Line #15 Trivia/ANightmareOnElmStreet5TheDreamChild


1	* ActingForTwo: Creator/RobertEnglund plays both Freddy Krueger and Freddy's biological father (albeit briefly) in this film.
2	* BTeamSequel: Creator/RennyHarlin didn't return to direct, as he was busy with ''Film/DieHard2''.
3	* CreatorBacklash:
4	** Rachel Talalay, producer of the first four films and director of ''Film/FreddysDeadTheFinalNightmare'', was involved in the pre-production of the film, but abandoned production because she was busy with other New Line projects. She criticized the film for being too serious and because Stephen Hopkins was a director more concerned with the visual than with the plot.
5	** Erika Anderson criticized the film in ''Never Sleep Again'' for not being scary and straying from the series' roots. She expressed disappointment that they edited so much of Greta's death scene.
6	** Series producer Bob Shaye admitted in ''Never Sleep Again'' that the movie was "kind of lame."
7	** For co-writers John Skipp and Craig Spector. Apparently, the only thing from their version of the script that survived to the finished product was Freddy saying "It's a boy!" after his resurrection.
8	* DuelingMovies: With ''Film/FridayThe13thPartVIIIJasonTakesManhattan'' and ''Film/Halloween5TheRevengeOfMichaelMyers'', which were released in the same year. Despite all three being the worst critical and commercial failures for their franchises (with the possible exception of ''Film/HalloweenIIISeasonOfTheWitch'') up until that point, this film ''still'' somehow managed the best critical and commercial reactions of the trio.
9	* FranchiseKiller: ''The Dream Child'' was so reviled that it was decided to kill Freddy in the next movie, which is ironically even more reviled than ''The Dream Child''.
10	* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: The unrated cut of the film, which has the more gruesome versions of Dan and Greta’s deaths, has never made it onto any other format aside from VHS and Laserdisc. The closest it got to being on DVD and Blu-ray were snippets on the ''Never Sleep Again'' documentary, reportedly due to problems with the original film masters.
11	* RefittedForSequel: Leslie Bohem first pitched the idea of a "Freddy Baby" for the first film. His pitch involved telling a pregnant executive to imagine Freddy's claws tearing out of your body.
12	* TroubledProduction:
13	** With Creator/RennyHarlin being gone due to having to work on ''Film/DieHard2'', Robert Shaye and co had ''less than a year'' to make the film. The title was the first thing thought up for the film, as was the poster. Nobody had any idea what the "dream child" was, or why the poster had Freddy levitating a crystal ball with a foetus inside - this was because the story hadn't fully taken shape yet.
14	** The idea of Freddy using someone's to-be-born child to get into the real world was an idea that was considered for the first film. Two writers, John Skipp and Craig Spector were brought in to write a story that had Alice and Dan's unborn child being taken over by Freddy. Producer Rachel Talalay hated their script and brought another writer, Leslie Bohem in, who ended up rewriting almost ''all of it''. The only thing from Skipp's and Spector's script that made it into the final version was Freddy's infamous line "It's a booooooy!!!". The two have since come to regret wasting their time.
15	** It then turned out that Bohem's screenplay wasn't entirely to Shaye's liking either, and with the writer unavailable for rewrites, William Wisher Jr. came along and did a further draft, which Shaye also didn't like. Yet another writer, David J. Schow was hired and managed to create a screenplay that most of the key players were happy with, though a few further last-minute revisions were done by co-producer Michael de Luca due to Schow having been assigned to work on the screenplay that would eventually become ''Film/LeatherfaceTheTexasChainsawMassacreIII''.[[note]](And just to indicate how torturous the writing process was, the first teaser trailer credited Bohem and Wisher for the story and Schow and de Luca for the screenplay; the finished film, thanks to a combination of legal spats and WGA arbitration, credited Skipp and Spector for the story, and Bohem for the screenplay)[[/note]]
16	** The infamous scene where Freddy's amputated arm turns into a number of red and green tarantulas was a ''literal'' nightmare to shoot. The tarantulas were painted red and green, and trained to move in certain ways. Problem was, only one take was filmed because ''the tarantulas were angry and aggressive''. It doesn't help that nobody knows what happened to the spiders after because they soon disappeared - some even believe ''they disappeared into the studio office''.
