SPOOKYSONGS

Nightmare – Tuesday Knight

The Nightmare on Elm Street film series has not only inspired a ton of great spooky songs, it has also spawned some great soundtrack moments. Nightmare on Elm Street 3 featured the epic Dokken theme “Dream Warriors”, Nightmare 4 features the incredible “Are You Ready for Freddy” by the Fat Boys, “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama, and “Love Kills” by Vinnie Vincent Invasion, and tons more (4 has the best soundtrack); Nightmare 5 goes 80s hip-hop, but still rocks out with “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter” by Slaughter, and Nightmare 6 is… well, yeah.

Pictured: Huge Dokken fan

Nightmare 4: The Dream Master, while maybe the 3rd best film, has the best music. The film opens, though, with a song that is not on the soundtrack at all: “Nightmare” by Tuesday Knight. Knight is the lead actress in the film, taking over from Patricia Arquette as “Kristen”. The story goes that shortly after being cast, she asked the director if she could record a song for the album. She had previously released a solo record the previous year. It took her two days to write and record the song, and the producers liked it so much they put it front and center in the opening scene of the movie.

Tuesday Knight was an up-and-coming actress in 1988. She had released her one and only solo album a year before, perhaps most notable for a cover of Prince’s “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad“, which isn’t terrible. After starring in Nightmare 4, she did nothing too notable, just acting here and there in random horror flicks. She is so tied to the Nightmare series that it was probably hard to shake that image. Today she still does horror movies and does the convention rounds.

Tuesday with Heather Langenkamp!? Faint.

The only problem was the movie soundtrack was on Warner Brothers, and she was signed to Vanity Records. Because of the licensing issues as well, she did not receive any royalties for the song. Up until very recently, the only way to hear the song was by watching the movie, or downloading a rip from the film.

The song starts ominously with lots of doom bass and some swooshy keyboard sounds. Tuesday sticks pretty much to the story of Elm Street. There’s a scary man chasing her.

Darkness strikes once again
I’m all alone, it feels like the end
He walks with me while I sleep
It’s like a heart attack on a one way street

the worst kind of heart attack!

She’s running through the nightmare, and when she turns, there’s no one there!! I bet it’s Freddy. I guess we’ll see! In the film, while this song is playing, we see someone working with chalk on… something… as the song plays and we see opening credits, we keep seeing a hand with different colored chalk. We finally zoom out and see it’s a little girl drawing The Elm Street House!!! Hoooo-boy, we’re in for a ride! The house is all falling apart; Kristen asks the little girl where Freddy is, and she says “he’s not home!” Meaning… he’s out there somehwere! Eek!

The song is almost three minutes long, but there’s only like 2 verses so it feels short. The intro takes up most of the runtime, but that fits the opening scene of the film perfectly. The atmosphere is dead-on for a Nightmare film. Plus you get the added bonus of the girl on screen being the actual singer! A perfect spooky song.

Luckily for us, in 2015, someone at Warners (for some reason) found the master recording of the song! They returned it to Tuesday Knight, since they technically did not own it, and she was able to finally release the song as a single. While it did not tear up the charts, it was a big gift to horror fans who had crappy ripped-from-VHS versions of the song for almost 30 years.

The videos for this movie are fantastic as well. The Fat Boys actually got Robert Englund to be in the movie and for me it’s almost better than the Thriller video as far as “spooky videos” go. Vinnie Vincent also included some Freddy scenes in their video. The Dramarama song is still played on alternative radio. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith also recorded a song for the soundtrack “Nightmare on My Street”, which was a massive hit, but was passed over for the Fat Boys song. The video for that song wasn’t released until very very recently. It’s hard to overstate how huge Nightmare was in the cultural zeitgeist.

It was a different time.

Right before part 4 came out, Freddy even had his own album, Freddy’s Greatest Hits, which is great in such a terrible way. It sounds so fake and cheap, but it’s 100% real.

Here’s some of the other great videos from the time: