A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a 1987 American fantasy slasher film directed by Chuck Russell in his feature directorial debut and written by Russell along with Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, and Frank Darabont. It is the third installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and serves as a direct sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The film stars Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Laurence Fishburne, Priscilla Pointer, Craig Wasson, and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp), now a psychiatrist, and Kristen Parker (Arquette), a patient who can bring others into her own dreams, team up with other kids to launch a daring rescue into the dreamland and save a child from Freddy Krueger.
After the mixed response to A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), New Line Cinema sought out franchise creator Wes Craven to return to write the script for the third film, which he agreed to despite having a different idea for another Elm Street film.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was theatrically released on February 27, 1987. The film grossed $44.8 million domestically on a budget of over $4 million and received positive reviews from critics, who considered it to be one of the best films in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. It was followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, released in 1988.
Plot Kristen Parker dreams of Freddy Krueger, who attacks her and makes it look like she has slit her wrist in the real world. Believing Kristen to be suicidal, her mother Elaine admits her to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, where she is placed under the care of Dr. Neil Gordon.
At the hospital, Kristen fights the orderlies who try to sedate her because she fears falling asleep. Nancy Thompson, the new intern therapist who survived Freddy's killing spree six years prior, calms her down by reciting Freddy's nursery rhyme, helping her realize she is not alone. Nancy meets the rest of Dr. Gordon's patients: Phillip Anderson, a sleepwalker; Roland Kincaid, a tough kid from the streets; Jennifer Caulfield, a hopeful television actress; Will Stanton, who uses a wheelchair due to a prior suicide attempt; Taryn White, a recovering drug addict; and Joey Crusel, who is the youngest and too traumatized to speak. One night, Freddy attacks Kristen in her dreams; she unwittingly pulls Nancy into her dream, allowing them to escape.
Kristen reveals that she has been able to pull people into her dreams since she was young. Over the next two nights, Freddy kills Phillip and Jennifer. Nancy reveals to the remaining patients that they are "the last of the Elm Street kids," the surviving children of those who burned Krueger to death years ago. They try group hypnosis so that they can experience a shared dream and discover their dream powers. In the dream, Freddy captures Joey, leaving him comatose in the real world. The dean is furious, and Nancy and Neil are relieved of their duties. A nun named Sister Mary Helena tells Neil that Freddy was the son of Amanda Krueger, a young woman on the Westin Hills hospital staff who was accidentally locked inside with hundreds of mental patients over the holidays. They raped her continually, causing Freddy to be born. The only way to stop him is to lay his bones to rest.
Neil and Nancy ask her father, Officer Don Thompson, where the bones are hidden. Nancy rushes back to the hospital when she learns that Kristen has been sedated. Neil takes Don to help them find the bones. Nancy and the others again engage in group hypnosis to reunite with Kristen. Taryn and Will are killed by Freddy, while Kristen, Nancy, and Kincaid rescue Joey. Sensing that his remains have been found by Don and Neil, Freddy kills Don and incapacitates Neil. Don's ghost appears to Nancy, but he is revealed to be Freddy, who stabs Nancy. Freddy comes upon Kristen, but Nancy stabs him with his own glove. Neil purifies Freddy's bones, killing him, as Nancy dies in Kristen's arms.
Neil, Kristen, Kincaid, and Joey attend Nancy and Don's funeral days later. During the funeral, Neil finds Amanda Krueger's tombstone and discovers that she is Sister Mary Helena. That evening, he goes to sleep with the Malaysian doll Nancy gave him and Kristen's papier-mâché house nearby. Suddenly, Kristen's house lights up from the inside, suggesting that Freddy is not defeated.
Cast
Production Development Following the critical failure of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, New Line Cinema was unsure if it would continue with the series. Wes Craven, who wrote and directed the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, did not participate in the second film. He had not wanted the original to evolve into a franchise, but due to immense dissatisfaction with Freddy's Revenge, signed on to cowrite the screenplay for the third installment with the intention that it would end the series. However, the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors prompted a continuation of the series. Craven himself would be unavailable for directing, as he was tied up with filming Deadly Friend around the same time.
Craven's first concept for the film was to have Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) invade the real world: Krueger would haunt the actors filming a new Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. New Line Cinema rejected the metacinematic idea, but years later, Craven's concept was brought to the screen in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
Before the script was finalized, in 1986 John Saxon and Robert Englund wrote their own scripts for a third Nightmare film. In Saxon's script—a prequel story called How the Nightmare on Elm Street All Began—Freddy is ultimately innocent, or at least set up for the murders by the main culprits Charles Manson and the Manson Family. Freddy is forced by a mob of angry parents to confess to the crimes, which enrages them further. After lynching Freddy, he comes back to avenge his wrongful death by targeting the mob's children. In Englund's treatment, Freddy's Funhouse, the protagonist is Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss)'s older sister, who was away at college when Tina was murdered and returns to Springwood to investigate how she died. Freddy had claimed the 1428 Elm Street house for his own in the dreamworld, setting up booby traps like Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) had done against him. According to Englund, after the script had been unused for years, part of it was used in "No More Mr. Nice Guy", the pilot episode of Freddy's Nightmares.
