The Reality of Storytelling in Wes Craven’s ‘New Nightmare’
In 1994, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise was dead in the water. Freddy Krueger had been killed off in the sixth entry, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, in 1991. The Los Angeles mayor even declared the release date “Freddy Krueger Day,” and there was a public funeral held for a beloved fictional serial killer. They could not have made their intentions clearer in announcing that the movie was indeed Krueger’s last stand. The fact that it was a critical and commercial flop only seemed to confirm that the series had ended. But New Line Cinema was, after all, “The House that Freddy Built,” and so plans were put in motion to develop ideas for a seventh Nightmare almost immediately. This included the long-rumored concept of Freddy vs. Jason, which did actually see its first official script get turned in that same year. As it stands, three years is barely a blip between a supposed finale and a new movie. Even Jason Voorhees took nine years off the big screen after the release of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
With this movie, however, it didn’t matter, because the idea was gold. It’s even a line spoken in the film itself: “Who better to resurrect Freddy than his creator?” Thus, original Nightmare on Elm Street writer/director Wes Craven was brought back into the fold, to helm the new sequel, and this time he was allowed to do whatever he wanted.
Craven took the opportunity to make a “sequel” that nobody expected. He conceived of a tenth anniversary film about the legacy of his original A Nightmare on Elm Street, the booming popularity of Freddy Krueger and his hold on a legion of die-hard fans, and the impact of that success on the people who made the movie. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is set in the “real world,” at least compared to the other entries. Heather Langenkamp stars as a version of herself, married to a makeup FX artist named Chase, and they have a son together named Dylan, who has been plagued by nightmares while Heather has been plagued by harassing phone calls. Heather begins to have nightmares of Freddy at the same time she is contacted by Robert Shaye at New Line to star in a new Nightmare on Elm Street that is being written and directed by Wes Craven. This kicks off an entire chain of events as Freddy slowly transcends the film world to enter reality. Or the reality of this film, so to speak.
New Nightmare gets a great deal of deserved credit for being a pre-cursor to the meta horror movement that Craven would kick off with Scream just two years later. After all, in New Nightmare, Craven isn’t simply aware of the tropes and trappings of the franchise, this is literally a movie about the people who made the movie. There are layered callbacks to specific moments in the original film, but much more than that, it is so centered on the pop culture status that Freddy had amassed in that ten year time period. This is a creator taking a look at a creation that had taken on a life of its own, that had transformed into something entirely out of his control, and then making that the very backbone of the plot. That is literally what it is about. I think it’s more interesting than simply being a meta commentary, however. I think, at the end of the day, New Nightmare is simply the most Wes Craven movie ever made.
Every single sentiment that Craven ever expressed about why we tell horror stories, all of his scholarly knowledge on myth and storytelling, that is all here, distilled into a two hour runtime. People often read Freddy in this movie as simply some entity that simply took the form of Freddy, but at least in the context of this film, it’s more complicated than that. This is Freddy, but Freddy as this movie depicts him is the modern representation of evil itself. Evil takes many forms in many times, because the stories we tell to scare ourselves are always the same, at their core. It was the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” It was Count Dracula, or Count Orlok from Nosferatu at the turn of the century. It was the cave bear that early man had nightmares about. And in the 1990s, it is Freddy Krueger.
It is comfortable being Freddy Krueger and it wants to keep being Freddy Krueger, that’s what serves the basis of the plot. It was contained by the films, by the telling and retelling of the story, and now that the story is over, it is crossing over in search of new, real blood. Just like the Freddy within the movies, it feeds off fear, it feeds off that attention. Only now instead of the dreaming teenagers of Springwood fueling its evil, it’s us. It’s us with our ticket stubs or video rentals — as was the case in 1994, anyway — munching on our popcorn, and without us, it’ll starve. It is the telling of these stories that processes that fear instead of repressing it. When repressed it grows restless and breaks free.
