The greatest movies never made: Peter Jackson’s ‘Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Lover’
Long before he was an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Peter Jackson was making waves on the no-budget horror circuit, and he was even enlisted to try and crack the story for a new entry in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise at the turn of the 1990s.
At the time, only the most ardent of gorehounds would have even recognised Jackson’s name, considering he only had the instant cult favourite Bad Taste and misanthropic puppet caper Meet the Feebles on his filmography. He hadn’t even made Braindead yet, never mind making his first ventures into Hollywood filmmaking.
As tends to be the case with almost every long-running horror saga that’s been monetised to within an inch of its life, the appeal of Freddy Krueger was on the wane by the dawn of the 1990s. The razor-gloved icon had already starred in five features between 1984 and 1989, with the striped jumper enthusiast beginning to wear out his welcome.
A reinvigoration was much-needed, then, but in what proved to be a disastrous call, Jackson was overlooked. He co-wrote a screenplay subtitled Dream Lover alongside Danny Mulheron, and while there’s no word on whether or not he was in line to direct it himself, common sense would indicate that after his first two films found an audience very similar to the one who devoured the Elm Street sequels, he’d be near the top of the pile.
Jack Sholder, Chuck Russell, Renny Harlin, and Stephen Hopkins were all relatively untested when they helmed the second, third, fourth, and fifth instalments, so in terms of experience, Jackson was leagues ahead with Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles to his name. More than his qualifications, though, it was the story that made Dream Lover stand out.
Opting for an air of metatextuality long before Craven’s own New Nightmare, the story found Robert Englund’s fearsome antagonist a shadow of his former self. People simply weren’t scared of Freddy anymore, to the point the local youths would take sleeping pills for the express purpose of kicking the ever-loving shit out of a terror who used to strike fear into the hearts of many by name alone.
The opening act was basically A Nightmare on Elm Street meets A Clockwork Orange, with Freddy the one on the receiving end of repeated batterings from unruly youths. However, when he ends up retaliating and killing one of his dreamscape assailants, he begins to rediscover his long-lost mojo.
From there, Freddy would make it his mission to re-establish dominance over the dream world, effectively kidnapping a police officer and holding them hostage on his turf in an effort to draw the cop’s son back into uncharted territory for a final showdown. It would have explored that alternate reality in greater detail than any Elm Street flick to date, which would have been the perfect conduit for Jackson’s signature brand of imaginative horror.
Instead, New Line Cinema opted to pass on Dream Lover in favour of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was comfortably the worst of the original seven-film series. On the plus side, it put Jackson into the company’s orbit for the very first time, which ended up working out incredibly well for both parties when the studio ended up backing his ambitious adaptation of The Lord of the Rings almost a decade later.
After his brief flirtation with Freddy, Jackson would show New Line what it was missing by directing the riotous Braindead. Meanwhile, A Nightmare on Elm Street was perilously close to flatlining after the dismal Final Nightmare, necessitating Craven’s much-heralded return with the post-modern New Nightmare.
He did alright for himself in the end, but the prospect of peak horror-era Jackson getting his hands on a legend of the slasher genre was a mouth-watering prospect that sadly failed to materialise.
