A Nightmare on Elm Street

You know what no ever mentions when talking about these movies? Just how incorrectly titled they are.

Unless Freddy himself is the “Nightmare” of the title, we have to be talking about the various bad dreams that Freddy causes. They are not one continual mental horror, but rather a series of different night terrors.

So really, the movie should be called “Nightmares on Elm Street.”

But, hey. Wes Craven is almost certainly a multi-millionaire, and the series has spouted a bunch of sequels, and a remake. So what do I know? I’m just a guy writing a book.

Before all the nightmares, we get to watch the creation of the famous glove. We see a couple of hands choose a glove, and some blades. And then design little metal fingers to attach the blades to.

It’s creepy, to be sure, but I don’t know that it’s all that practical of a weapon. If you’re using it with your dominant hand, it’s going to be hard to do anything else. Like, say, tying up a victim, or grabbing someone trying to flee.

And if it’s on your non-dominant hand, well, try playing ping-pong with the wrong hand and you’ll see how useless it is.

So top marks on intimidation, but a D- for usefulness.

The blades slash through some cloth, and then we’ve got a girl in a nightgown, running down a pipe-and-steam-and-cement-block corridor.

A male voice says, “Tina.” She turns around, and sees a sheep, and hears an evil laugh.

All right then. I’m sure somewhere in the world someone is afraid of sheep. And pipes.

Tina keeps walking, and it’s clear things is some kind of steam-pipe-using warehouse.

She looks around, and there are the claws, slashing through cloth again. And then vanishing around the corner.

And here’s the creepy dude in the hat. She sees him and runs away, and then in the always popular horror movie fashion, he pops up in front of her.

Tina wakes up in her bed. Her mom comes in to ask if she’s okay, and Tina says it was just a dream. Mom points out that it must have been some dream, noting the rips in Tina’s nightgown.

Some dude pops into Tina’s room, asking if mom is “coming back to the sack, or what.” Which, for some reason, makes me feel even more icky than watching Tina get attacked.

Mom tells Tina to stop having those kinds of dreams, or cut her fingernails. Mom is winning no awards this year.

Tina grabs her crucifix off the wall, and the shot changes to sort of a hazy day, with little girls jumping rope and reciting:

“One, two Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again.”

Point of order: Does a crucifix help even a single person in this entire series? As far as I know, Freddy doesn’t have any sort of aversion to religious icons.

The next morning, Tina tells her two friends, Nancy (chick) and Glen (dude, and also Nancy’s boyfriend) about her bad dream, and about how it reminded her of that old jump-rope rhyme, the one about Freddy.

Nancy and Glen point out that it was just a dream.

Somewhere in there, Tina’s jerky boyfriend shows up to be a jerk for a minute.

That night, Nancy and Glen offer to spend a couple nights with Tina, whose mom had to go away for a couple of days.

Tina’s mom: the real nightmare of the movie.

Glen calls his mom, and plays a sound effects tape with airport noises so that she thinks Glen is staying at a cousin’s house. The cousin lives near the airport.

Naturally, the “airport” sounds run out too soon, but luckily Glen’s mom is trusting and kind of dopey, so he isn’t forced to go home.

Nancy tells Tina that she knew Tina would be fine, and Tina says all day long she’s been thinking about that guy’s “weird face.” And his “fingernails.”

This reminds Nancy of her dream. She dreamed about a guy in a dirty red and green sweater.

You know what this franchise needs? A crossover between “Nightmare” and “Silent Night, Deadly Night.”

Tina asks about the fingernails. Nancy says that mostly the creepy guy dragged them along things. And that they were more like, “finger-knives.”

Tina says they had the same dream, and Glen says that’s impossible.

Then they hear a sound outside. Something like, I don’t know, knives scraping along a wall?

Tina, Nancy and Glen all head outside, with Glen taking the lead and doing a little trash-talking.

Turns out it’s their friend, Rod, who tackles Glen to the ground and then confirms that he was making the noise, with a garden implement.

