car rides. But the tone coasts dumb and nacho spilling fun, and there’s a knockout mindjacking sequence that’s worth the price of admission alone.

Flanagan flirts with a deeper exploration of growing up the child of an alcoholic. Booze lust is genetic, inescapable, and haunts like the bathtub lady in Room 237. I wanted either more Ferg psychic warfare or deeper family tree psychodrama, but Doctor Sleep seems content to split the difference in a cinematic shrug. If only Flanagan had used the source novel as a springboard to invent more scenes like Rose the Vape mindpreying on children like some Stevie Nicks cosplay Nightmare Feddy!

A tonal mess, but one that goes way out and is not afraid to fail. I’ll tip a city witch cap to this movie just for trying, which is rare in any sort of tentpole megaplex opener these days.

Don’t Panic

Rating: 👹👹👹👹

Don't Panic feels like a total blur—a half remembered Mexican Kruegersploitation featuring a magic rose and a hungover jheri curl adult man in dinosaur jammies playing a teen. Did this movie really happen? Did I hallucinate a flower exchanging bromance and an amped up alcoholic mom ripped straight from the original Elm Street? Did a grown ass manbaby really throw his dirty laundry at a poster of a model washing a car with a license plate that says, “4 Play??”

The moody synth score rips, too! And I love the very ’80s cutaway to some weird computer generated commercial while troubled not-really-teen eats cereal while wearing Ray-Bans®. Maybe the most fun bargain bin Nightmare!

Wishmaster

Rating: 👹👹

A genie twists a bunch of people’s wishes into elaborate deaths while cracking one liners like a certain fedora wearing so-and-so. Wes Craven even “presents” this snoozer, but he threw his name on just about anything back in the day. Not exactly a stamp of quality!

Wishmaster basically serves as an excuse for director Robert Kurtzman, the K in KNB EFX Group, to create a feature length gore demo full of puke monsters and living statues and decapitations and skeletons leaping from bodies. The whole movie wallows in horror fanservice with Psychotronic Magazine name drops and cameos from Ted Raimi, Tony Todd, and Mr. Krueger himself, Robert Englund. This kind of cinewinking usually tests my patience, and the repetitive structure of Wishmaster definitely didn’t help the glut of splatterhead references stick.

Mahakaal

Rating: 👹👹

If you ever thought A Nightmare on Elm Street needed Bollywood musical numbers, kung fu, and a Michael Jackson impersonator named Canteen, then I guess Mahakaal is the movie of your dreams? A good deal of the film xeroxes the original Nightmare plot beat for beat. The same teen types meet predictable demises; alcoholic parents hide the truth behind the knife-fingered glove. But Mahakaal d-r-a-g-s each event out to the point of tedium. At 2 hours and 12 minutes, the film definitely feels padded with endless scenes of rom-com coupling and fight scenes in college campuses and wood-paneled living rooms. The loosey-goosey rules to this bootleg Freddy’s powers made the finale bit of a slog as well. Remember when Freddy was a black magick wizard who could randomly manifest himself in reality and beat leather jacket boyfriends down with a metal rod? Neither do I!

Even song and dance sequences about picnics and love and the wild throes of student passion couldn’t spice up this lumbering behemoth of a film. The light at the end of the tunnel? Canteen/MJ posing next to a Bad poster or performing a strange mime rope pulling dance. A true cinematic saint.

A Nightmare on Drug Street

Rating: 👹

A bunch of purgatory trapped teens who smoked weed to death warn this scared straight educational video is scarier than any horror movie, but no ersatz Freddy even shows up! Instead, we’re treated to scenes of high school freshmen snorting cocaine in a bathroom, playing drunk driveway basketball, and keeling over from a crack overdose at the family dinner table. What a misleading title!

Whew! That’s a lot of Freddy for one article. I could keep going through Dreamaniac and Bad Dreams and Deadly Dreams and YouTube® fan video detritus like Freddy vs. Ghostbusters. But choose your own adventure through this crowded replica field! Have fun uncovering more mixed-up Freddies buried deep in video stacks or the annals of the internet.

A Nightmare on Elm Street remains a horror classic that plunges straight into the veins of its time and our universal fucked up very American collective consciousness. Just keep denying and pretending everything is okay, and the monster under the bed will never pop out, right? Fascinating how different filmmakers and cultures reinterpret Nightmare’s primal fear to address new concerns. Who knew a child-murdering dream demon-like Freddy Krueger could be so personal?

Nightmare Feddy: The pop cultural phenomenon of a Nightmare on Elm Street and the bootleg Freddy Kruegers it inspired