The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise consistently adjusts its tone and content with each successive sequel, pushing from horror to fantasy, and from thriller to comedy. The Dream Child – the fifth instalment that was released in 1989 – is the first film to arrest this trend. It is essentially another 90 minutes of the surreal and fantastic content that was presented in The Dream Master. That choice is easy to understand: at almost USD$50m in theatrical revenue, The Dream Master was the most successful Elm Street movie yet. Why mess with a formula that finally seemed to have reached its maximum commercial potential?

Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), who seemed to have finally defeated Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) and banished his spirit to hell, has only just graduated high school when she discovers she is pregnant. Cursed by dreams of Freddy and a mysterious nun named Amanda, Alice discovers Freddy has returned – and is using the dreams of her unborn child to threaten her friends.

The idea of using pregnancy as a theme in an Elm Street movie had been bouncing around New Line since before the release of Dream Warriors in 1987. It finally emerges here, utilising the survivors of the fourth film Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel). Directing duties pass over to another new filmmaker – only Wes Craven directed more than one instalment – and Stephen Hopkins shows off a strong visual sense and a very glossy style. The visual influence of the music video, which drove the look of The Dream Master, is in particularly vivid force here. There is a strong argument that The Dream Child represents the best-looking film in the series yet.

Sadly on the plot level things are somewhat less certain. The Dream Child was famously cut when Hollywood’s MPAA took exception to the film’s more violent sequences. There is a lot here that feels bowdlerised, particularly Freddy’s murder of aspiring model Greta (Erika Anderson). In the released cut he appears to force-feed her to death at a dinner party. As scripted he is actually carving out and force-feeding her her own internal organs – a far more visceral and horrifying scene that could have been a franchise-wide highlight. Some of the cuts feel structural as well – there is an overall sense that elements of the plot have been excised to move more rapidly between the dream sequences.

One scene that does stand out features comic book artist Mark (Joe Seely) trapped inside a monochromatic superhero world. It is the film’s most inventive sequence, and its abstract nature allows it to bypass the MPAA censorship that affected other parts of the movie.

While stylish and broadly enjoyable, The Dream Child feels like a compromised work and does not quite make the impact that its immediate predecessor did. That seems reflected in its commercial performance. With grosses of USD$22m in American theatres, it was profitable but much less so than The Dream Master. For the first time, Elm Street appears to be running out of steam.