Rod asks what’s going on, Glen tries to get in Rod’s face, and Rod pulls out a switchblade. Glen steps back, and Nancy grabs Rod’s arm and says that it’s just a sleepover.

Glen is the least useful boyfriend ever.

Nancy takes the knife from Rod, closes it, and Rod makes fun of Glen.

Then Rod, who up to this point has been kind of a jerk, pulled a knife on everyone, and scared the life out of Tina and crew, takes Tina by the hand, and tells Nancy and Glen that he and Tina are going to use Tina’s mom’s bed, and Nancy and Glen can have “the rest.”

Nancy and Glen get ready to leave, but Tina comes back to the door and asks Nancy and Glen not to leave her alone with “this lunatic.”

There’s a reason Tina has nightmares about sheep: They have a higher IQ than she does, and that terrifies her.

Rod slaps a hand over Tina’s mouth and drags her away.

Glen tries to suck face with Nancy, but she shoot him down, because they’re “here for Tina now.” Yeah.

Later, Glen lies awake while Rod and Tina soil Tina’s mom’s bed. Afterwards, they promise to have “no more fights,” and Rod says that neither of them will have nightmares anymore.

Tina asks when Rod had a nightmare, and he points out, all grumpy-like, that dudes can have nightmares too. Then he goes to sleep. It seems Tina will not be getting any cuddling this evening.

Later, we catch up with Nancy, who is in Tina’s bed. The crucifix falls off the wall and Nancy sets it down next to her. Then she falls asleep.

Later still, Tina hears a sound outside. She shakes Rod a little bit, but he doesn’t wake up. She pulls a shirt on and goes to look out the window. Someone is throwing rocks at it. A rock jams in the window.

Nancy, still lying in bed with her eyes closed, doesn’t see the hands pushing against the wall. She opens her eyes, hangs the crucifix back on the wall, and lies back down.

(Look, I’ll go ahead and admit that was pretty creepy, but I’m not sure that it makes any sense at all. Do we assume that Nancy fell asleep for a moment, allowing Freddy to affect the physical world around Nancy? At which point, she woke up? I guess that kinda works as an explanation. I gotta wonder how often I’m going to be asking these questions.)

Tina, still dressed only in a shirt, walks outside, asking if somebody is there. Tina is literally doing everything she can to not survive this movie.

She steps out into the street, and there’s Freddy, looking all burned up. Freddy’s arms are really long, so that Freddy can scrape the nails of one hand against some nearby metal.

Tina runs, and of course, even though she’s going away from Freddy, she bumps into him. At which point, she turns around and runs the other way.

Tina continues to run back to her house, when Freddy steps out from behind a tree, as though he were in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He tells Tina to look, and uses his glove to cut off two of his own fingers.

Tina runs up to her porch, screaming for Nancy. Freddy grabs her and pulls her to the ground. She reaches up to grab his face, and his face skin pulls off, revealing the skull and eyeballs beneath.

In Tina’s mom’s room, Tina screams for Rod.

Rod gets out of the bed. Luckily for us, after he finished showing Tina a good time, but before he fell asleep, he put on some underpants.

Under the covers, Tina is trying to fight off Freddy.

Rod pulls the blanket off of Tina, who is the only one in bed. Her eyes are still closed, so she’s still “asleep.”

She pushes herself around on the bed, her shirt pulls open, and four claw marks appear on her chest. She’s pulled off the bed, and into the air. She kicks Rod in the face, knocking him over.

Tina, screaming and covered in ever more blood, hits the floor, and is dragged up the wall and across the ceiling while screaming a lot. Rod keeps yelling out, “Tina!” but otherwise doesn’t stand up or try to help in any way.

Tina finally falls off the ceiling. She bounces off the now very bloody bed.

Nancy wakes up.

Glen and Nancy try to break into Tina’s mom’s room. Tina is WAY dead on the floor. Rod has vanished out a now-open window.

At the police station, two cops talk about what might have happened. They’re going to pin the whole thing on Rod. Granted, Rod didn’t do it, but given what little we know about Rod, this might not be such a bad thing for society.

