A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child could have been a PG-13 movie as its director wanted, but why did he aim for a more tame rating for a horror movie? In 1984, Wes Craven introduced the audience to a one-of-a-kind slasher in the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, which followed four teenagers who become the targets of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a villain with a very specific method to haunt his victims: terrorizing them in their dreams, so if he kills them there, they die in real life too.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was a critical and financial success and is still considered one of the greatest horror movies ever, and it made way for a franchise with a total of nine movies (including a crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is often considered the best of the bunch, the following movies weren’t exactly a hit. Such is the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, which could have been a lot different from the rest as its director wanted to make it PG-13.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 is set a year after the previous movie and follows Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), who is haunted again by Freddy but now through the sleeping mind of her unborn child, all with the purpose of being born again. Such a strange premise required a darker tone, but not necessarily more gore and violence, so director Stephen Hopkins wanted the movie to be PG-13 and not R-rated like the previous ones. This was revealed by special makeup effects artist Christopher Biggs in a deleted segment from the documentary Never Sleep Again, where he shared a bit of Hopkins’ vision for Freddy’s fifth big-screen adventure.
In the aforementioned deleted segment, which is very brief, Biggs explained that he saw Hopkins in one meeting and he only said “no blood, I want no blood on any of these gags” as he didn’t want the movie to get an R-rating, which Biggs and company found to be strange – and with good reason, as a slasher movie from the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is somewhat expected to have a rating that reflects its graphic style. Ultimately, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 had to go through significant cuts due to the graphic nature of some scenes, as were the deaths of Dan (Danny Hassel), Mark (Joe Seely), and Greta (Erika Anderson).
In the end, Stephen Hopkins didn’t get the PG-13 movie he was aiming for, and though A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 didn’t get an X rating (in big part thanks to the changes to the aforementioned deaths), it received an R-rating, just like the previous entries in the franchise. A PG-13 movie from A Nightmare on Elm Street wouldn’t really feel like a Freddy Krueger movie, even if the famous slasher ended up being more comedic than terrifying, so it all worked out for the better.
