A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a 1987 American fantasy slasher film directed by Chuck Russell in his feature directorial debut. The story was developed by Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and is the third installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Larry Fishburne, Priscilla Pointer, Craig Wasson, and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Nancy Thompson, now a psychiatrist, and Kristen, a patient who can bring others into her own dreams, team up with other kids to launch a daring rescue into the dreamland and save a child from Freddy Krueger.
The storyboards for the shooting were supplied by Pete von Sholly. Russell originally hired a cinematographer whom line producer Rachel Talalay perceived to be “Eastern European;” Talalay had the cinematographer fired after he had insulted Penelope Sudrow and replaced him with Roy H. Wagner. The Royce Hall building on the University of California, Los Angeles campus was used for the exteriors of the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, while St. Brendan Catholic Church was used for the church scenes. The scenes in Freddy’s boiler room were filmed at a converted warehouse across the street from Los Angeles County Jail. Mark Shostrom, who was also doing work on the set of Evil Dead II, possibly smuggled the Freddy glove used in Dream Warriors and used it as a background prop for one day, explaining why the glove appeared in that film released the same year.
The special effects were created by a team led by Peter Chesney and included Kevin Yagher and Mark Shostrom. For the iconic deathscene for Jennifer, where her body is hoisted into the air, Shostrom created a dummy of Penelope Sudrow with fully flexible limbs out of fiberglass and urethane and then put a matching wig on the dummy. The team built five fake televisions, each with different functions, with one being equipped with a rubber membrane which a dummy of Freddy’s head pushed up through, after which they substituted the dummy with Robert Englund. Another was equipped with the metal arms which included Freddy’s fingerblades and vacuum tubes from real televisions. The line “welcome to prime time, bitch” was ad libbed by Robert Englund.
For Taryn’s death scene, the team had originally tried for an effect where her head explodes after being injected with drugs, but could not make this effect work; instead they put appliances on Jennifer Rubin’s body to show the withering effects of the injection. The skeletal version of the girl that Kristen is holding in the intro sequence was originally a surreal mechanical corpse dummy created by Shostrom, but turned out to be too good for its purpose; Russell was so unnerved by its appearance that he did not dare to put it in the film, but had it replaced by a simpler “decayed skeleton.” Shostrom went to the Simon Wiesenthal museum for inspiration, looking at photographs of burned children from the Auschwitz concentration camp and needed ten weeks to complete the original dummy, and its replacement was created within hours at Russell’s insistence.
Heather Langenkamp and co-star Craig Wasson refer to a deleted scene in which they kissed, with Wasson stating that “No, we didn’t have sex, but there was this one real hot kiss that just about melted the camera lens. Too bad they cut it.”
Dream Warriors was theatrically released on February 27, 1987, and grossed $44.8 million domestically on a budget of over $4 million. It received mostly positive reviews from critics and is considered by many to be one of the best films in the Elm Street series.
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