A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Fan Film Recreation is a home movie that was made by teenagers. All of the male parts—except for a dad, who is played by someone’s dad—are portrayed by ladies in drag. An Asian girl named Kim Dao stars as Freddy Krueger.
These kids were ahead of the curve.
I don’t have to tell you that few things in life are more satisfying than watching a movie where Patricia Arquette and Heather Langenkamp engage in dreamland warfare with Freddy while a theme song by Dokken plays. Colleen Briggs and her friends felt the same. They spent two months in 1989 filming a 40-minute remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with the help of the Briggs family camcorder, some magic markers, and a red Esprit sweater. A few years ago, this mini-epic was uploaded to YouTube by someone that was involved with the project. Sadly, it has since been removed . . . but not before we ripped it for safekeeping.
This movie is as adorable as it sounds. The iconic scene from Dream Warriors, where Freddy smashes someone’s head through a TV, is recreated using a cardboard television with a tinfoil screen. Freddy’s boiler room is populated by plaid couches and flames that are drawn on notebook paper. Dokken’s theme song plays, but the original recording has been overdubbed by the cast. There are also a few things that never made it into the final cut of the original, like a slow zoom on a poster of a Shih Tzu.
When I was thirteen, my greatest accomplishment was tracing Spawn comic books and passing them off as my own creations. And it totally worked until this butthole named Taylor brought the actual comics to school and blew the whistle on my shit. What I’m getting at is this: Just like Dolly Parton, Mink Stole, and Elvira, the ladies responsible for this movie will always be cooler than we could ever hope to be. Briggs and her friends had the idea to recreate one of their favorite movies, and they actually followed through. But unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (another pee-wee homage that was completed the same year), Nightmare resonates beyond nostalgia and novelty.
Most vintage teenage fan films were made by dudes. So they’re universally fueled by beer, gore, and “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys. For proof, look no further than Halloween: The Truth Behind the Mask. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Fan Film Recreation is different. Freddy barely appears. Instead, Briggs and company focus on character development, story, and endearingly dorky dialogue (“They’re defenseless in their dreams and that’s precisely what they need!”). For a few weekends in 1989, these empowered ladies created a tiny zeitgeist of accidental surrealism that was made for no one but themselves. Decades later, this artifact exists to remind us that life can be fun and inspiring, as long as we let it happen. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Kim Dao—again, as Freddy—flubs the most famous one-liner from Dream Warriors:
“It’s time for prime time!”
