Alice Cooper's STEVEN: who is he and what is the meaning of life?

Many music performers have alter egos they inhabit at various times on record or onstage. Eminem routinely slips into his Slim Shady persona to wreak havoc on celebrities and society in general, while Nicki Minaj pretends to be more than 40% human parts. But none of these alter egos are as mysterious as Alice Cooper's Steven. This article includes spoilers for the concept albums Welcome to my Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, DaDa, The Last Temptation, Along Came a Spider and Welcome 2 My Nightmare. It will also be a lengthy, unfunny dissertation on an obscure aspect of rock music history which I consider it my autistic duty to elucidate.

I wish I had this subtly creepy wallpaper.

Welcome to my breakdown

Steven first appears in 1975's Welcome to my Nightmare. The nightmare is presented as being Steven's. We are introduced to Steven in the song "Years Ago", in which he sings "All my toys are broken/And so am I inside, mom". Many people take this as an indication that Steven is a young boy, but in the song he doesn't seem to be so sure. Different voices alternately sing "I'm a little boy/No, I'm a great big man/No, let's be a little boy, for a little while longer? Maybe an hour?"

At its end the song segues into "Steven" with the phrase "I think I hear my mom calling..." and "Steven" then kicks in, with the name being repeated in a refrain that becomes more insistent. Steven says "it's right outside my door". He seems to be very afraid of whoever - or whatever - is outside his door.

The next song is "The Awakening". In this song Alice sings of waking up and looking for his wife, only to find that he has stabbed her to death in his sleep. The final song on the album is "Escape", which features the lines "But where am I running to? There's no place left to go/Just put on my makeup/And get me to the show".

What does it all mean?

Welcome to my Nightmare is a concept album. I believe it tells one continuous story - the origin story of Alice Cooper himself. Steven is the fictionalised Vincent Furnier - Alice's birth name. Steven is a grown man who is married. He also drinks to excess, and it makes him violent, or at least he fears it will. The song "Only Women Bleed" reflects this fear. It is preceded on the album by "Some Folks", which goes "I'm just no good without it/I'm not a man at all". While it is not specified what this refers to, I think it's alcohol.

The nightmare starts off in general terms. "Devil's Food" and "The Black Widow" are about generic scary things, like giant spiders and being eaten. But gradually the songs shift to more specific fears. Jack Torrance in The Shining had similar demons - he drank, and he once hurt his son. Like Jack, Steven is haunted by these fears.

Why does Steven drink? He drinks because of something that happened in his past. As mentioned above, there is some confusion about whether he is a boy or a man, but he must be a grown man to be married. I believe that in his nightmare he regresses into a little boy as a way to try to hide from the horrific realities of his life. After pleading to be a little boy for a while longer, he is frightened by someone outside his room, which leads to his awakening - his efforts to avoid reality are in vain.

"I think I hear my mom calling" - but he doesn't hear his mom calling. The cries of "Steven" in the song of the same name are from a woman, but not his mother - his wife. She is crying out to him as he is stabbing her in his sleep.

When he wakes up, Steven realises that he has done what he feared the most - he has killed his wife. Now his only recourse is to do what he has tried to do in the dream - to escape into another persona. "Just put on my makeup and get me to the show". He escapes into madness; into the persona of Alice Cooper.

Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

Steven didn't appear by name on the next album, and it seemed to be about Alice, the entertainer, being sent to a comedy disco Hell for all the controversy that he caused with his antics during the early 70s. However, if you subscribe to the above interpretation of Nightmare, Alice and Steven are really the same person. This is, however, complicated by the inner sleeve of the LP, which featured this text:

Lay still, Steven, and I'll tell you a bedtime story. I'll tell you a bedtime story that's not for all children. It's a very special story, that only special children will understand. It's a half-awake story, and it will be better if you close your eyes. It's a story that takes place in a dream, like other nightmares you have known. It's a dream that Alice has dreamed. You can dream along with him. You can follow Alice down the staircase, deep, down the stairs to the pit where he doesn't want to go, but he has to.

