A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) on Netflix
X19871h 36mFantasyHorrorThriller
Kristen Parker is admitted to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital after Freddy Krueger attacks her in a dream. There she meets Nancy Thompson, an intern therapist who survived him years ago.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.7/10101,092 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
Kristen Parker dreams that Freddy Krueger attacks her, and the marks the attack leaves in the waking world look like a slit wrist. Believing her daughter tried to kill herself, Elaine Parker admits her to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, where Dr. Neil Gordon takes her case. Kristen fights the orderlies who come to sedate her, because she is afraid to fall asleep. Nancy Thompson, a new intern therapist who came through Krueger's killing spree six years before, calms her by reciting the rhyme Krueger is known by. Nancy then meets the rest of the ward: Phillip, a sleepwalker; Kincaid, a tough street kid; Jennifer, a hopeful television actress; Will, in a wheelchair since a suicide attempt; Taryn, a recovering drug addict; and Joey, the youngest, who cannot speak. Kristen tells Nancy she can pull other people into her dreams.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the intro sequence, Shostrom built a surreal mechanical corpse dummy, going to the Simon Wiesenthal museum for inspiration and looking at photographs of burned children from the Auschwitz concentration camp; it took ten weeks, but Russell was so unnerved by it that he had it replaced by a simpler decayed skeleton, made within hours.
- In the Australian state of Queensland the film was banned by the Bjelke-Petersen government over its drug references, specifically the scene where Freddy's glove becomes a row of syringes; only in 1990, when the newly elected Goss government abolished the Queensland Film Board of Review, did it become available through normal channels.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor apparently did not read the script or do any research on the Nightmare films, so during the fake talk show where Dick Cavett interviews her, all her reactions seen on film were 100 percent genuine; when Freddy jumped out she had a mild freak-out.
- Nurse Marcie, while seducing Joey, was originally supposed to turn into a “she-Freddy” with Alden wearing Freddy's mask, but Roy H. Wagner had second thoughts after seeing how it looked, saying “Freddy with breasts, it was too off-kilter”; the nurse shoots prehensile tongues instead.
- The theme song “Dream Warriors” was written and performed by heavy metal band Dokken, whose manager Cliff Burnstein, an acquaintance of Wes Craven, obtained a copy of the film script as reference for the lyrics; the single's success led to heavy metal songs in the sequels' soundtracks.
- Mark Shostrom, who was also doing work on the set of Evil Dead II, possibly smuggled the Freddy glove used in Dream Warriors over and used it as a background prop for one day, which explains why the glove appeared in that film, released the same year.
- Dream Warriors was New Line Cinema's first film to open nationally, and it debuted at number one in 1,343 theaters with a weekend gross of $8.9 million, a record for an independent film at the time.
- Patricia Arquette was nearly recast early in the production of Dream Warriors, but Chuck Russell intervened and convinced the producers to allow her to stay in the part.
