I've only ever seen the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, so I had no idea what to expect for this one. The other two series have a more self-serious tone, and generally attempt to scare the audience.

So it's interesting that this series seems to instead have more fun. Whereas the Halloween movies are mostly set-up with moments of pay-off, here they've decided to put the emphasis on the latter: deaths are often precluded by creative gimmicks, such as puppet-strings made out of the veins of the victim or a Videodrome-esque sequence that ends with a girls head in the TV set.

"Welcome to prime time, bitch!"

And Freddy himself has a lot more personality as well. Part of this is of course because he can talk while Michael Myers can't, but he really seems to favor being on the dramatic side: he has quippy bants with his victims and sometimes monologues as well, and I do have to admit it makes him less scary as a result. But I'm not sure being scary this is a priority for the movie, as it often plays up its comedic angles (especially considering how often he says the word "bitch").

In a lot of ways this reminds me more of It than It Follows: whereas the latter relies on capitalizing off slowly-built tension, the former accepts its carnival-ride origins. Dream Warriors is similar in this aspect and is a lot more overtly fun as a result, and really does differentiate the slasher subgenre from its tenser horror roots.