If you go to sleep now, Steven, you can go down the long and endless staircase and sing sweet songs to Alice and free him. And if you can't get to sleep, Steven, and in the middle of the night you get out of bed, when everything is quiet and the trees are still and the birds are hiding from the dark, you can lay down on your bedroom floor and press your ear tightly to the boards. If you listen very carefully you can hear Alice searching for a way out, forever chasing rainbows.

Sleep tight, Steven. And have a good night.

You can read this in all sorts of ways. One way to look at it is that Steven really is a child, and Alice is a character in a story his mom or dad told him. Another is to think of this as a prequel to Nightmare - that Alice was a character in a story, and in "Escape" on Nightmare, Steven drew on this childhood memory to create a character to escape into.

But there's another possible meaning that fits into what we learn on the next Steven album, 1991's Hey Stoopid. That maybe this is something a doctor is telling the now institutionalised Steven. In this analogy, the doctor is trying to get Steven to give up his Alice persona. The pit where Alice doesn't want to go, but has to, isn't really Hell, it's the unconscious mind. The doctor may be trying to get Steven to get rid of Alice, to lock him away under the floorboards of his own psyche. He is treating Steven as a child because Steven has now fully regressed into one.

A Wind Up Toy

Hey Stoopid only mentions Steven at the very end, on track "Wind Up Toy". The song implies its subject is in a mental institution, with doctors who run tests but can't determine what is wrong with him. The song also mentions his parents: "Daddy won't discuss me/What a state I must be/Mommy couldn't stand/Having such a wound-up boy".

This could mean that his parents are alive, and have given up hope for his recovery. However, it could also mean he has regressed to his child-state and only imagines that they are around. This seems likely if we take into account the information that we later learn from "Hell Comes Home".

The Last Temptation

Steven appears again as the protagonist in The Last Temptation, Alice Cooper's 1994 album. This time he seems to be free. In the tie-in comic he's depicted as a young boy. This could mean it is a prequel or that Steven is imagining himself in a free world. I do not believe this is a prequel to Nightmare and all the other albums. For a start, it's called The Last Temptation. It could hardly come before Nightmare, in which Steven has succumbed to the temptations of alcohol. Moreover, Steven is shown to have sexual desires for the character Mercy, which means he must be of a mature age in reality.

So in The Last Temptation, Steven goes (in his mind) to the sideshow, where he meets the Showman (depicted as Alice in the comic), who offers him things. The Showman shows him how his life could be boring or miserable, and offers him a way out. In crisis, Steven prays for salvation, and ultimately confronts the Showman and rejects him. The Showman is strongly implied to be the Devil, which is basically confirmed on the next album, Brutal Planet, as the Devil on that album shares his catchphrase, "nothing's free".

The Last Temptation is a morality play, and Steven's rejection of the Devil seems to clear the way for his redemption: "I'm Heaven bound/Go back to where you belong". Thematically, it also represents a rejection of the sideshow, the "Escape" from reality Steven has relied on for so long. By overcoming his demons both literal and figurative, he may now be able to rejoin the world.

Along Came a Spider

The name Steven reoccurred on 2009's Along Came a Spider. This album revolves around a serial killer named Spider who's collecting legs from eight victims to create his own giant spider, like a cross between Dahmer's zombies and The Human Centipede. At the end of the record he reveals to Steven that he's been in this cell for 25 years, so couldn't possibly have committed the recent murders.

From the wording it could be interpreted that Steven shares the cell with him, or that he has some sort of multiple personality disorder, because he uses the word "we". I don't think it's common practice for the criminally insane to bunk up together, but if Steven isn't in the cell with him, why is he there? Well Steven on The Last Temptation and Spider both kind of find Jesus in their respective storylines, so maybe Steven is a priest now and he's visiting Spider in prison. I don't know if that was the idea though. It could not be. Another possibility is that Steven is another personality of Spider.

