Her dreams are disturbed by a boogeyman with blades, but Taryn White’s waking hours are equally haunted by the ever-present urgings of drug addiction in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the second sequel in the Elm Street franchise, and while the film’s eye-popping special effects are still a marvel to behold (I’ll never look at a pig head the same way), it’s the troubled teenagers at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital who still steal the show, especially Taryn, whose heartbreaking story arc is filled with sinister forces on both sides of her eyelids.
When Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) arrives at Westin Hills after her mother believes her to be suicidal—when she was in fact wounded by Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in her dreams—we’re introduced to a Breakfast Club-esque cast of young characters. All of them are in the hospital for different reasons—depression, aggression, chemical dependency—but they all have one thing in common: their parents were in that massive mob that burned Freddy Krueger alive years ago, making them the last of the Elm Street children and the next targets on the boogeyman’s shrinking victims list.
Confined to the same section of the hospital and participating in regular group therapy sessions, these kids are forced to come together on a daily basis, and their constant interactions, budding friendships, and occasional quarrels (although they do fight, they fight more like siblings than enemies) make them perhaps the strongest, most unified ensemble of characters in any Elm Street film. Played by Jennifer Rubin early in her acting career, Taryn is a key component of the group that would go on to become the Dream Warriors, and like many of the other young actors in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Rubin was the perfect fit for her multidimensional role, and she reflected on her experience coming into the iconic franchise.
“I was thinking, ‘If it’s good enough for Johnny Depp [who played Glen in the original film], it’s good enough for me [laughs].’ But I really think I was made for that role. I really do. It was perfect for me—I’m a really sensitive person, and I do come from divorce and stuff like that, so I had all of those kinds of things. And then, when I become a Dream Warrior, the hair stood up and the toughness came out, you’re only going to see that side of me when I’m in a supportive situation. I’m not an arguer and I never put my opinion on people, but then in certain situations, I will fight. I’m a black-and-white kind of person. I’m full-on fight or I’m a crybaby [laughs].”
For Taryn and fellow patients like Joey (Rodney Eastman) and Will (Ira Heiden)—with whom she charmingly plays a Dungeons & Dragons-type board game before bedtime—falling asleep at Westin Hills is a horrifying experience, but being awake can also be dangerous. This is especially true for Taryn, who one night steps out of the bathroom to encounter a sleazy orderly, who, knowing Taryn’s history with shooting up, is looking to score Taryn some pharmaceuticals from the dispensary.
In this moment, Taryn faces a threat just as real and uncomfortable as anything that Freddy Krueger could throw at her. She’s offered a clear path to relapse, to the intoxicating yet deadly highs of her past. Rubin imbues Taryn with a palpable vulnerability in this moment, and we honestly don’t know what her response will be until she shows us just how strong her character is with a firm refusal of the drugs that are practically being offered to her on a silver platter (in this film, though, it’s the severed heads that are served on a silver platter). I still find this scene as suspenseful as any dream sequence in Nightmare 3, with Taryn telling the orderly to f*** off becoming an empowering moment for her character and setting the stage for her later showdown with Freddy Krueger.
A scene that has become iconic within the Elm Street franchise and the horror genre as a whole, Taryn’s showdown with Freddy in the grimy dream world alley outside Jake’s Bar is remembered for many reasons, but especially for the appearances of its two central characters. First revealed during a group session with Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson), Taryn’s punk rock, black leather outfit is complemented nicely by her swinging switchblades and far-reaching mohawk. According to Rubin, thought, the hairstyle Taryn has in Dream Warriors was originally not part of her character’s look, and was something that she came up with.
“My background was modeling,” Rubin explained, “so I started off as a model and then worked my way into movies. I was modeling in New York. I was really working, working, working. I won a contest, like International Model of the Year, and all that stuff, so I was getting my hair done and my makeup done all the time. So, when I went on set [for Dream Warriors], I had done the fittings for the leather outfit, and that was from the owner of Trashy Lingerie on La Cienega [in Los Angeles]. The guy was little like Danny DeVito, and he came to take me there to put on the outfit. It was like a Frederick’s of Hollywood place, but with more costumes, too. So I thought that was really, ridiculously fun.”
“When I put it on, I had that stringy hair going down, so I wanted to go talk to [director] Chuck [Russell], and on the way to see Chuck, I walked past one of those camera dollies, and on the camera dolly was a Time magazine folded in half—somebody didn’t finish reading an article—and there was a picture of a person with a mohawk. I grabbed that magazine in the middle of the hallway, and I was going to ask Chuck a different question altogether, and then I showed him the picture and I said, “Can I do my hair like that?” And he goes, “Yeah, sure.” And then he answered my other question and then I walked back. My modeling background got that hair to be appropriate for that outfit because the draggy hair was, to me, not happening at all, and I needed to do something fantastic.”