At any rate, it turns out one of the cops is Nancy’s dad. He and Nancy’s mom ask Nancy what happened, and she says Rod isn’t, you know, THAT crazy, and that Tina dreamed this was going to happen.

The next morning, Nancy convinces her mom that she wants to go to school, even though she didn’t get any sleep the night before. Her mom agrees, on the condition that Nancy comes right home after school.

Nancy starts walking to school. She sees a dude in a suit and sunglasses as she walks. But when she turns and looks again, he’s gone.

And Rod grabs her from behind. He says he’s not going to hurt Nancy, and that he didn’t touch Tina. Which isn’t strictly true.

Suddenly, Tina’s dad pops out of the bushes, gun pointed at Rod. Rod runs. Nancy gets in the way of dad, but it doesn’t much matter. A bunch of cops come out of nowhere, and they cuff Rod and take him and his switchblade away.

Rod protests his innocence to Nancy as he’s dragged off.

Nancy’s dad gets all cranky and wants to know why Nancy is going to school. Nancy stomps off in a huff.

In English class, Nancy’s teacher gives a lecture on Shakespeare, and how things aren’t always what they seem. The teacher has a dude named John read from “Julius Caesar,” and Nancy falls asleep.

You can tell she’s asleep because she can see Tina, in a clear body bag, pawing at the bag and calling to Nancy.

Ah, the Julius Caesar bit ends in, “Were it not that I have bad dreams.” Okay, mister writer/director, you’ve proved you’re a smart dude. Move along.

Nancy looks back at the door and sees that there’s a pool of blood there, but no Tina. So she walks out the door and starts following the trail of blood. Someone is dragging Tina’s body bag around a corner, but the “person” doing it is invisible.

Nancy follows the trail of blood, turns the corner, and bumps into a girl wearing an orange-and-green sweater. Which is odd, since Nancy described it as red and green before. But I’m sure that will all be explained later, am I right?

Nancy keeps on walking, down a hallway which suddenly has a bunch of leaves in it, and the girl calls out to her. Nancy turns, and the girl now has blood running down her face, and Freddy’s glove. She tells Nancy not to run in the hallway.

Nancy turns and walks down the hallway, around a corner, and down some stairs. She’s still following the trail of blood.

Eventually, she gets to the basement of the school, and she heads into a room where no students are allowed. Looks like a workshop/boiler room.

Freddy steps out, and Nancy asks who he is. In reply, he lifts up his sweater, which looks kind of reddish in this light, and uses a claw to slash open his own chest. Green goo and maggots ooze out.

Nancy freaks out and runs away. Only the door seems to have vanished.

So, you know. More running. Pipes. Steam. Freddy doing the crazy laugh, and saying stuff like, “Gonna get you.”

Nancy says, “It’s only a dream.”

Freddy says, “Come to Freddy.”

Nancy burns her arm on a pipe, and wakes up in the classroom, screaming.

Her teacher yells at her to calm her down, and says she’s going to call Nancy’s mom. Nancy says she’s going home, and the teacher tries to get the class back on task.

Nancy stands outside the school and cries. Then she notices that she has an actual welt on her arm, from where she burned herself.

Nancy goes to talk to Rod in prison, and Rod once again tries to explain what happened. Which, of course, makes him sound crazy. He tells her that he had a “nightmare” the night before Tina got killed. And yeah, dude with razors for fingers.

Nancy pounds on the door to be let out of the prison.

That night, Nancy takes a bath and sings the Freddy rhyme, which is totally NOT what I would do in that situation, because it would creep me right out.

Nancy falls asleep, and the Freddy hand emerges from the water between Nancy’s legs. The hand reaches for Nancy, and it looks bad, when there’s a knock at the door. Nancy wakes up and the hand descends into the bath water.

Shouldn’t the hand have just, like, vanished? Or is the implication here that being a little groggy means that the nightmare can still affect you, even if you’re not totally out?

Regardless, mom warns Nancy not to fall asleep in the tub. She’s worried Nancy might drown. Mom has also heated up some warm milk for Nancy, which Nancy notes is “gross.”

