High schoolers Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel) race in a pickup truck to the house of their friend, exercise junkie Debbie Stevens (Brooke Theiss). They are trapped in a time loop, fruitlessly driving down the same length of street over and over. Meanwhile Debbie is transforming, Kafka-esque, into a cockroach: her home gym now resembling an enormous roach hotel filled with viscous glue. It is in this moment that you might recall the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, released just four years ago, and Freddy Krueger’s chain of supernatural slashings and stabbings. You may catch yourself asking, as Debbie’s cockroach head splits out the back of her human skull: what the hell happened to bring us from there to this?

One of the interesting results of A Nightmare on Elm Street being released film by film over the course of the 1980s is that when watching the whole series together, you can see the aesthetic development of commercial cinema over that period (1984 to 1991). With the fourth instalment, Renny Harlin’s The Dream Master, the rise of the music video and cable channel MTV are reflected in the new work’s glossy presentation and extended use of wide angle lenses. While the film follows on directly from 1987’s The Dream Warriors – in fact it is probably the most direct a sequel the franchise gets – in visual terms this feels like a whole new series.

As the style has progressively transformed, so has the content. Wes Craven’s original Nightmare was a comparatively simple affair, in which the dream settings were essentially a means of instigating violent and gory death scenes. By The Dream Master the franchise is indulging in extensive, oftentimes surreal, set pieces where Freddy barely uses his iconic knife glove for its intended purpose at all. The horror elements have been softened, and the humour increased: while the result is a more mainstream entertainment (and The Dream Master marks the commercial height of the original six films) it does feel like something more potent has been lost in return.

There is something welcome about bringing back Dream Warriors‘ three key survivors – Kristen (Tuesday Knight replacing Patricia Arquette), Roland (Ken Sagoes), and Joey (Rodney Eastman) – but also something disappointing in how quickly all three are then replaced by a new cast of ill-fated high schoolers. Most of the new characters feel generally disposable, with the exception of Alice who replaces Kristen as a typical ‘final girl’ character.

There is a lot of entertainment value in The Dream Master, but the creative dividends of the Freddy Krueger character are visibly declining. He is less a monstrous villain hero, and more of a pop culture icon. Less than two months after Dream Master‘s release, the anthology series Freddy’s Nightmares  debuted in syndication. Over the following two years Freddy expanded into comic books and videogames, and even turned up in a few music videos. He remains a classic pop cultural icon, but it cannot be denied that while his popularity peaks here his potency as a horror character has already started to decline. The Dream Master is enormous fun, but one can see the rot has already set in on Elm Street.