The Nightmare On Elm Street 3 Scene Horror Fans Can't Stop Rewatching
The 1987 film "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" has become a classic of the horror genre in the years since its release. The third installment in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise follows a group of teenage inmates at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital caught in a battle for their lives against dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). The teens get help from one of Freddy's first targets, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), who now works as a therapist at Westin Hills. The group also learns they have the shared ability to visit each other's dreams via group hypnosis and realize they have limited magical abilities within their dream world to help them fight Freddy. Unfortunately, they don't have enough power to defeat him, and Freddy begins to pick them off one by one. As the kids dwindle in number (even former final girl Nancy is taken off the board), Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) has the awesome responsibility of killing Freddy for good.
This late '80s fright-fest includes a number of scenes that will stick in the memories of franchise fans. To be fair, it's hard to forget a movie where a villain with a scarred face tries to kill you and your friends while you dream, double so when the villain in question has hypodermic needles for fingers at one point. Folks on the horror subreddit r/horror recently gathered to discuss their favorite memorable moments from "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3" and share their pick for the scene they can't stop rewatching. Which one is their favorite?
Are you ready for Snake Freddy?
When it comes to one scene from "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" that fans can't stop rewatching, Redditor u/Mst3Kgf points to the moment when Freddy transforms himself into a gigantic snake. Not only does he take on a horrifying shape, but he tries to swallow protagonist Kristen alive. Luckily, Nancy saves her in this particularly unforgettable scene, which you can check out on YouTube. In their thread, u/Mst3Kgf explains it's rewatchable "not just because the Freddy worm is an amazing creepy effect, but [also] that 'YOU' Freddy gives when he sees Nancy is awesome."
"The practical effects in that movie are so good, and it's shot so well," agreed u/inthedollarbin. Redditor u/Beaker360 joined in, saying, "Seeing this repeatedly on HBO in the '80s is where my love of horror began." Additionally, u/Rechan wrote that this moment fully sinks into cement the fact that the dream universe is Freddy's domain "rather than [the notion that] he's invading YOUR dream."
According to a 2015 Yahoo! News article, Kevin Yagher, the film's special effects artist, described the snake Freddy effect as the most difficult one to create in the whole film. It required four different puppets, and three of the puppets worked as designed, but a single puppet — the one needed for both wide and close shots of Arquette being swallowed up to her waist — refused to behave on command.
"The thing looked great... But it did collapse when it tried to eat her," Chuck Russell, the film's director, explained in the same Yahoo story. "So there was actually no way to gobble her. It became this ancient-looking, collapsed, gumming-her-to-death kind of thing." Russell solved the crisis by shooting the scene in reverse, permanently immortalizing the film as a horror classic in the process.