Writing Wes Craven has said, about the franchise's guidance by he and Bruce Wagner, that "we decided that it could no longer be one person fighting Freddy. It had to be a group, because the souls of Freddy's victims have made Freddy stronger". He also called Heather Langenkamp to ask her if he may include her character Nancy in the script, to which she agreed. In interviews with cast and crew in the DVD extras, it is revealed that the original idea for the film centered around the kids separately traveling to a specific location to die by suicide. Later it would be discovered that the common link between the youths was that they dreamed of Freddy Krueger. Since suicide was a taboo social issue, the storyline was abandoned. Some aspects of the idea remained in the film.
In Craven's and Wagner's original script, the characters were somewhat different from what was eventually filmed. Nancy was neither a dream expert nor a mental health professional. Kristen (named Kirsten in this script) only stayed in the institution briefly; she had a father and her mother Elaine was named Alice. Neil's last name was Guinness instead and his character was much younger. Dr. Elizabeth Simms's last name was Maddalena, Taryn White was African-American, Joey Crusel was the one who built the model of a house and had trouble getting around (although he did not use a wheelchair), and Philip Anderson was a thirteen-year-old. Will Stanton's name was originally Laredo, he had long hair, did not use a wheelchair, and was the one who made the clay puppets. This script also described the ranch house where Krueger was born, and that is the house that shows up in the kids' dreams rather than the Elm Street house. Wes Craven specifies the house in his original script to be "an architectural portal to [Freddy's dreamscape]. It is virtually a limitless world of the human psyche in all of its dimensions ... So you can enter this other world through the house or dreams or madness or hallucinations or special psychic states that various people have".
Contrary to the film, Donald Thompson knew from the start that Krueger was real and still alive. Krueger was missing and Nancy wanted to find him. When she finds him, Nancy learns that Krueger is obsessed with finding the house where he was born so he could burn it down. In the original script, there is a romance between Nancy and Neil and they have sex. There are scenes and lines that are reminiscent of the first film. There is no mention that Krueger's mother Amanda had been a nun or that Freddy was born of rape. Both Joey and Roland Kincaid are killed. The deaths in this script were more grotesque; Krueger was not as talkative and he was more vulgar. Freddy is killed by Nancy by using his own glove, not by holy water, and she sees through his shapeshifting trick even though she still dies.
In Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, director Chuck Russell states that Craven's original script was darker and more profane, and Rachel Talalay thought that the script seemed like a "$20 million script". Discussing the more humorous elements in the film, Russell said, "I looked at what [series creator] Wes Craven did and said, 'This is absolutely great and terrifying.' But I felt that by the time I came along on 3, the way to go was to make the whole idea of dreams and nightmares into a carnival and go further into the dreams and make Freddy Krueger more outrageous and add more of an element of dark humor. That worked and the series went in that direction from then on."
One of the most memorable scenes in the film is the sequence that takes place in the junkyard during the film's climax. The junkyard sequence and the set itself were the product of art director Mick Strawn, who also handled some of the film's special effects sequences and became production designer on the sequel. The sequence was so popular that it appeared again in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The junkyard sequence was filmed in Pacoima, California for both films.
Casting Lisa Wilcox and Lezlie Deane, who would respectively be cast as Alice Johnson and Tracy Swan in later installments, have both reported to have auditioned for roles in Dream Warriors previously. Patricia Arquette was nearly recast early in the production, but Chuck Russell intervened and convinced the producers to allow her to stay. According to producer Sara Risher, the role that the producers spent the most time interviewing and auditioning for was Marcie (Stacey Alden), the 'sexy nurse' who seemingly seduces Joey (Rodney Eastman) in his dream but turns out to be Freddy. Nurse Marcie, while seducing Joey, was originally supposed to turn into a 'she-Freddy' with Alden wearing Freddy's mask; Roy H. Wagner had second thoughts about this after seeing how 'she-Freddy' looked in practice, stating that "Freddy with breasts, it was too off-kilter". The concept of 'she-Freddy' was substituted with having the nurse shoot prehensile tongues at Joey to trap him and then be switched with Englund-Freddy.
In the shooting script, Sally Kellerman was supposed to appear on Dick Cavett's talkshow, but Cavett allegedly handpicked Zsa Zsa Gabor personally after being given the opportunity to choose who he thought should appear in his show and be slaughtered by Freddy. According to Robert Englund, all of her reactions and dialogue were completely improvised:
Filming