She falls asleep, and Freddy pulls her under the water.

Under the water, Nancy is trapped under what looks like ice water, with one little hole of light.

When she pulls herself up out of the water, Nancy is still in the tub. She screams for her mother.

Mom uses a coat hanger to break into the bathroom, just as Nancy gets out of the tub.

Annnd… I’m officially perplexed how the whole asleep/awake thing works in this movie. I mean, granted, it’s creative and creepy and all that, but I’m not sure what the rules are, here. If Nancy was asleep, okay, she went under the water, and then… she pulled herself up out of the tub.

Only that means she was probably awake at that point. So Freddy should have been gone. Only he pulled her back under the water. So I guess she was still asleep.

But she kept on screaming, and pulled herself totally out of the water before mom even got into the room. Nancy was standing there in a towel. So when did she wake up, exactly?

Am I over-thinking this one? Probably.

At any rate, Nancy apologizes for scaring mom, and claims she slipped getting out of the tub.

Mom leaves. Nancy reaches into the medicine cabinet and pulls out some anti-sleep pills.

Later, in her pajamas, Nancy watches, “The Evil Dead.” Out of order. Seriously, if you know anything about “Evil Dead” at all, you’ll be totally perplexed as to what sequences she’s watching, because none of them match up.

Nancy turns off her TV, gets up, and looks out her window. She opens her window, and there’s Glen, who just climbed the trellis to see how Nancy is doing. Glen comes into the room, and they talk about how she freaked out in English class.

Nancy asks for Glen’s help. She’s going to “look for someone,” and Glen needs to stand guard.

I’m not sure why the movie is pretending that what’s going to happen is some big mystery. Anyone who understands basic logic knows Nancy is going to sleep, to try to locate Freddy, and Glen’s job will be to wake her up if she freaks out.

At any rate, a little later, Nancy, still in her jammies, walks out the front door of her house. It’s all foggy-like outside. Nancy keeps on walking around. She calls out to Glen. Glen pops out from behind a tree and says he’s watching.

You know what’s goofy? She’s not wearing any shoes. If it was me, and I was looking for a psychotic killer, I’d put my running shoes on before going for a walk outside. In the dark. But that’s me.

Nancy just keeps on walking. She goes to the cop shop, and peers in a basement window.

Rod is in there, in a little prison cell. Freddy walks in the door of the… you know what? This is going to take some description. Okay, first, there’s a little jail cell, and that has a door in it. Then there’s a little room NEXT to the jail cell, with a SECOND door in it. Freddy comes in that door.

Nancy calls to Glen again. Glen doesn’t answer.

So Nancy gets to watch Freddy walk right through the bars of Rod’s jail cell. She looks away, and back, and Freddy has vanished.

Nancy looks around again, and there’s Tina, all body-bagged up. A centipede crawls out of her mouth. There are more centipedes on the ground, at her feet.

Nancy walks around the edge of the cop shop, calling to Glen.

Freddy appears, and gives chase.

Nancy runs back to her house. She goes in the door, and up the stairs. The stairs turn to goo as she steps on them. Freddy smashes the little window in the front door and does some taunting.

Finally, Nancy gets up the stairs and into her room. She sees Glen lying there, asleep.

Nancy looks in the mirror, insisting that, “This is just a dream.” Freddy smashes through the mirror and into Nancy’s room. He grabs Nancy.

They tussle on the bed. They tussle on the floor. Nancy calls to Glen. There is more tussling, and Freddy slashes up a feather pillow. Nancy’s alarm goes off, and… Nancy wakes up.

I know. Big shock.

Nancy says several unkind things to Glen. Then she realizes that her mom is coming, so she shoves Glen out the window. Mom comes in, and Nancy tells mom that she was just having a bad dream, and that she’s going right back to sleep.

Then she runs to the window and calls to Glen again.

A short while later, Nancy and Glen head to the cop shop, and they demand the cop behind the desk let them see Rod, even though it’s the middle of the night.

