WANT TO MAKE BABIES? - MY LIFE IN HORROR BY KIT POWER

My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.
 
Want To Make Babies?

 
Before
 
Again, I remember basically nothing about this. I mean, I remember the premise - Freddie attacks teenage girl via the dreams of her unborn kid. Which seems like an idea with potential, albeit potential that could very much cut either way. A teenager is murdered when Freddie takes over his motorbike. Maybe. And I think she’s saved by her kid in a dream, like the kid double crosses Freddy somehow.
 
And that’s really it. Popular theory has this as the low point of the series, and if I remember correctly it was by far the lowest grossing. That said, when I re-watched it 15 years ago, I remember thinking it was significantly better than my teenage appraisal, and that it was kind of good. Who the hell knows?
 
Let’s find out.
 
After
 
Okay. So as previously noted, this one is, in terms of critical appraisal and box office, widely regarded as the worst of the series. I'll see how I feel about that when I’ve finished the run, but right now, I’m really conflicted.
 
Because here’s the thing; it’s not bad. In fact, I would strongly argue, by Elm Street standards, it’s pretty fucking good, and occasionally brilliant. Seriously. It absolutely shares some of the narrative flaws of the previous entry, especially around a rushed resolution that feels arbitrary and unearned in a really frustrating way. Unlike the last two entries, it does also suffer from a pretty severe pacing problem, whereby after the first 30-40 minutes, things really do crawl along  for a bit, especially around a well-acted-but-narratively-pointless scene where Alice’s dead boyfriend's parents threaten to adopt her still-unborn kid - it’s well acted, but narratively is just wheel spinning. And as we’re apparently doing the complaints section, sure, that section also includes by far the most cringeworthy Freddy sequence in the series so far, when an initially promising drag-the-kid-into-his-comic book ends up degenerating into skateboarding Freddy, kid made into paper, and oh, lord save us, SuperFucking Freddy please make it stop now and pretend it never happened, okay, thanks so much.
 
But, so, okay, the bad bits are bad, big shocker there, but there are also good bits, and they are many, and they are very good.
 
Like, for example, the first entire 30 minutes, which are as batshit as any Elm Street movie has managed so far. See, Alice’s unborn kid is dreaming most of the time. And because he is Alice’s kid, he shares Alice’s power to pull Freddy into the dreams. But what it also means is that Alice a constant connection to Freddy’s dream world. She can be in a dream at any moment. And through her power, so can her friends.
 
What I really like about this is the sheer balls of having this as the premise... and then not explaining it for the first half an hour or so. Meaning that as an audience, all we know is that it seems like Alice is asleep all the time, or that she’s instantly narcoleptic or something, or Freddy has just taken over total control of reality… or whatever. Like, all we really know is that things can go totally nutso nightmare logic at any second and we don’t know why.
 
And I totally get how this will have been frustrating, perhaps even a turn off, for many. Given the amount of words I spent in the past entry complaining about sloppy resolutions and poorly sketched lore, you might fairly be wondering why I come down on the other side with this film. It’s a fair question, and the answer is, this is different because firstly, it is subverting what we think the existing rules are (you have to be asleep for Freddy to get you), rather than just hand waving something out of the blue, and secondly, it does offer an in fiction explanation that ‘makes sense’. It just makes you wait for it, through thirty glorious minutes of utterly, wonderfully batshit insane Freddy moments.
 
We get the aforementioned boy eaten by a bike sequence, we get the birth of Freddy (Amanda Krueger returns, and this time, the way to defeat Freddy is to ‘lay her soul to rest’, a not-terrible idea that sets up a twin ‘real world/dream world’ finale a la Part 3 that works well, though it turns out the way you lay someone’s soul to rest is by touching their skeleton, which, erm, okay). The birth of Freddy! And it’s basically a remake of the canteen scene from Alien only with childbirth, and if that sounds hilariously distasteful and bonkers, I’m telling it about right.
 
We even get a not-unreasonable conversation around abortion, where Alice’s friend points out that if the unborn kid is literally going to get them all killed, maybe not have it? And sure, as Alice has already met her future son in dream form, we know the film is not going to actually go there (and frankly, given the gloriously poor taste of the franchise so far, probably just as well), but still, that’s an actual thing that happens in Elm Street 5.
 
There’s also the central image that as Freddy kills the kids, their souls are being fed via umbilical cord to the fetus, the implication being that Alice will, eventually, give birth to Freddy. Why Freddy would want this is unclear, given the enormous power he can wield in the dream realm, but I think it’s actually a testament to the strength of the movie as a whole that this has only occurred to me as an issue as I write this essay; I was more than happy to go with the flow as the movie unfolded, largely, I think, because the sheer scale of the idea and the bonkers nature of the accompanying imagery proved overwhelmingly distracting.
 
This is also a movie unambiguously on the side of the teens, by the way. Unlike with Craven’s later Scream series, which seemed more generically misanthropic, in Elm Street 5, it’s the parents who come in for by far the biggest kicking - bullying, controlling, and callously indifferent, if not actively hostile to their kids, with the notable and rater sweet exception of Alice’s dad, who between the last movie and this has beaten the bottle and is now a repentant AA type; you do find yourself rooting for Freddy to start picking off the older generation, and let the kids sort things out for themselves.
 
But we’re straying into complaining about what the film isn’t rather than what it is. And what it is, is another Elm Street movie. One that has a *very* bonkers premise, one that opens strong, drags a bit in the middle, and comes back pretty strong at the end. One that tilts the rules of the franchise, opening up new ground, and that builds on the mythology of Freddy’s conception to good effect. And it’s a movie with some truly striking imagery, especially the aforementioned bike of death and umbilical cord of soul eating. Add in the brief but incredibly disturbing image of Amanda Kreger reclaiming Freddy as her child, clutching her bloody stomach as the iconic calw emerges, and this is an entry that delivers the visual shocks for which the franchise is rightly remembered.
 
 I’ll grant that the set piece highs aren’t quite at the level of 4, and the mid-movie pacing slump is pretty brutal; still and all, I think I prefer this movie. Mainly for the wonderful insanity of the first 30 minutes, which manage to be genuinely disorienting, gleefully shredding the rulebook of what our villain can do, and in the process delivering some of the most vivid imagery of the series.
 
One more to go.
 
KP
22/6/19