Nightmare Retrospective | New Nightmare

Nightmare Retrospective | #8 | Wes Craven's New Nightmare

By 1994, the Nightmare On Elm Street was, to put it lightly, suffering from franchise fatigue. Six films in and much of the charm had been lost - though Freddy was no less popular in spite of that. Supposedly, as of the last film, Freddy was finally dead, and the story was over - or was it?

It seems like it would have been almost impossible to make a good follow up to the atrocious Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare without completely rebooting the story, and that's exactly what Wes Craven, finally back in the director's chair for the first time since the 1984 original, did. By doing so, he pulled off an impressive feat; he wrote and directed a brilliant reinvention of the Freddy Krueger mythology that became one of the scariest, smartest and freshest entries in the entire franchise.

This time, the nightmare has taken on a very new form. It starts off with a creepy opening scene set to the classic 80's synth soundtrack of the original. A man forges a pair of sharp claws attached to a glove - Freddy's glove. The man takes a large meat cleaver and chops off his own hand. Blood spurts, but then we move out, cutting to a camera crew filming the scene. The director yells cut, and the crew enter the scene, resetting the props while the man removes his false appendage. We are on a movie set - and they're filming the seventh Nightmare On Elm Street film.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was Wes Craven's first foray into the meta horror subgenre, and while it's not as charming or classic as his 1996 classic Scream, it's just as frightening if not more so. Unlike Scream, which is as much a satire as it is a love letter to horror films in general (or slashers at least), New Nightmare plays it straight, providing a no-bullshit exploration into the purpose of horror films and the effects they have on others, as well as the cultural role Freddy Krueger and characters like him play for audiences across the country.

The story follows Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played Nancy in the original film, played by herself. She now lives an idyllic live with a husband and little boy named Dylan. Both her and her husband still work in show biz, but Nancy has moved away from horror films - yet her fans haven't, and she is constantly followed by unwanted appreciation for her work in the Nightmare films. At the beginning of the film, her idyllic lifestyle seems to be coming apart. For the past several weeks, a stalker has been making strange phone calls and leaving threatening letters in her mail, all themed after Freddy Kreuger. She's been having nightmares, and her son is having trouble sleeping. Soon, people begin to die or disappear, and Dylan begins to speak about a mean old man trying to get him in his sleep - a mean old man with large, razor sharp claws. She soon discovers that Wes Craven has been working on a new script for a new Nightmare film that he wants her to star in, but that he's keeping the project under wraps, and nobody but him knows the story - save for a few details here and there that are alarmingly similar to what she's been experiencing in her day to day life. It's very clear that something strange is going on here, and as the film goes on, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

New Nightmare makes use of Freddy himself in some of the most interesting and restrained ways of the franchise so far. When he's on screen, he's not actually that impressive. His design looks more hokey than scary in this film, and there's a lot of very bad CGI towards the end that's very distracting. It's not until the final act that he is on screen regularly, however; most of the rest of the film you don't even see him. The signs of his presence are in the strange marks left around the house, the strange calls coming over the phone, and the signature claws cutting their way through the wall or through a bedsheet, like he's trying to claw his way into our reality. It's the idea of Freddy that's scary in this one, and it's far scarier than the Robert Englund comedy specials that the last few films were. In fact, I'd actually go as far as saying that this is probably the most purely scary Nightmare film. The actual kills and scares take a backseat to the horror the characters experience; the way Heather questions her reality, the way her son seems to be succumbing to childhood schizophrenia, the way her friends and loved ones seem to be dropping one by one to some unexplainable, impossible phenomenon.

New Nightmare has quite a lot to say about the gory horror franchises that Wes Craven spawned, as well as the genre in general. They are only films, but they seem to have left some sort of permanent effect on the people involved in them. Heather never seems truly comfortable with her role as Nancy, and even before it becomes apparent that the threat of Freddy is real, the very concept of him seems to have become a sort of specter all on its own, hanging over her as she tries to return to a normal life. When her son starts acting out, the only thing people can think to say is that she shouldn't have let him watch her films, even though she didn't - she seems extremely uncomfortable with the idea, in fact, and is uncomfortable even reading him something as violent as Hansel and Gretel for fear that it will traumatize him somehow.

But New Nightmare doesn't just acknowledge the negative ways in which horror effects us - it's also a deep study on the functions the genre performs in our culture. As I've said numerous times in this series, Freddy is a fictional character, but the fears he represents are very, very real. In New Nightmare, the fictional version of Wes Craven has somehow captured the essence of an ancient evil within the character of Freddy, and thus imprisoned it within a story - but now, Freddy is dead, and the story is over, and the spirit is free. Horror movies have the power to traumatize and hurt, but they are also important because they allow us to visualize our fears and anxieties in a physical form and process them in the safe confines of a story. Without this, these fears can be far more dangerous.

New Nightmare doesn't always work, and overall it doesn't have quite the same indie charm as the original Nightmare on Elm Street. As mentioned before, the parts with Freddy physically on screen are a little underwhelming and often full of bad CGI. The whole ending setpiece is a little bit ridiculous and leans more into mindless spectacle over scares. Despite that, however, I think it's deserving of the label of classic, at least as far as Nightmare On Elm Street goes. It's maybe not the best one, but it's absolutely a brilliant, if flawed, reflection of Freddy Krueger's legacy and the horror genre in general up to that point, and easily among the scariest films in the franchise.

Overall, New Nightmare is a high point for the franchise, perhaps the very best since the original Nightmare - at least the best by far since Dream Warriors. Not only is it a fun and scary fright fest, but it's an intelligent meta-narrative that examines the very nature of horror and horror icons and the roles they play in our culture, both good and bad. It's a love letter to the franchise, but also an honest one, and the world of horror is better for its existence.