DaDa theory

Alice Cooper's best album is also one of his less widely known. 1982's DaDa told the story of Sonny, who may also have multiple personalities. Some fans believe that Sonny is also Steven. Potentially, Alice, Steven, Sonny and Spider could all be the same person (of course, they are IRL). I don't believe that Sonny was meant to be Steven, as there are no overt continuity references on DaDa, and Sonny commits suicide at the end of the album. However, Sonny and Steven both seem to share something in common in their backstories: an abusive father.

The Nightmare returns

Steven is mentioned one more time to date in the AC discography: in track "When Hell Comes Home" from Welcome 2 My Nightmare, the 2011 sequel to the original. The song describes a scenario in which a young boy shoots his alcoholic father who has returned home in a menacing rage. This boy appears to be Steven, which, in keeping with our conception of Steven as a grown man in Nightmare 1, makes this a prequel within a sequel, like the Vito scenes in Godfather 2. Killing his abusive father may be the traumatic event that caused Steven to lose his childhood, which he would spend his adult life trying to get back.

As Steven is only mentioned on the one track, it seems likely that the protagonist for the rest of the album is Alice himself, as on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Except, as we know, Alice is likely the creation of Steven. The album ends with his surprise death, which would seem to put an end to the character once known as Steven. Except, as we know, Alice Cooper is the grand villain of rock and roll, and like all good villains, he can never truly die.

Do YEW have an autismal theory about a series of albums going back to 1975??? Poast!

Sweet Dreams: Wes Craven's New Nightmare!!!

RIP based spoopy movie man.

You could be forgiven for tuning out (of life) after Freddy's Dead, and audiences at the time did (the first part), leaving Wes Craven's return to the series he created to underperform at the box office. That's a pity, because against all reasonable expectations the seventh Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best in the series and a perfect way to wrap things up and go out on a high. Faced with the reality of a series that had devoured itself in an orgy of stupidity, Wes Craven did the only sensible thing you can do: he stepped outside the series.

I for one welcome our new dream demon overlords.

New Nightmare posits the first six films as just that: movies, entertainment that exists in the pop culture of the "real world" in which it's set. Wes Craven is a real person who makes films, Robert Englund is a real actor who plays Freddy Krueger, and Heather Langenkamp is a real actress, wife and mother who is called upon to play Nancy and stop Freddy one last time, but for real this time.

This prop seems to be inspired by a scene in 5. Despite Craven's ambivalence toward the other sequels, New Nightmare is full of these little nods.

Freddy Vs Godzilla still in development hell.

One thing that stands out about this approach is that Craven doesn't go for the cheap and obvious gag of having Freddy slaughter the hacks who made Freddy's Dead. Although that would have been satisfying, it would have been fix fic, and run the risk of verging on Chris Chan tier revenge fantasy bullshit. Instead, the focus is squarely on Heather as protagonist, with the Freddy-demon released from the prison of the film series returned to his roots as a mostly-straight-faced villain. The idea is simply floated that he slipped the bonds of his confinement in the story world because the suits ran the series into the ground, and that's all you need.

Together again.

Heather's husband is named Chase and works as an effects technician on horror movies. Her son is played by the kid from Pet Sematary. She does the chat show circuit and deals with autistic fans, creepy phone calls, and a nurse who thinks she's going crazy and is a bad influence on her son on account of her movie roles. Craven has fun sending up the culture and the perennial moral panic over scary art, but never quite tips over into soapboxing.

Freed from the 80s, she actually has great hair.

Heather humours her spergy driver.

Me on the left.

One night Chase falls asleep at the wheel and is killed by Freddy, leaving Heather alone to protect her son and kill the dream demon once and for all.

"Cut to the Chase FX" - kino foreshadowing.

New Nightmare feels more naturalistic compared to the previous instalments. There's less stylised lighting and surreal imagery, and in some ways that's a shame, but it helps separate the "real world" from the "movie world". Real-life events such as Langenkamp's stalker and a contemporaneous earthquake are rolled into the script too, making the fake-real-world even a little realer. Freddy gets a redesign too, which was probably necessary to distinguish him from the cartoon character he had become by Freddy's Dead. They even recast Freddy with...himself:

Freddy Krueger is a successful actor and you're a NEET.

