It takes a village to raise a child, or to allow all minors within city limits to be systematically murdered in their own homes. As we learn in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, that’s exactly what happens to Springwood, home of Freddy Krueger and eight-time recipient of the Casey Anthony Award for Crappy Parenting. When your entire suburb turns into a childless husk of a town, and the last remaining residents are Roseanne and Tom Arnold, then you know something went wrong.
This is not a picture from The Stupids.
While the entire town is uniformly awful, special recognition must be given to Mrs. Parker, who spent two sequels ignoring her daughter Kristen’s frantic pleas for help. Like most parents in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Mrs. Parker doesn’t realize that her only child is having dreams that are somehow related to that one guy she helped murder once. She just thinks that her daughter is going through a normal teenage phase. So when she notices that her daughter is staying up late, taking lots of meds, and making Popsicle stick houses just for the hell of it, she puts her foot down and does what any worried adult would do.
That’s it! You’re committed!
At this point in the franchise, that might be considered good parenting. Lock your kid in an asylum as far away from Elm Street as possible and they might not wake up dead. It makes sense on paper, but in actuality, most of Kristen’s fellow patients end up being horribly murdered.
Or profoundly embarrassed. And THEN horribly murdered.
Rather than take the hint that Kristen might be telling the truth, Mrs. Parker ignores all the clues and horrible murders and invites her daughter to come back home. The nightmares go away, but then they come back because it’s a new sequel. This would be the perfect time for Mrs. Parker to redeem herself. Now she can finalize realize that the guy she kind of killed has come back to murder her daughter a lot. She can take her daughter and move to another town where they can be safe. And that’s exactly what she does.
Except the total opposite. She secretly feeds Kristen a bunch of sleeping pills against her wishes and watches in amazement when she, surprise surprise, gets horribly murdered. When your only child’s last words are “Mother, you just murdered me,” and she means it in a literal sense, you know you’ve made some poor decisions.
Except the total opposite. She secretly feeds Kristen a bunch of sleeping pills against her wishes and watches in amazement when she, surprise surprise, gets horribly murdered. When your only child’s last words are “Mother, you just murdered me,” and she means it in a literal sense, you know you’ve made some poor decisions.
