The 1984 horror classic A Nightmare On Elm Street inevitably spawned many rip-offs, but how many of the movies accused of stealing Freddy Krueger’s style were guilty? A Nightmare On Elm Street was a deeply necessary shot in the arm for the then-ailing slasher genre during the 1980s. Since the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th, countless masked slashers had plagued the multiplex but few had brought with them the invention and originality necessary to become horror icons.
However, that changed when director Wes Craven introduced the world to Freddy Krueger. A Nightmare On Elm Street’s monstrous villain had a killer hook in his ability to invade the dreams of his victims, a clever conceit that allowed Freddy to pull off more elaborate and ambitious murders than killers who were limited by the dull rules of reality. Freddy could hunt down victims in the one place everyone assumed they were safe, and this ingenious premise resulted in the overnight creation of a beloved movie monster.
However, much like Halloween from 1978 prompted the shameless knock-off Friday the 13th, which in turn begat countless further rip-offs, there were plenty of producers who wanted in on Freddy’s lucrative antics. The Nightmare On Elm Street franchise was phenomenally popular throughout the ‘80s, resulting in a string of A Nightmare On Elm Street rip-offs that varied in terms of originality and quality. Some were surprisingly inventive, others were totally shameless or silly, but one thing that everything from Dreamaniac to Wishmaster had in common was the accusation that they would never have existed if it weren’t for Freddy Krueger.
Dreamaniac (1986)
Impressively enough, despite featuring the tagline “You don't have to live on Elm Street to have nightmares,” Dreamaniac was not actually a Nightmare On Elm Street rip-off. Instead, this Full Moon Features release told the story of a rockstar who struck a devil’s bargain when a succubus guaranteed him romantic success if he fed his conquests to the demon. However, just because the movie was not a knock-off of Craven's creation and featured a promising conceit, that's not to say Dreamaniac is a thoughtful, dark horror-satire on the greed and avarice of the 80’s ala American Psycho and its ending. Although it did not rip-off A Nightmare On Elm Street as much as its tagline suggested, Dreamaniac was still a trashy, tasteless and utterly non-scary effort that failed to reach even the low bar of quality usually seen in Full Moon Features’ ‘80s output.
Bad Dreams (1988)
In 1988's Bad Dreams, horror fans can find what may be the most shameless A Nightmare On Elm Street rip-off of all time. Sure, the killer is a dead cult leader rather than a groundskeeper, but otherwise, this one has the entire formula: a badly burned villain with a connection to the heroine’s traumatic childhood, stalking and killing in dreams, an asylum setting and even a starring role for Dream Warriors co-star Jenifer Rubin. However, when Rubin was one of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3’s best Dream Warriors, it is only fair that the actor got another shot at taking down a dream demon after her shockingly quick death in the official franchise outing.
Wishmaster (1997)
The most unfairly maligned movie on this list, the Wishmaster series was often accused of ripping off the Nightmare On Elm Street series thanks to its slasher-style fusion of fantasy and horror. However, the djinn is an inventive monster with a more seductive and less outright predatory attitude toward his victims than that of Freddy Krueger, and substituting twisted interpretations of wishes for dreams made the franchise’s premise genuinely intriguing. The Wishmaster movies lost steam as soon as the insanely charismatic Andrew Divoff exited the title role as much like Nightmare on Elm Street couldn’t replace Robert Englund, the series needed its campy villain to work. Nonetheless, this franchise didn’t rip off Craven’s iconic slasher as much as many reviewers of the time claimed.
Sleepstalker (1995)
Released straight to video in 1995, Sleepstalker is another somewhat shameless A Nightmare On Elm Street knock-off. This outing did feature one original twist in its villain’s backstory, but unfortunately for Sleepstalker, its lone divergence from A Nightmare On Elm Street’s formula was also the movie’s biggest misstep. In Sleepstalker, a condemned murderer uses voodoo to transfer his body into sand… so he can become the sandman and attack his victims in their sleep. Corny puns aside, the sight of a sentient sand person attacking characters does not strike fear into the heart the way Freddy Krueger or his New Nightmare reinvention The Entity did, and Sleepstalker’s reticence to borrow Krueger’s burned visage resulted in a surreal, but not at all frightening, replacement. A rare case when stealing would have been preferable, Sleepstalker’s total lack of scares and unintentionally hilarious villain proves that sometimes, taking the Bad Dreams route and simply xeroxing the original movie would have been the preferable option.
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
While the original Slumber Party Massacre is more of a straightforward slasher in terms of story (and a surprisingly smart subversion of the genre in terms of dialogue), Slumber Party Massacre II revives its killer via dreams and became a shameless Nightmare On Elm Street rip-off as a result. Interestingly, the sequel does more with dreams within dreams and trippy nightmare logic than many actual Nightmare On Elm Street franchise installments attempted. The best Nightmare On Elm Street dream sequence accurately captures the strange, offbeat feeling of nightmare logic, but most of the franchise’s kills simply use the dream world as a setting for gory bloodletting.
However, Slumber Party Massacre II uses the dream invasion setup to constantly confuse and wrong-foot viewers who can never be sure whether they are watching a real scene, a dream, a hallucination or something in between. Unfortunately, the sequel does not do much with this ambitious tone, mostly settling for silly one-liners or comedic gross-out gore. However, the strange dreamlike style still makes Slumber Party Massacre II the best of A Nightmare On Elm Street’s rip-offs, since the slasher actually makes use of its fantasy elements.