Oh hey, looks who’s back? Seems like you just can’t keep this guy down. As a bonus to the Friday Night Frights Nightmare on Elm St. marathon, I’ve compiled every music video I could find from the various installments in the series. There are 4 songs altogether and in my opinion the quality lands squarely in the 50/50 zone. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Make tonight a Freddy night!

I have a theory that the first introduction you have to a long running film series typically will wind up becoming your favorite installment. It may not be the best one but it was your initial experience. This is the reason that Temple of Doom is my favorite Indy, Return of the Jedi my favorite Star War, E.T. my favorite E.T. and whatnot and so on and so forth, etc. What’s crazy is that as you get older, taste normally develops and totally shifts around, but not here though. No. A Nightmare on Elm St. 2: Freddy’s Revenge was my first taste of Freddy Krueger’s adventures and time has only poured concrete on it as the towering gold standard of the entire series for this particular fan.

Let’s do this thing.

I guess I couldn’t let our Dorkside’s 2024 Freddy ‘Fest (*tm) thing go by without bringing this up now could I? A Nightmare on Elm St. for the Nintendo Entertainment is a great, *cough* wonderful, *choke*…I mean, it’s a game that has been lumped in with LJN’s notorious track record of poor 8-bit releases based on movies. Only this one has the odd distinction of having been made by Rare; That’s right, the developers responsible for such stone cold classics as Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye and the almighty Banjo-Kazooie are to blame for this one.

Please don’t make me play it again.

A Nightmare on Elm St. 3: Dream Warriors belongs to a highly exclusive cinematic club of quality third installments. And in this special podcast edition of Friday Night Frights, Rob and Ray are gonna break it on down! Please enjoy this oh so nerdy (not to mention oh so spooky) deep dive into Freddy’s Nightmares!

Click Here to Listen!

There’s this great little retro diner called the St. Francis Fountain located in San Francisco’s mission district (Try the Cilantro Chicken Soup, the best in the city). It’s like walking into another era with the decor primarily unchanged from what it must have looked like in the 50’s: Hat and coat racks attached to each booth and there’s an adorable little candy counter featuring vintage and sealed trading card packs (along with individual cards that can all be bought for dirt cheap). Well wouldn’t you know it, on a random recent misty afternoon outing we went in for lunch and they had a ton of Nightmare on Elm St. cards to wade through and I of course couldn’t help myself.

Let’s have a look at the only five singles I could find featuring Freddy himself (And yes, I love that three of them just so happened to come from part 2 and are in sequence!).

If one were to rank all of these movies, I’d bet A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master would sit comfortably somewhere in the top 3 on most lists. Maybe even top 2. It’s arguably the most fun of them all, embracing a much more kinetic cinematic style, really cranking up the visuals and overflowing with an overall vision. It’s also just so 80’s, watching it now makes this one feel like the Freddy that comes to mind when you think about Freddy.

It’s kinda iconic.

Released back in 1994, this October A Nightmare On Elm St. pinball officially crosses the 3 decade mark of having never been played by yours truly. While 2,000 tables are reported to have been built (presumably finding homes in arcades, bars, bowling alleys and strip clubs across the country), I’ve certainly never seen one in real life. Have you? How the hell has this Nightmare machine managed to slip by me over all of this time!?

And almost as important, how is Nightmare Machine not a band?

A Nightmare on Elm St. 5: The Dream Child is a tough one to write about because it is easily my least favorite and thus, least frequently viewed entry in the series. I’ve never been in the mood to watch one of these movies and been like, “Y’know what? I could really go for Part 5 right now.” But I did give it another shot recently and am going to do my best to be nice.

Please Freddy, can I reason with you and ask you to not kill me for this review?