The year is 1994, and the genre of horror is in a bit of a holding pattern. The iconic”Big 3″ slasher villains were either clearly past their prime (Michael Myers and Halloween), or in the cases of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, gone (presumably) for good after the character deaths of these killing machines.
Most horror fans know that in-universe and outside of it, death rarely means forever, so it wasn’t a shock when New Line Cinema—the house that Freddy built—brought back the razor-gloved reaper for another go-around. What was surprising is how they went about doing it in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
THE STORY: 10 years since the release of the first A Nightmare on Elm Street, its final girl, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) has mostly retired to a quiet life. Sure, she does an occasional media appearance while focusing on television acting, but really, she’s more than content with her life at home which includes son, Dylan (Miko Hughes), and husband, movie costume designer Chase (David Newsom). There’s no interest on her end in going back to a franchise that the New Line execs—and Fred Krueger portrayer Robert Englund—are begging her to return to one last time.
Heather has been experiencing weird, lucid dreams lately that coincide with earthquakes. And in tandem, she’s dealing with a stalker who references the infamous Krueger nursery rhyme. Her stress is noticeable, and she knows something isn’t right as Dylan’s behavior becomes more erratic. Movies are their own separate world, right? Only when they’re being made, for that is the only way to suppress the evil Craven’s franchise introduced. Heather may have no choice but to reprise Nancy again.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Even the most novel of ideas rarely come out of thin air. Craven’s Scream released in 1996 and set off a resurgence in the horror genre by having its characters be erudite in the minutiae and machinations of what it meant to be in a horror movie and what it would take to survive—or die–in real time. Scream is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t exist in its final form without the first draft meta-stab release of New Nightmare.
New Nightmare was the first scary movie to showcase a reality of what it would be like if the slasher villains we’ve watched endlessly somehow made it into our world. From a purely base level, it is a frightening proposition, one that Craven, who also wrote the script, runs with by remaking his killing icon into something more sinister and stoic, a 180 from the slapstick standup comic he had devolved to after A Nightmare on Elm Street. And much like a good creature feature, the long-time director is in no hurry to reintroduce his star and in showing restraint, he builds anticipation and atmosphere through the first third of runtime, only using easter eggs and callbacks to let his audience know Freddy is back without displaying the charred countenance we had all been accustomed to.
While Craven was interested in modernizing Freddy and putting an unofficially official bow on the franchise he started, he was as interested if not more so in exploring whether horror movies play a role in creating unstable, violent people (asked directly in Scream 2), a studio’s role in delivering horror movies, the occasional longstanding trauma actors/actresses experience during intense shoots, and society’s role in engaging with horror movies and sometimes transforming them—consciously or unconsciously—into something they’re not.
One of the better scenes early in focuses on Langenkamp (possibly a career-best performance) appearing on a daytime talk show where she’s asked about her interest in doing another Nightmare movie. She’s already shaken up due to her nonstop stalker, but the audience is so zealous for Krueger many are dressed up like him. He’s almost like a hero, or at least an antihero, a bizarre revelation for a character who murders children to become a commercial symbol. Her paranoia crescendos when Freddy…err, Englund comes out of the back and onto the set for a reunion of sorts Heather wasn’t prepared for. It’s moments like those and the convos that follow them that give New Nightmare its intrigue.
A GREAT MOMENT: The previously mentioned scene is a great one, but I’m going with the scene where Heather and Wes reconnect and Heather begins to understand her ordeal. Heather shows up to Wes’ home to ask about the script, and Wes immediately becomes an open book, sharing that he too has had nightmares about an entity focused on killing, and these nightmares directly feed into his scriptwriting; he’s writing a new scene each morning from his dreams.
Heather, non-skeptical and quickly sensing there’s no exaggeration on the part of the director, asks Wes what can be done to stop this version of Freddy from crossing into the real world. Wes posits that since the Nightmare series stopped, it was the only guardrails they had in containing this ancient evil. And by creating a new Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s the only way they can do so again. Wes commits to writing the script, but puts the choice of playing Nancy in the hands of Heather.
This four-minute scene moves quickly, and might require some subtitles to understand the soft-spoken and somewhat fast-talking Craven. It’s the first point in the film where we officially understand the meta approach, driven home by what we see on a computer at the end of the scene. The humor within the scene is subtle when you recognize that Craven is criticizing nearly every following installment post ANOES, sentiments he often said to the press as the series got older.
It’s fascinating to see Craven—typically only making on-screen appearances as uncredited cameos, in the center of a scene and commanding it in a quiet yet gravitating fashion. His dialogue is immaculate, and his reveal about how the only way to stop this instance of Freddy is through making another Nightmare flick stands as a clever metaphor in this world and out of it for feeding the beast. Sometimes, the beast is satiated, but it’s never full, and hence more and more follow ups to IP, or anything that depends on a steady loop of content for revenue. It’s a wink-wink acknowledgement to the audience, but it’s one that fits within the framework of the movie, too.
THE TALLY: Craven’s first foray into meta-storytelling isn’t perfect—specifically, the Englund/Krueger relationship feels a tad underbaked for what’s being analyzed here, but Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is consistently compelling, heady, and paced well. Also, probably “elevated horror” before elevated horror became a thing. It’s What to Watch, and it is currently streaming (as of this writing) on Max.