The series is filled with dream sequences, but A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is the outing with the most evocative version of a cinematic nightmare. Released in 1984, director Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street was a slasher that breathed new life into the genre after its popularity began to wane. The conceit that made A Nightmare On Elm Street stand out was simple; namely, the movie added a supernatural element to its otherwise straightforward slasher tale.
Until Elm Street came along, few films had thought to combine paranormal elements with Halloween-inspired stories of killers cutting through scores of teen victims. However, after Nightmare On Elm Street's Freddy Krueger was murdered for his crimes against children, the monster vowed to return and wreak revenge in the one place their parents couldn’t protect them. In an ingenious twist on the standard formula, Freddy hunted victims in their dreams.
The idea alone was enough to make the original a hit, and Craven mined some effectively creepy visuals from the premise of a killer who haunts dreams rather than the real world. However, it was not until the third movie, 1986’s A Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors, that the series started taking advantage of the uniquely creepy creative opportunities that dream-set sequences could offer. It was not until A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master that Robert Englund’s favorite dream sequence in the series occurred, which is the dream-within-a-dream chase sequence loop.
While racing to save their friend Debbie (who is too busy bodybuilding to realize she’s dreaming), Alice and Dan begin to realize they're also in a nightmare as the scene keeps looping back. This takes the form of a strange effect wherein the characters act out the opening moments of the scene, the movie cuts to Debbie being transformed into a cockroach by Freddy, and then it cuts back to the characters acting out the same scene again until one of them realizes they’re trapped in a loop. In a series that eventually devolved into cartoony slapstick, quips and a parade of celebrity cameos by Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, this meta, Lynchian moment is an unusually unnerving touch that was an inventive approach to the idea of a dream demon contorting realities to fit his whims.
It is a subtle but eerie concept and maybe the series' best representation of an actual real-life dream/nightmare state, where the scares don’t need to follow the rules of reality so much as their twisted internal logic. It’s also Robert Englund's favorite sequence from the series according to the documentary Never Sleep Again, with the actor noting “by the second time you’re in the loop, you realize something bad is going to happen” and calling the scene a “brilliant realization of a dream.” It is a surprise to see it come from future Cutthroat Island director Renny Harlin, but there is no denying A Nightmare On Elm Street 4's loop scene is a more subtle approach to a nightmare sequence than many of the later sequels achieved.
source https://screenrant.com/nightmare-elm-st-4-best-nightmare-sequence/
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