A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5 Novelization (Credit: FANGORIA)
Despite being “The House That Freddy Built,” New Line sure had strange ideas on how the Elm Street films should be represented in the world of physical media. The original was treated with respect, but the sequels were often given bare-bones discs and/or packaged together with other entries, as if none of them mattered on their own. The Blu-ray set was no better; only the upcoming 4K UHD set seems to feel each entry deserves its own disc again, though sadly extras are pretty slim.
Similarly, for the novelizations, they packaged the first three films into one volume (and not even a particularly large one, giving each film about 70 pages), and then did the same for Dream Master and Dream Child, jamming them together and tossing a few pages of photos in for good measure. What does Freddy have to do to get standalone releases for his adventures?
Published in 1989 to tie into the release of Dream Child, it's not much of a surprise that the Dream Master part of the book isn't particularly enlightening. With the film long in the rearview by that point, it'd be weird to deviate from its (very successful) theatrical cut. There are only two differences worth noting: Rick's death is different (he dies in the elevator, without the karate scene), and there's a scene where Debbie and Dan visit a hippie professor who has some insight into dreams and what they mean.
Otherwise, apart from a few minor dialogue variations (there's no “Rick, you little meatball!” line! Boooo!), it plays out exactly as Renny Harlin gave us, racing through its events without any major introspection from its characters. That said, on the page, you can imagine Patricia Arquette returning as Kristen instead of being recast, so that's nice.
For Dream Child, however, it diverges enough from Stephen Hopkins' finished cut to make it worth reading (and writing a column about, of course). As die-hards know from Never Sleep Again, this was a messy production, with “too many cooks in the kitchen,” as they say, resulting in an entry that is no one's favorite. It's weirdly low on kills (a mere three, even less than the original), inexplicably doesn't utilize Alice's powers, and has a confusing plot that culminates in a shrug of a climax. There's a lot to like, and I appreciate the attempt to make Freddy scary again after Dream Master had him in full quipster mode, but as a whole, it simply doesn't work.
The novelization suggests that it could have at least been a little better, not to mention kind of daring in a way I'll get to later. If you're wondering about kills, however? Well then, I'm sorry to report that there aren't any more to find here, and they basically play out the same. Mark's is a little different, with Freddy showing him comic book versions of Dan and Greta's deaths before killing him (and Mark's superhero alter ego is absent here), but for all intents and purposes, the action in the book mirrors that of the film.
The changes come from the character moments. Alice's dad, in particular, has a little more to do here; there's a sweet scene where he comes home with jars of baby food for her, so she can start practicing for her baby. This series has always presented parents as… well, pretty awful, and Mr. Johnson followed suit with his appearance in Dream Master, but here and in the final cut, he has gotten sober and is surprisingly/endearingly supportive of his teen daughter's pregnancy.
The book doesn't have the sad moment where he says that he hopes the baby is a boy because it'd be nice to hear one in the house again, but the baby food part and a few other moments (he's more defensive of her when Dan's parents try to muscle her into letting them raise the child) help make this a rare exception for the franchise: a loving and supportive parent.
There are also a couple of scenes with a security guard named Beland, who doesn't appear in the film. In his first scene, Alice pretends to be a police dispatcher who calls him away from his job of guarding the pool, allowing Yvonne, Dan, etc to sneak in for their graduation party. In the other, Beland spies Dan exiting the pool and chases him for trespassing, and it's actually his motorcycle that Dan steals in order to continue his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get to Alice. Neither of these amounts to much, but the first strengthens Alice's bond with her new friends, and the other would have given Danny Hassel a little more to do before his surprise death.
Some of the character dynamics are a little different, too. One notable change is that Mark is much shyer about his feelings for Greta, as opposed to the very brash version we got on-screen. Instead of his lollipop antics, he actually draws a nice picture of her, which flatters her, and she responds with a little kiss on the cheek. And the group meets up at the Crave Inn several times, unlike in the movie, where it only appears once (prior to Dan's death).
The doctor that they go see to check on Alice's baby is also a total jerk here, complaining about missing his golf game and rolling his eyes at Alice's concerns throughout the test. Greta's fancy dinner party scene also goes on longer, with one part that actually tickled me personally, when one guest referred to Dan as “Rick.” For whatever reason, I myself have mixed up the names of these two characters several times over the past 35 years (including in my notes for this very column!), so seeing it play out on paper was very amusing.
But the most interesting diversion occurs in the final scene. The climax with Freddy plays out pretty much the same (in that I couldn't really tell you what was going on), but in the epilogue at the park, Mr. Johnson points out that all three deaths were accidents: Dan in a car crash, Greta from choking, and Mark when his suspended bed fell on him (something that is hard to comprehend from the movie's depiction, but the cop DOES note that the bedroom wasn't “up to code”). The idea being that Freddy never actually returned after all, and that it was merely Alice's heightened stress that caused her to dream about Freddy again.
It's something that's never actually been explored in the movies: is it possible for these people to dream about Freddy the way they might also dream about being naked in class or being in an out of control car, without it being the ACTUAL, dangerous Freddy? This quick bit of dialogue suggests that they might have attempted this sort of thing, which would have been an interesting and even ballsy kind of approach for what was horror's hottest franchise at the time.
Alas, they played it safe, and there's no such implication in the finished film. Freddy was indeed back, and he was trying to be reborn from Alice's baby, or something. I can't say that this modified version would have turned this into a winning entry, but there's enough here to suggest it was at least a little more interesting and thoughtful during the development, only for most of those qualities to be rewritten/edited down into a pretty ho-hum affair.
Worse, its relative failure (less than half of what Dream Master made the year before) had New Line decide to end the series with the even worse Freddy's Dead. So it's fair to say nothing good came out of this one beyond being able to claim that it's the one time in the entire franchise that a Final Girl came back and survived. Oh and we got whatever the hell this is.
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