17	** The shooting itself was a stressful mess. Director Stephen Hopkins had only four weeks to film, and a further four weeks to edit, with only two stages to do it on. Although he did get everything done on time, the experience left him so stressed and burnt out that he almost said no to directing ''Film/Predator2'', despite the higher pay and more relaxed shooting schedule.
18	** During post-production, test screenings had scenes that were considered so disgusting that they had large chunks of them left on the cutting room floor. The "Freddy Bike" scene had even more shots of Dan's skin being ripped away graphically, and the infamous scene where Freddy force feeds Greta tons of disgusting food made of her innards had a shot that panned down to reveal Freddy ripping her insides out as she ate. Heavy cutting was needed to keep the film from receiving the then-new NC-17 rating.
19	** When the film was released, though getting bad reviews from critics was basically expected, fans on the other hand criticized the film heavily for being needlessly mean-spirited and downright cruel in an attempt to be DarkerAndEdgier. Others, on the other hand, found it boring and not nearly as fun as the other films. The film, as a result, was a box office failure - it opened at #3 and soon disappeared after. Despite this, the film still performed better than the [[Film/FridayThe13thPartVIIIJasonTakesManhattan other]] [[Film/Halloween5TheRevengeOfMichaelMyers two]] slasher film instalments that came out that year, but it still was bad enough to make the producers decide to kill Freddy for good in the next one.
20	* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
21	** Creator/StephenKing and Creator/FrankMiller were offered to write and direct the film.
22	** The first draft of the script didn't have Greta, Mark, or Yvonne. Alice's friends were named Dean, Jen, and Ginger.
23	*** Jen is almost a combination of Yvonne and Mark, acting as the sassiest member of Alice's group and a dedicated artist. Unlike Mark, Jen focuses on sculpting and sketching compared to comic art. Freddy kills her in a warped version of her studio by animating her scrap metal statues and causing an explosion with her kiln.
24	*** Ginger appeared to be a prototype of Greta, and suffered from bulimia and a sleazy manager named Buddy instead of a domineering StageMom. She would've died much later in the film with a two-stage nightmare. First, she appears in Club MTV only for Freddy to turn her into a [[BodyHorror grotesquely fat]] [[PigMan pig monster]], before she starts puking blood. After waking up from that part, Freddy appears and guts her open in a way similar to Tina's death from the first movie, with the police thinking Buddy actually did it.
25	** More on Freddy's backstory would've been explored, such as how his mother gave him up for adoption and how he'd been bullied relentlessly by older kids and a cruel Mother Superior, leading into his desire to hurt others.
26	** Amanda Krueger would've had more of a role where Alice calls her out for abandoning her baby and being indirectly responsible for how he turned out.
27	** Alice's pregnancy was going to advance rapidly thanks to the energy Freddy was infusing in her unborn child. Only a passing mention of the baby being a bit large for the first trimester remains in the film.
28	** Dan lasted longer in the earlier script, with him living long enough for him to learn Alice is pregnant and figuring out what to do afterwards. He's also shown arguing with his parents, whom believe Alice is mentally ill due to her past trauma. While Dan's death still involves Freddy-controlled motorcycle, Dan's bike is simply rammed into a tree branch and he's impaled. Following his death, Dan's parents make it clear at his funeral that they don't want anything to do with Alice or her baby.
29	** Freddy's goals with Alice's baby were made much more clearer, with the reveal that he'd been planning on using Alice's fetus to be born again, and had in fact already manifested inside her while feeding on the fetus she conceived with Dan.
30	** Other early drafts including one where the kids were part of a small theater production, and another called "Freddy Rules" introduced Nancy's uncle and his family as main characters alongside Alice. This draft included something called the Coma Pit, a realm of the dream world Freddy was absolutely terrified of.
31	** In the penultimate battle scene when Jacob [[spoiler: kills Freddy by unleashing the powers that were inherited by him]], the line Jacob was originally scripted as him saying [[PrecisionFStrike "Fuck you, Krueger!"]] but due to Whitby Hertford's age during filming the line was re-written as "School's out, Krueger!"

Context Trivia / ANightmareOnElmStreet5TheDreamChild