These things are all reflected in the film, from the recreation of the iconic Nosferatu shadow to the many repeated references to “Hansel and Gretel,” which come full circle in the ending, when Freddy is literally thrown into a furnace and burned by a child he was preparing to eat. The most persistent references, however, are still wisely to the original Nightmare on Elm Street. And each of these references serves their purpose. In a movie where the actors from the film are playing themselves, the way Craven blurs those lines is genius. There is a hard line between Freddy Krueger and Robert Englund, who is so disturbed by his own Freddy nightmares — at least, that’s what we’re led to assume — that he packs up and leaves in the middle of the movie. The line between Heather and Nancy, however, is much murkier.
In many interviews, Craven and Heather Langenkamp have both talked about the strength she brought to that character to truly bring her to life and in New Nightmare, even if this is a fictionalized Heather Langenkamp, that could not be more true. Heather’s arc across the movie is not just about protecting her son at any cost, it is about letting Nancy back into her life, being willing to confront her demon again, and tapping into the strength that gave birth to her iconic character in the first place. Heather’s transformation into Nancy is gradual. She receives the same notable marks on her body that Nancy received throughout the original film. A mark on her forehead, a cut on her arm, a gray streak in her hair, these all come one by one. Heather’s consciousness never changes into Nancy, of course, she never literally becomes another person or forgets herself, because Nancy is something inside of her. It is a role she must consciously choose to play.
This is best expressed in the movie’s most powerful scenes and one of my favorite sequences out of the entire Nightmare on Elm Street saga. Heather calls John Saxon, the actor who played her father, Lieutenant Thompson in the film, to come to her house after her son, Dylan, has fled the hospital. What happens throughout this sequence is so gradual, it happens one piece at a time, that’s the brilliance of it. He starts referring to her as Nancy, his outfit changes to his police uniform from the film, and Heather picks up not only on the fact that reality is literally changing around her, she also picks up on what she is supposed to do.
She understands not only who she is supposed to be, but where she is on the game board, and refers to him as her father, accepting her role as Nancy. Finally, she’s signed on for the film, so to speak. She is Nancy now. And as she turns back around to her house, it is no longer her home in Hollywood, but the house on Elm Street, hungry to have her back after ten years.
This scene might be the best example of it, but New Nightmare plays a lot with the concept of reality being less concrete than it appears. That is perfect for a Nightmare on Elm Street entry set in the “real” world. The original movie was about the same thing, in essence. That whole film carried a question of what was real and what was a dream. In New Nightmare dreams are still obviously an important element of the story, but it is much less about the blurred lines between the dreaming and waking worlds, and much more about the barrier between film and reality.
In stark contrast to Freddy Krueger the Star, his near protagonist position that had been established from Nightmare on Elm Street 4 onwards, New Nightmare takes its time introducing him. The suggestion that reality itself is shifting is one of my favorite elements of the movie, that there are ripples from this thing that is literally breaking through into our world. One of the first pieces of information given in the film is that Los Angeles has been racked by a series of increasingly intense earthquakes. The first one we see in the movie leaves four long slashes in Heather’s wall, as if Krueger is literally slashing his way into the world. It’s as if the world itself literally has to crack to allow him to slip through.
New Nightmare is a powerful, intelligent, thoughtful film about myth and storytelling and the movies, but it is also not too smart for its own good. Craven delivers sequences that feel as though they could have been right at home in the original, from Freddy’s glove slicing up through Heather’s bed, like a shark’s fin just under the covers. He also delivers sequences that the original film could never have afforded, like the absolutely fantastic sequence where Freddy appears in the clouds and scoops Dylan up off the freeway with his giant claw. It is the kind of great movie that also never really had a chance to make a killing at the box office. Even if the comedian Freddy of the later sequels had become overexposed, he was still what audiences had become familiar with. At the same time, it’s entirely possible audiences wouldn’t have flocked to see any new outing so soon after Freddy’s Dead.
Whatever the case, what they did get was so far beyond what anyone could have possibly expected. In later years, though, people have certainly come around to appreciating what Craven did with this movie. This is his master’s thesis on a boogeyman he created, and loved, but could never escape, as well as the concept of boogeymen, in general. It is one of the very best of its franchise. Even more than that, it is one of the very best of its decade.
