Did You Ever See a Dream Stalking?

By RICHARD CORLISS

One, two, Freddy's comin' for you.

Three, four, better lock your door.

Five, six, grab your crucifix.

Seven, eight, gotta stay up late.

Nine, ten, never sleep again . . .

Nice guy, Freddy Krueger. Conceived in a madhouse one weekend when the inmates took their grotesque pleasures with a trapped staff member, this "bastard son of a hundred maniacs" worked as a school janitor in Springwood, U.S.A., where his hobby was kidnaping and murdering teenagers. Tried for these crimes, he was freed on a technicality: "Oh, the lawyers got fat and the judge got famous, but somebody forgot to sign the search warrant in the right place." So the parents of Elm Street tracked the demon down to his boiler room and burned him -- to death, some say.

Clever fellow, our fricasseed Freddy. Now he stalks the dreams of his posse's teenage children. A vision of loathsomeness with his moldy black felt hat, scalded face, red-and-green-striped sweater and right-hand glove with steel "finger-knives," he lures each sleeping adolescent to a convenient boiler room (every building in town has one) or into their grungiest fears. And if they don't wake up in time, he executes them. Kind of harrowing, the number of Elm Street kids who die in their sleep. As one boy says, "It's not exactly a safe place to be a teenager."

Life of the party, this killer Krueger, with a mot for every murder. "This is it, Jennifer," he tells an aspiring young actress before smashing her head into a television set, "your big break in TV!" He impudently asks a girl, "Wanna suck face?" and does so, fatally. He drowns one horny lad in his water bed: "How's this for a wet dream?" At a nightmare diner ("If the food don't kill ya, the service will!"), he transforms one boy, literally, into a pizza face ("Rick, you little meatball!"), then devours him ("Mmmm, soul food!"). Another victim sprouts insect legs when trapped in Freddy's Roach Motel: "You can check in, but you can't check out."

What's really funny is how popular this suburban psychopath has become to the very teens he would menace. Freddy Krueger would never have won the Mr. Congeniality award at Springwood High, but at the box office he has matured into Most Likely to Succeed. As embodied by Actor Robert Englund, he is the star of New Line Cinema's A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Each sequel has outgrossed its predecessor, financially as well as filmically, with the first three installments cadging more than $100 million. And the new entry, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, has, in Variety's cheery phrase, "slashed its way into b.o. history." The picture, made for a puny $6 million, earned $12.8 million in its first three days -- better than Roger Rabbit, bigger than Big -- for the fourth best opening weekend of the year and the best ever tallied by an independently released film.

It gets spookier. The first three Nightmares have sold half a million videocassettes. Next month a syndicated TV series, Freddy's Nightmares, debuts on more than 160 stations, with Englund playing host. The sales of Freddy Krueger merchandise have topped $15 million. The Freddy mask and hat outsold all other Halloween costumes last year. New Line reports brisk sales for two Nightmare books, five LPs and a board game. You can buy Freddy dolls, the familiar sweater and the signature glove (with plastic finger-knives). He's got his own fan club and MTV special. And come October, a 900 chat line.

What's going on here? Are young moviegoers tiring of summer comedies and eager for a little dog-days shock therapy? Not likely: the season's other horror movies have been flops. Then is the answer just Freddy, the perfect freak-out counselor for an evening of summer camp? Not quite. Sure, he's got loads more personality than Jason, the goalie-masked monster of the seven Friday the 13th bloodfests. As Englund describes Freddy, "He has a bantam- cock swagger, an arrogant sexual thrust, like Jimmy Cagney." The ex- janitor can be pathetic too: "I picture him as a wiry, scrawny Lee Oswald with a push broom, peeking into girls' lockers when no one's looking." But the Nightmare films are more than a Freddy phenomenon. With sharp humor, a dash of B-movie style and the eerie simplicity of a child's counting rhyme, they tap profound adolescent fears, then exorcise them. It's catharsis on the cheap.

The first Nightmare, written and directed by Wes Craven, was a supple, evocative parable of vulnerability and triumph. Nancy Thompson (the splendid Heather Langenkamp) is isolated in adolescence. Her divorced parents are drunk or too distant; her friends are too weak to save themselves or her. So as in Psycho and Halloween, a young woman must act alone against evil. No man can defeat this creature with his strength; she must face him with her brains and purity. "These pictures are boot camps for the psyche," Craven says. "The only choice is to act or die. They are about kids' accepting the reins of adulthood, where you are responsible for your life, or death. By the time you are an adult, it's hard to touch that intensity, that chaos, but kids know the feeling. They live there."

Nancy Thompson was a modern Nancy Drew. And in Renny Harlin's Nightmare 4, Alice Johnson is Alice in Wonderland, falling through the hole of her consciousness into a war with the Mad Felt-Hatter. All the Nightmare films are compact encyclopedias of classical and pop allusions. They quote Poe and Cocteau, Hamlet and Balinese dream theory; they crib ruthlessly from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, Poltergeist and themselves. They are cultural carnivores.

In the past two Nightmares the tone has turned more facetious, the special effects toward the shoestring spectacular. Freddy now delivers double entendres like a James Bond boogeyman and devises custom-made tortures like the wardens of Room 101 in 1984. But he still represents the thing teens love to hate: Dad. "Freddy is the most ruthless primal father," says Craven. "The adult who wants to slash down the next generation." No keys to the car, Son. And no clean beaches, no safe streets, no safe sex, no noble politicians. Just a zillion-dollar debt for you to pay, and a nuclear winter that lasts forever. Adults ruined the world and created Freddy. Only kids can save it and destroy him.

But the kids who have made Nightmare the industry's most profitable horror series don't want Freddy destroyed. They want him back again next year, for April Fools' or Halloween. That's why, at the climax of Nightmare 4, everyone cheers when Freddy declares, "I am eternal!" The folks at New Line Cinema certainly hope so. They'll sleep better if their teenagers don't.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York