Man, the police legal protocols in this town are for poo, huh? Or maybe it’s common for someone who witnessed a murder scene to go visit the alleged murderer in the middle of the night?

In the Rod’s jail cell, the sheets start to twist and move. Around Rod’s neck. Rod is, of course, asleep.

Nancy’s dad appears. He’s hanging out the office, trying to solve the murder. In the middle of the night. With their only suspect in custody. Uh-huh. Sure he is.

Nancy begs her dad to go down and check on Rod. Dad asks for the keys.

You know, I just came up with yet another question about police procedure in this town. Apparently, anyone can just walk up to the windows of the cop shop at any time and look down on the people in jail. They don’t even have, say, frosted glass or anything.

Can you imagine all the little kids playing, “Let’s go to the police station and watch the dudes in jail. Maybe they’ll have to poop!”

At any rate, Rod’s eyes are open, and he’s screaming for help while the sheet-noose drags him out of bed and across the floor. One would think screaming would be hard when you’re in a noose, but you would be wrong. So very wrong.

At any rate, the noose snakes up through the ceiling bars of the little jail cell (why are there bars there?) and the sheet hangs Rod real good just as Nancy, Glen, and her dad run in.

Too late. Rod is dead. Nancy and a surprising number of other people attend the funeral, even though they all think Rod is a murderer. This seems to include Nancy’s dad.

Post-funeral, Nancy informs her dad (and her mom, who’s standing right there) that the murderer is still out there. With a burned face, a “weird” hat, and a dirty red-and-green sweater.

Oh, and the knives, which are like “giant fingernails.”

Because as we all know, murderers never change their appearance in any way, in order to avoid detection.

Dad tells mom that Nancy should stay home for a few days. Mom wants to go one better. So she takes Nancy to a dream clinic. And I guess they just happened to have an opening, like, right away.

The nurses and doctors stick a bunch of wires on Nancy, and leave the room.

Nancy falls asleep. The doctor and Mom talk about what dreams are. While mom has a cigarette. Man, how can you not love a little medical smoking action? The 80s, man. When cancer didn’t exist.

Nancy goes into REM sleep, and the doctor helpfully informs the audience that a 3 is a good dream, whereas plus or minus 5 or 6 is a bad dream. Then the numbers shoot way, way, way up. Nancy freaks out.

Mom and the doctor run into the room and wake her up. Part of her hair has turned white. The doctor fills a hypodermic up with a sedative and gets ready to stick Nancy. Nancy freaks out and pushes him away.

They look at Nancy’s arm. There’s a bad cut there.

Also, Nancy grabbed Freddy’s hat off his head and brought it out of her dream.

Back home, Mom and Dad argue about the hat on the phone while Nancy eavesdrops.

Mom hangs up, and Nancy walks in. We discover that Nancy still hasn’t slept. They argue about the hat. Nancy points out that Freddy’s name is actually written inside the hat.

Mom thinks Nancy just needs to get some sleep.

Nancy thinks maybe she should just crawl inside of a bottle and become a hooch-hound, like her mom.

Mom slaps Nancy in the face. Nancy steps away.

Nancy’s Mom says that Freddy can’t come after Nancy. He’s dead.

Nancy gets really upset about this, because her mom was acting like this was something Nancy made up.

Mom says Nancy needs to get some sleep. Nancy is, for obvious reasons, not convinced. She leaves the house.

She and Glen go for a walk. They stand on a bridge, eating food and talking about the Balinese way of dreaming. Apparently, they have a system they call dream skills. If they’re having a bad dream, they turn it into a poem or a song or something. All their art comes from their dreams.

If a monster attacks them in their dreams, they turn their back on it. That takes away the monster’s energy and is disappears.

They’re both really, really cavalier about this whole thing, seeing as how two of their friends are dead.

Oh, and important detail for later: Nancy is reading a book on how to booby-trap her house.

Nancy heads home, and discovers that her mom has put bars on all the windows. Nancy confronts her mom, who lights up a smoke. And tells Nancy to join her in the cellar.