“So, in the end, everything was pointed down when Taryn wasn’t in her Dream Warrior mode, but then everything goes up when she is—the hair goes up, the knives come up. It was great to be that person who was responding and creating things in the moment.”
Taryn’s badass Dream Warrior outfit mirrors the growing confidence within herself, making it the perfect battle armor for her fight with Freddy after she is separated from the group in their quest to save Joey (who was a little tongue-tied at the time). Unfortunately for Taryn, although she puts up a good fight against Freddy in a showdown that pits her switchblades against the dream stalker’s claws (she even wounds Krueger with a well-placed stab), Freddy gets the final say when he uses Taryn’s past to get the best of her, transforming his bladed gloves into syringe fingers and plunging them into the suckling sores on her arms.
The scene is still to this day one of the most uncomfortable horror movie moments for me to watch, made all the more unsettling because Taryn had beaten her drug-addicted past in the real world, only to have Freddy use her addictions and inner demons to manipulate and kill her in the dream world. Although the death scene still features a one-liner from Freddy (a habit that was becoming more common for the franchise), he holds back on the more over-the-top delivery of “welcome to prime time, bitch!”, instead nearly whispering, “What a rush…” Krueger’s more laid-back delivery mirrors the euphoric highs of drug use and maybe, just maybe, holds a little respect for a Dream Warrior who was a worthy opponent, who succumbed to a new twist on his razor blades. Outside of their horrifying symbolism to Taryn, Freddy’s syringe fingers have enjoyed a growing legacy over the years, and while reflecting on her character’s death, Rubin discusses how that scene resonated with drug users in real life.
“I get a lot of fan mail from people who walked away from drugs after seeing that as kids. They were probably just at that point when they were getting stoned and stuff, and then they went to see that movie and then all of a sudden they were like, ‘I’m never getting stoned again,’ [laughs].”
“I like the fact that I don’t get razored,” Rubin continued. “To me, it was like, ‘The razors are there and then there’s this other glove.’ The two gloves to me are completely different. And we had the stunt person there because we had to do the stuntwork as well while we were doing the scene. It was my first time doing it with the stunt person, and then, being a young actor, during the fight, I started to think it was real, and then I’d just try to stab him, and forget the choreography [laughs]. It was really magical, though. When the door slid behind me, I don’t think I knew that part of the script. So when the door slid behind me, I was like, ‘What?’ I was really thrown off. And then the bum on the ground, I thought that was him [Freddy], and then it wasn’t him. Also, during the fighting and the choreography with [Freddy], I did knick him a little with the knife. I felt bad about that, but he was okay.”
Taryn’s switchblades have become synonymous with her character, their presence accompanying two of Taryn’s most memorable lines: “Okay asshole, let’s dance,” and, “In my dreams, I’m beautiful… and bad.” And while Rubin’s natural movements with the knives made it seem like she was a master of the blade, she did have some help from the prop department.
“Remember in the back of a comic book when you could order fun stuff like seahorses and handshake buzzers? The handshake buzzer had that metal ring, and you put it on your middle finger and it stayed there, and then you buzzed someone when they shook your hand. [The switchblades] were like one of those with ball bearings in it, and my glove hid it, and then they stuck the knives on a thing so all I had to do was learn to twist my hands real fast and then the knives would come out. It looked like I did it, but the black glove was hiding that part.”
Throughout Taryn’s alley-set death scene and beyond, the innovative special effects work (done by a dream team of artists including Greg Cannom, Screaming Mad George, Kevin Yagher, and Mike Elizalde) on Dream Warriors made it easy for Rubin and her co-stars to immerse themselves in Freddy’s frightmares, although there are a couple of set pieces in particular that stand out to Rubin.
“It was a monster machine. I remember the feather room the most, because we had to scream, and as they were doing the effect and they released the feathers, you realize that you’re going to breathe in a feather. I remember Patricia Arquette’s dinner table scene, too, the disgustingness of it, but it was artistically gorgeous in a way. It was great work and it was a great process. If you can be in one movie that lasts the test of time, that’s the biggest reward.”
As beautiful as it is to look at, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 still resonates with me for its characters above all else. A badass Breakfast Club in their own right, the Westin Hills teens and their adult supervisors are flawed, fascinating, and ultimately there for each other. As the great Dokken once sang, the Dream Warriors—including Taryn—didn’t want to dream no more, but they knew that they had to for each other, and for the chance to be beautiful... and bad.
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This retrospective is part of our Class of 1987 special features celebrating a wide range of genre films that were first released thirty years ago. Stay tuned to Daily Dead in the coming days for more pieces celebrating one of the most exciting graduating classes in horror and sci-fi, and check here to read all of our Class of ’87 retrospectives.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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