Alice and Jacob live their lives in modern day 2025. Krueger has been ‘he who shall not be named’ since 1989. For Jacob’s entire life, he’s taken pills to keep him healthy. He thinks they’re vitamins, heart arrhythmia pills or something, but they’re a new form of Hypnocil. Only he and his mother are prescribed them, only Alice and the pharmacist know why.
Jacob (36) is a young father now of two kids named Rick (15) and Kristen (16), with a wife named Sarah, his high school sweetheart. Through some unfortunate circumstance, Jacob, forgets to pick up his prescription, runs out of pills and misses a day. Nothing seems to go awry, despite his anxieties. Until that night. He has his first Freddy dream. Krueger is older, grittier. Without the souls of the Elm Street teens, Freddy has aged, and is near spiritual death. This reveals his status as a dream demon being a curse he wished for in purgatory that was granted, so long as he continued to kill his victims. And now, 32 years later, He’s in his seventies and waning miserably in solitude.
Jacob wakes up, never knowing who the man was or why he instinctively ran from him. Later, he tells Sarah about his dream. They collectively shrug it off, Sarah casually mentioning a dream monster her dad told her about when she was young.
The next night, he has the dream again, this time with Krueger getting a rare early-upper hand. Just before he gets killed, Jacob wakes. There’s a POV shot of someone coming from the basement, through the living room, up the stairs, down the hall and into the master bedroom. Only Sarah lies there. A claw bursts into the shot and brutally slashes Sarah, leaving her to bleed out on the bed. Ala Elm Street 2, it cuts to Jacob, holding a claw, and screaming.
After being arrested on charges of murdering his wife, his mother visits him in a maximum security prison. Alice says she knows what caused this and apologizes to Jacob. She tells him his father didn’t just die in a car accident and his grandfather didn’t merely die in his sleep. She then proceeds to tell the tale of Fred Krueger, naming her and Jacob as the final links to the original parents on Elm Street who tracked Krueger down. Alice reveals the way to finally kill Freddy: “he dies when we die. We take him to our graves.” Similar to Freddy vs Jason, he lives by being spoken of, thriving on the fear he elicits. Only Jacob and Alice know he exists anymore, after all records and accounts of Krueger have been wiped away. So at this point, Freddy existing is a Mandela Effect to the rest of the world who think of a Dreamscape copycat killer. Only Alice and Jacob know of a real serial killer from the late 70’s-mid 80’s. Alice leaves a fresh prescription of Hypnocil for her son before leaving.
That night at home, Alice begins to feel tired. Her bottle of pills magically rolls out of the medicine cabinet, onto the floor, and behind the sink. When she looks for her pills, they’re gone. She panics, knowing she cannot sleep. Frightened, she hurries to her son’s home to make sure his children are okay. On the way, she visualizes the pharmacist’s death at the hands of Krueger. She narrowly escapes death as her car rolls off the road.
In jail, a disgusted guard refuses to allow Jacob his meds for the night. Jacob falls asleep terrified.
Kristen is asleep when Alice arrives. Their aunt Yvonne is watching them and worried about Alice coming around during this time. She’s in on keeping Krueger mum as well.
Jacob, possessing all of his mother’s dream powers, enter’s Kristen’s dream. Alice is there, protecting her. Krueger arrives, now terrorizing Jacob’s daughter, Alice’s granddaughter. The nightmare ends with all three waking up in a panic, but alive. Alice and Kristen go to check on Rick and find Yvonne dead with those 4 familiar claw-marks, and Rick soundly asleep.
From this point the rest of the film is about Jacob bringing on all new killings from his prison cell, with Freddy infecting the dreams of his daughter through him. Kristen’s teenage friends die through their dreams when she tells 3 of them about a nightmare disregarding what Alice told her. Freddy gets more and more powerful, with dreams becoming further and further indecipherable from reality (new CGI). Alice stops taking Hypnocil in an attempt to protect her grandchildren in their dreams as CPS tries to take them away from her custody. While Alice forces Hypnocil on the children, the pills are ineffective with Jacob’s dreams being Freddy’s entry point. Freddy always spares his life and Jacob never speaks of the terrors he sees in dreams to ensure it doesn’t spread.
Authorities eventually place Alice visiting her son in prison, as well as on the scene of the crime in Yvonne’s murder. A manhunt begins in search of Alice for connections to the grisly deaths. Kristen and Rick are left to fend for themselves.
Jacob eventually escapes from prison by weaponizing Freddy on a guard. He makes his way to Springwood, dramatically reuniting with what’s left of his family. By the time he gets home, the manhunt has extended for him and his mom. Jacob, Alice, Rick and Kristen all end up together, barricaded in Alice’s home. The police, news, and angry parents are all outside attempting to bring the two ‘murderers’ to justice before they kill their own grandchildren.
In a final dream battle, Jacob is killed when Freddy no longer needs him. Alice is soon follow. Kristen sees Freddy going for her younger brother and distracts him by pretending to accept his offer to “kill for him”. She claws Freddy to death before clawing herself. Rick sees his sister claw herself, doesn’t know what to make of this, and forces himself to wake up. He has a dream power. He awakens to find his grandmother and father dead on the floor. His sister is bleeding out on the floor. Before Kristen dies, she tells her brother “Don’t be afraid of your dreams!” The very idea of Freddy dies with Kristen. In a way, Alice and Jacob have succeeded in taking him to their graves, but at a huge cost.
Before any evidence is discovered, a newscaster accidentally starts a fire to the home and it engulfs into flames, burning everybody inside, including Rick, while the cameras and authorities watch on.
10 years later, a new killer emerges, exacting revenge on the people of Springwood for killing him: Rick Jordan.
First time writing Elm Street fanfic, and it shows. Haha, but yes, if they continue the story, they can begin anew with an inhabitant of the original Elm Street teens taking over the role of dream demon. The twist is he had no clue about who Freddy was because no one around him wanted him to know. His ascension to demon coincides with resentment of the police and the townspeople who watched him burn to death. This effectively ends Freddy as a character, begins the series anew with a different killer, a different mythology, and so many places to go. I figure it references the original films, while also avoiding being a straight retelling and redoing of popular scenes from the 1984 original. Freddy goes out on a final high note, using practical effects in earlier dreams and state of the art CGI in the later dreams which depict him as younger, stronger and more gruesome than ever.
Final kill count would be 10, which is also the entry in the series if you count the 2010 remake.
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