A Chronology on Elm Street, Part 5

"Dream Warriors" - Dokken

A beautiful blonde wakes up in Freddy's dreamworld and finds herself drawn into a spooky old house, where she's confronted by none other than...

...her favorite rock band Dokken. You remember Dokken, right? (Of course you don't. Don't worry about it.) At first Dokken scares her, but after the lead guitarist burrows through the floor like a gigantic mole and then bursts out of the wall to favor her with a guitar solo she realizes that they're pretty okay guys. (Pretty okay guys who can fucking rock.) But just when she's finally starting to enjoy herself Freddy Krueger appears and drags the guitarist off, and when our hottie follows she finds herself in the (relatively unimpressive) bowels of Freddy's twisted dreamscape, where the world's most sparsely-attended Dokken concert is being held. (Well, the most sparsely-attended before 1995 or so, anyway.) Freddy's there too, ready to cook our main chick's hash, only to be driven back by Dokken's preternatural ability to rock, at which point Freddy Krueger is the one waking up in his bed, terrified. "Who were those guys?" he gasps. Really, Freddy? You're afraid of Dokken? They're like one step above hair metal, and frankly I'd probably bet against them in a fistfight with the Sleez Beez.

I feel the same way, Freddy.

"It's just a stupid joke in a dumb music video, it's not fucking canon," you're probably saying right now, out loud, to your computer. (Hey, do I know you, or what?) But let's really think about this for a minute. The big fake-out here is that it wasn't the blonde's nightmare after all, it was Freddy's, and it featured slightly skewed versions of several incidents that will occur in his near future (i.e. the next movie), exactly as presented here. (Minus Dokken, of course, who had better things to do.) (Ha ha! No they didn't.) Given the information provided, it's my contention that this incident really happened in the Nightmare on Elm Street universe; it's what they call a prescient vision, and it's the first suggestion that, in addition to his other powers, Freddy Krueger has a limited ability to see into the future. That's a hell of an important piece of information to dole out in a goddamned music video, but that's what makes the expanded world of A Nightmare on Elm Street such a fascinating tapestry: its willingness to...

Okay, who am I kidding? Even if you jettison the music videos and the comic books and the late-night ads for the Freddy Krueger Hotline, none of this Elm Street bullshit even tries to make any sense. Sometimes Freddy can possess people, other times he can't. Sometimes he's the "bastard son of a hundred maniacs" (whatever the hell that even means), other times he was raised by a pimp (it's in the novel). Thursday he's finally, irrevocably dead. Friday he's better. It's all a load of terminal horseshit anyway, so I say this goddamned music video is canon, if for no other reason than I like the idea of Freddy Krueger being just as terrified of heavy metal as the rest of America was in 1987. Seriously, why should he be any more rational than my mom?

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