It doesn't seem like high praise to say this one gets it right, but given everything that's happened in this series, you couldn't expect a better conclusion. It was seven films, a TV show, a game and various comics, novelisations and merchandising that veered erratically from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, packed with effects, jumps, deaths, one-liners, waifus, retardation, darkness, surreality, brilliance and catharsis. Freddy Vs Jason and the r*make would follow, but thematically, New Nightmare was the perfect ending.

Absolutely cathartic.

The final scene even suggests a sort of looping back to the beginning, an infinite recursion as of a classic story being endlessly retold. Based Nancy always keeping Freddy down in the boiler room so we can all sleep soundly in our beds.

Sweet Dreams: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare!!!

Nominal series endings generally at least try to go out on a high note. Friday the 13th had two (The Final Chapter and The Final Friday), one of which was good and the other tried, bless it. A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, approached its death in an advanced state of dementia, drooling and shitting all over itself. Fortunately, this wasn't the last movie, because nothing with "final" in the title ever is. Without further ado, let's delve into the heart of retardation.

The glasses do nothing! I'm still watching Freddy's Dead!

Freddy's Dead opens with a guy on a plane. He's obviously having a nightmare. His seat flies out of the plane and he wakes up in bed. He goes over to the window and finds Freddy flying on a broomstick dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West. You know those Comics Code approved Joker stories from Silver Age comics where instead of killing people he played pranks and stole that kid's report card? This is the equivalent of that for horror movies. Jesus Christ.

There's jumping the shark and then there's this bullshit.

So the kid makes his way to a delinquents' centre run by Maggie Burroughs and her shoulder pads. Breckin Myer (Road Trip) is there, along with Tracy, who likes violence but dislikes being touched, and Carlos, who has a hearing aid. As lame as this is, it's still more characterisation than most movies these days have, so whatever. Maggie takes the nameless kid back to Springwood to find out all about him, and the others stow away in the van because this is a wacky comedy (Road Trip).

A fun game is to pause at any second of this joint and see whose expression matches your own.

Springwood is a ghost town in this movie because Freddy killed everyone offscreen between movies. Why they thought that would be less interesting to show us than Freddy playing Nintendo and stealing a deaf kid's hearing aid for 90 minutes, I have no idea. The town with no children could have been a fantastically creepy setting, but instead it sucked.

The Twin Peaks nod is nice and all, but imagine if this flick had half the atmosphere of that show.

So Freddy offs the kids in increasingly stupid ways, stopping only to shill for Nintendo, and then somehow follows Maggie and Tracy back to wherever they come from. I guess the rules for this instalment are that Freddy can't leave Springwood without someone to carry him, so he sent out the John Doe character to bring someone back for him to hitch a ride on. So why didn't he just hitch a ride with the John Doe? Anyway, Maggie learns that she's Freddy's daughter (dumb) and that he got his powers from three floating skull things (gay) and that he lived in the famous Elm Street house, meaning that Nancy's mom moved into the house of the guy she torched (Road Trip).

A twist of some potential fascination teased, then instantly abandoned for more dumb shlock.

Freddy still has powers in the waking world, he just stops using them immediately after this for no reason at all.

Look, you've read my part 5 writeup. You know I'll defend practically anything with the Elm Street name attached to it. This piece of shit is on its own.

You know you're looking at a classy production when all the newspaper articles are copypasted from the sports page and World War 2 history books.

The once feared dream demon kills time by taunting a deaf kid.

Finally Maggie defeats Freddy with the power of 3D glasses, probably because they realised Friday the 13th had a 3D instalment and didn't want to miss out on the trendwhoring, even though 3D wasn't even trendy in the early 90s. Is there anything good about this movie? Well, I liked the fact that Alice Cooper is Freddy's stepdad. I liked the gag where he cuts off his fingers while counting down the ways people have killed him in the past. Maggie was pretty hot. Oh, and Iggy Pop wrote a song for the credits in like two minutes for it, which I thought was funny.

