Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was buried on Home Video today in 1992, after a September 13th, 1991 theatrical release.
By the time Freddy’s Dead dropped in ’91, the slasher genre was on its death bed. Box office numbers were circling the drain, and horror was moving away from wisecracking murderers and masked psychos. Prestige Oscar-winning psychological thrillers like Silence of the Lambs and Misery were the new red.
But for a while there, A Nightmare on Elm Street had been the thorny crown jewel of the slasher boom and Freddy’s Dead was supposed to be the big sendoff. But instead of giving the bastard son of a hundred maniacs a dignified death, New Line went full Looney Tunes with Freddy flying around on a broomstick and playing a literal Power Glove. The franchise that started as a surreal and terrifying high-concept horror movie was now a full-blown parody of itself, complete with hackneyed 3D segment and gimmicky cameos.
The cast was game, the kills were still inventive, and Robert Englund was clearly having fun. Top marks all around. But by this point, Freddy wasn’t a nightmare anymore and audiences had stopped being afraid of him. I was a huge fan of the series, but I left the cinema shrugging and ready to move on with my life.
Of course, this wasn’t really the end. New Line and Wes Craven would resurrect Krueger just a few years later with the excellent New Nightmare – and the Scream series would dig the genre up and give it a fresh coat of irony. But in 1991, the message was clear: The Franchise was done. And Freddy was dead.
…Until he wasn’t. -Pop