Mom tells Nancy a story – story about Fred Krueger, a “filthy child murderer” who killed at least 20 kids in the neighborhood. They caught him and he went to trial, but someone signed the search warrant in the wrong place and Freddy was set free.

So a bunch of parents tracked him down in an old boiler room where he used to take his victims. They filled the place with gasoline and lit it on fire. Freddy is dead.

Oh, but there’s more! Mom took a souvenir. She’s got Freddy’s glove, wrapped up in a dirty cloth and shoved into a wood stove in the basement.

Icky.

At any rate, Nancy calls Glen and tells him the plan. Nancy will fall asleep, find Freddy, grab him, and Glen will wake her up. Since she’ll be holding Freddy, he’ll come with her, and Glen can hit him with a baseball bat.

Nancy tells Glen to meet her on her porch at midnight.

Just before midnight, Glen’s mom wakes him up and tells him to shut off his TV and go to bed.

Also just before midnight, Nancy’s mom tucks Nancy in and tells her to go to bed.

Nancy’s mom leaves her room, and Nancy hops out of bed. She grabs some coffee from a coffeemaker she has stashed under her bed, and gets dressed. She looks across the street, where Glen lives, and sees Glen’s parents standing out on Glen’s porch.

The parents converse on the porch, about how Glen’s dad thinks Nancy is full of the crazy.

Nancy opens her door and looks in the hallway, but mom is still out there, boozing it up.

So she tries to call Glen. Glen is asleep again. Glen’s mom answers, and Glen’s dad says he wants the phone. Dad hangs up the phone, and takes it off the hook.

Nancy’s phone rings, and she hears the screech of Freddy’s claws. She yanks the phone out of the wall, then gets mad because Glen might try to call.

Uh, no. If you can hear Freddy, you’re asleep, and the phone isn’t really out of the wall.

No matter. The phone rings again, Nancy picks it up to listen, and Freddy says, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” Then the mouthpiece becomes Freddy’s mouth, and his tongue licks her lips.

Nancy freaks and runs downstairs. She’s trying to get out the front door, but her mom has locked her in. Somehow.

Mom is drunk on the couch. Nancy demands the key. Mom says Nancy is going to get some sleep if it “kills me.”

Focus, people. According to your own rules, NANCY IS ASLEEP ALREADY.

Over at Glen’s place, Glen sleeps. Freddy reaches up and pulls him down through the bed, leaving a big hole. Blood geysers up from the bed and coats the ceiling.

Glen’s mom runs in, sees all the blood, and starts screaming.

The cops arrive a short time later. Nancy’s dad waves up at Nancy, since she lives across the street.

Dad heads in, and sees blood dripping through the ceiling into a bucket.

Nancy calls Glen’s house and asks to talk to her dad. She tells him that Freddy is doing all the killing, and she volunteers to go in and get Freddy if dad will be there to arrest him.

She demands that her dad break down the door in 20 minutes, and she’ll have Freddy.

Dad hangs up, and tells another cop to watch Nancy’s house, and call him if anything strange happens.

Nancy booby-traps her house. In less than 20 minutes, even though it looks like she does a WHOLE lotta work in there, with tripwires and gunpowder and such.

Nancy goes to talk to her mom, even though she just blew a bunch of her 20 minutes. They reconcile. Aw. Mom puts her hooch on the bedside table.

Nancy sets the alarm on her clock. She says The Lord’s Prayer. She sets the alarm on her watch to go off in 10 minutes.

Then we get an audio recap of, “What if they meet a monster in their dreams?”

At which point, of course, Nancy goes to sleep.

Moments later, Nancy is headed down the stairs of her house, and into the basement. She goes to the wood stove, and pulls out the dirty rag that had Freddy’s glove in it. Only, of course, the glove is gone.

She keeps walking, and finds another door in the basement, which goes, I dunno, even more downstairs. To the abandoned boiler room.

Then she goes down a circular stairway. At which point, she’s on some catwalks in the boiler room.