Just close your eyes and think of Dream Warriors.

What did Rachel Talalay mean by this?

The best way to view this one is not even as part of the series but as a parody of it, but even that doesn't work too well because it doesn't even have enough jokes per minute to work as a Hot Shots style parody. But if the intention was to kill off any interest in the series, they succeeded. Killing off Freddy gave it a small box office bump but by the time of Wes Craven's New Nightmare a few years later, nobody cared about Freddy anymore. That's a shame because New Nightmare is one of the best in the series, and almost certainly the best seventh instalment in any film series.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child!!!

Note the absence of the number 5. Just like with people, when you need to start hiding your series' age, it's time to think about wrapping it up.

Fifth instalments generally suck, and The Dream Child largely falls under the curse. Maybe it's because horror franchises have a natural lifespan of four movies: Friday the 13th Part 4 was called "The Final Chapter" (it wasn't), Hellraiser 4 was the last one to get a theatrical release, and Final Destination 4 was dubbed, simply, "The Final Destination" (it also wasn't). Parts 5 always seem to be extending the premise a little too far, too gimmicky, and redundant. But as sad and tired as Dream Child sometimes feels, it still has moments and a ton of style that endear it to me, and probably to no one else.

The Jacob's Ladder/Silent Hill/Event Horizon tier aesthetics in the asylum scenes are consistently on point.

This time the movie starts off with Alice and Dan from Part 4 having secks. This is the origin of the pregnancy around which the drama revolves. Alice has a dream about being a nun gang-raped by 100 maniacs who then gives birth to BABY FREDDY. Although Freddy was burned by a mob as an adult, Baby Freddy in the dream world still appears to be burned, although maybe it's just ugly, I don't know.

Separated at birth: Fred Krueger and a Bitcoin investor (respectively).

Everything in this movie is great up until Freddy's resurrection. It has a nice, dark, kind of expressionistic quality to it. But when Freddy shows up the pacing gets all weird and the tone of the movie vacillates wildly between dark serious horror and unfunny comedy, making it irritating. It doesn't help that Freddy only has three kills in this movie, and one of them is the lamest yet.

Taaake oooon meeee

So Freddy bumps off Dan and proceeds to try and corrupt Alice's unborn child for...some reason, I guess. Maybe to be reborn through him, or use him as an agent in the real world? I don't know, and neither did the writer. Probably to be a dick, by this point.

2bf imagine the genes you'd get from her.

The retardation kicks into high gear at the end of the second act when Freddy kills a comic book geek by skateboarding toward him on a bladed skateboard, disappearing, calling him names, turning into Super Freddy, complete with cape (yes), and finally turning him into paper and then cutting him to bits. This scene encapsulates, albeit hilariously, everything that went wrong with the series: by this point Freddy could no longer be described as scary or even menacing, but annoying. If Part 5-era Freddy came up to you in a dream, you'd be like, "go away". That's why I think they should have stuck with the Freddy Baby the whole time, because it's creepy as shit, except when you see it moving from behind and it looks like a rubber chicken.

Every Frame An Edgy Metal Album Cover

There are, however, a few things I really liked about this movie. Alice's drunk dad from Part 4 is now going to meetings and trying to be a better person, which is a completely unexpected bit of character development that makes us care about him, making me wonder if he was supposed to be attacked at some point (he isn't). The opening and ending sequences have some wildly imaginative Gothic/Expressionistic uses of space, shadows, lenses and camera movements. We also learn that Freddy is such an asshole he calls his own mother "bitch" (although to be fair this is how he addresses everyone).

I get this shit from my mom too.

Moreover, Lisa Wilcox is again great as Alice, and it's nice to see her character move forward with some closure and new hope for the future. As much as the series was starting to get old, in a way it was also growing up. So forgive the worst parts of 5 because there's good stuff in there too, and it's a lot higher effort than, say, the same year's Jason Takes Manhattan. After this there would be one more regular sequel, and it would be the worst in the whole series, but don't worry, after Freddy's Dead everything got better! Until the remake.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master!!!

We're going all the way with this.

Just as Dream Warriors was the mid-80s time capsule that threw Dungeons and Dragons, hair metal, The Breakfast Club and most of its cast into a blender and just about got away with it, so part 4: The Dream Master moves with the times by giving us "the MTV Nightmare", complete with MTV title spots, water beds, The Karate Kid, and other 80s-core that hipster flicks of today cram in because DUDE THE 80S LMAO but which was, in its original context, actually endearing (80s nostalgia is actually misidentified nostalgia for a time when you could put Fu Man Chews in a movie without some 500-lb Umm Excuse Me umm-excuse-meing about it, but I digress).

Welcome to MY lightshow.

So if you're determined to see A Nightmare on Elm Street as a scary horror series and Freddy Krueger as a dark, menacing figure, immediately skip to Wes Craven's New Nightmare, because at this point, the scares are gone. This movie doesn't even attempt to be scary at any point, and brazenly ushers Freddy himself into the spotlight as a ham and cheese pop culture villain who does shit like pose with sunglasses on a beach and order pizza with the faces of his victims depicted as meatballs on it.

Yes, that really happens.

But if you want a pacy, nonsensical, 80s-hip trip into unabashed surrealistic effects-driven moviemaking, The Dream Master has a lot to recommend it. This is also the one where a dog pisses fire on Freddy Krueger's grave, bringing him back to life, which is both an apt metaphor for the state of the series for the next couple of flicks and a characteristically left-field, genuinely imaginative and dreamlike image that encapsulates everything Renny Harlin's flickkino (or kinoflick) gets right. I don't know if it's the dumbest smart movie or the smartest dumb joint I've seen, but it's one of them.

"Very observant. The sacred and the propane" - horror producer "Little" Carmine Lupertazzi

The thing is, for everything about part 4 that sucks (Freddy's glove cutting through the water like a shark's fin, the Karate Kid death) there's something boldly imaginative or downright artistic, like the body-horror-inspired cockroach death or Alice flying backwards into the cinema screen. It's like watching alternating scenes directed by Michael Bay and David Lynch. Since it's one of the longer entries, I wonder how much a judicious fan edit could actually improve it (I think this about part 5 too).

"This is really turning out to be a nightmare on Elm Street for: the Dream Master." I turned 360 degrees and walked right out of the kinoplex.

What we can all agree on is that Tuesday Knight's opening song is top tier pop and Lisa Wilcox is excellent as Alice, the new Final Girl who has the distinction of being the only two times undefeated champion of Nightmare on Elm Street films. She's the Dream Master of the title, a concept that's barely explained in some background dialogue delivered by Bob Shaye in a classroom scene. Basically there's a positive gate and a negative gate, and Freddy is the guardian of the negative gate, making Alice his equal and opposite, the guardian of the positive gate. I actually love how half-assedly this exposition is delivered because it shows that Harlin knows details like that don't matter, that film editing is basically free-associative in nature, and that gives the film, at times, a real dreamlike feeling.

Lost Burning Youth is not, so far as I can tell, a real film. However, not only does it sum up the condition of our unlucky protagonists, but it sounds like some arthouse film, which would make Reefer Madness the punchline to the double bill. No image therefore sums up The Dream Master quite like this one.

So while some of these movies are objectively pretty bad (2, 5 and 6), part 4 exists in a weird quantum state. It's no 1, 3 or 7, but it's a really intriguing oddity, and was the most successful release in the series at the time (though this probably has a lot to do with the positive reaction to 3). It also killed off the survivors from 3 in short order, and part 5, released less than a year after it, was a much diminished success, so this was clearly where the wave peaked in terms of popular interest. Nonetheless the studio capitalised on that moment in every way it could, with the two-season Freddy's Nightmares TV show spinoff following and all manner of merchandising like pinball machines appearing around this time. Not many pop culture phenomena reach such glorious heights and self-parodic lows at the very same time. And this, more than anything, shows us why the 80s are unrepeatable.