Then she climbs down a ladder off the catwalks. I realize this is all tension-building, but seriously, that took something like three whole minutes.

Once on the ground, Nancy calls out, “Krueger! I’m here!”

And it’s time to walk around so we can see all the production value again.

Nancy finds Tina’s crucifix, which, once again, hasn’t helped anyone at all.

But no Freddy, and no Freddy, and no Freddy. Until Nancy checks her watch. Then he appears from nowhere.

She runs – down the same spiral staircase she already came down.

Freddy attacks. She jumps. She lands OUTSIDE her house, because, you know, dream.

She sees that the alarm is about to go off on her watch, so she taunts Freddy again, and he pounces on her. She grabs him, alarms go off…

…

And Nancy wakes up. Part of her trellis came with her. But no Freddy.

She starts to babble about how she’s crazy after all, and suddenly Freddy pops up next to her bed.

Nancy smashes something over his head and runs out the door. She closes the door and hooks up a wire to the door handle, which will pull a sledgehammer onto Freddy’s.

Nancy screams out the window to the surrogate dad-cop. Surrogate dad-cop says everything is going to be all right.

Nancy runs to the front door and smashes the window, but the bars are in the way and she still can’t get out.

Freddy finally opens the door, and the sledgehammer hits him tummy. Freddy is mildly hurt. Then Freddy, who isn’t the brightest bulb in the flower patch, clutches his chest and falls OVER a banister and down the stairs, doing way more damage to himself by being stupid than Nancy managed with that sledgehammer thing.

Freddy falls all the way down the stairs and lands at Nancy’s feet.

She climbs over the couch, and they set off an explosive light bulb. Not sure what that was going to accomplish. It would be like setting off a grenade and hoping that the dude standing next to you would catch all the shrapnel. But okay.

Nancy breaks another window and keeps screaming for help, and here comes Freddy again.

Nancy goes to the basement, leads Freddy on a wild goose chase, douses him with some sort of flammable liquid and lights a match.

Freddy keeps coming, setting fire to parts of the basement as he goes.

Nancy goes back to the window and screams to her dad some more. He’s finally a little more willing to help now that smoke is pouring from the house.

Nancy takes the cops to the basement – only there’s a problem. Fiery footprints lead up the stairs.

Nancy follows them. Freddy is on Mom’s bed, attacking Mom. While on fire. Dad puts out the fire, using a blanket. Mom’s burned corpse sinks into the bed.

Nancy asks if dad believes her now.

A cop comes up from downstairs and says all the fires are out.

Dad embraces Nancy.

Dad heads downstairs after Nancy tells him to go. She says she’ll be there in a minute.

I’m a little confused by what sort of emotions I’m supposed to be feeling right now. Seeing as how dad the cop just saw some SERIOUSLY screwy stuff, this has to mean that Nancy is still dreaming all of this, right? Sure.

So, mom is probably alive, I’m guessing.

And that ain’t dad who just went downstairs.

Nancy stares at the bed where mom used to be. It doesn’t even look slept in.

The door slams behind Nancy. Nancy turns. The sheet on the bed rises, ghostlike. Freddy slashes his way through it, making death pronouncements.

Nancy retorts: “I know the secret now. This is just a dream. You’re not alive. This whole thing is just a dream. I want my mother and friends again. I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing.”

Freddy jumps off the bed, claw outstretched. And… he vanishes.

Nancy steps forward, out the door, and…

Out her front door, into the foggy, sunny, morning air. Mom is there, talking about how she bottomed out, and now she feels GREAT. She’s going to stop drinking, because she “just doesn’t feel like it any more.”

Glen, Tina, and Rod all pull up in a convertible with the top down. It’s kinda reddish. Nancy hops in.

The top appears: It’s got Freddy stripes on it. The top closes up, all the windows roll up, and the gang drives away while Nancy panics.

Over on a nearby lawn, three little girls jump rope and do the Freddy chant.

Aaand Freddy’s arm smashes through the window in Nancy’s front door, grabs mom, and drags her, screaming, into the house.