When Wes Craven died, horror critic and writer Kim Newman tweeted something very succinct. “Wes Craven reinvented horror at least four times – most directors don’t even manage it once.”
He refers to the intense, in your face horror of The Last House on the Left, a film so intense that many have never seen the film without cuts applied to it; The Hills Have Eyes, which exemplified a sort of rural horror where the monsters are not so much the monstrous as the “civil” people; A Nightmare on Elm Street, which brought surrealism to the mainstream; and Scream, which came to set the template for the post-modern slasher film.
However, in 1994, ten years after he introduced the world to Robert Englund’s burned up child killer Freddy Krueger, Craven made a comeback to the character. Several sequels had launched the careers of filmmakers (Chuck Russell, Stephen Hopkins, Renny Harlin, Rachel Talalay), but this was the chance for Craven to settle some scores. Not just with Krueger and Elm Street, but with New Line and Bob Shaye, the head of the studio.
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The key difference between the meta-horror of New Nightmare and Scream is that the latter is a film about people who watch horror movies, and the former is a film about people who make horror movies. The plot follows Heather Langenkamp – playing herself – as a woman haunted by the legacy of the Elm Street movies, living in the shadow of Robert Englund’s star standing, and facing an evil that takes the form of Freddy Krueger to enter the real world.
There’s often been a comparison between films and dreams, that the act of dreaming is often similar to the act of watching a film. What Craven’s two Elm Street films deal with is the act of dreaming and reality, but in New Nightmare it becomes a look at what being a part of something like horror films does to a person.
The film takes inspiration from several real life situations. Heather Langenkamp suffered from a serial stalker as a result of her turn in sitcom Just the Ten of Us, which ran for just three seasons. The show ironically had Langenkamp playing sisters with Brooke Theiss and JoAnn Willette both of whom had been in Elm Street sequels. Craven found the idea of Langenkamp being stalked because of a fairly corny “mom and pop” show to be interesting and put the concept into the film.
What the film deals with is the lasting legacy of horror films. Englund is shown to be popular and well liked, celebrated for his acting as Freddy, while Heather is forgotten and cursed to be stuck in the quagmire of horror films.
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While Freddy in the film isn’t the Krueger of the previous films, but a manifestation of evil and fear that is taking the form that scares people the most. Taking the themes he showed in the first film of parents hiding things from their children Craven focusses the film of Langenkamp and her relationship with her son Dylan (Miko Hughes). Langenkamp keeps the horror aspects of her career, and her husband Chase (David Newson) who is a make-up and special effects artist – Langenkamp’s real-life husband David does the same job – and is building a Freddy claw for the film from coming to the fore.
The underlying narrative of Hansel & Gretel also follows the narrative idea that stories, legends and dreams, are told over and over are majorly important to the human condition. The meta-fiction comes to a head in a scene where, haunted by the events around her, including earthquakes that feel geared towards her, Langenkamp talks with Wes Craven himself. The shock of the scene isn’t a horror jump, but the realisation that Craven was fully aware that she was coming because he had written the events in a screenplay the night before.
Craven gravely informs Langenkamp that she will have to play Nancy one last time to defeat this evil. Craven stages a final showdown that takes Dylan and Langenkamp under Dylan’s bed into this nightmare world where Kreuger fights against them. Tellingly at one point Kreuger throws Langenkamp against a wall marked “lust”, the underlying sexual threat of what violent horror films do to women present once more.
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The subtext of Elm Street was always that Kreuger had molested children, and that in visiting them in their dreams, he was with them at their most vulnerable, in their underwear, asleep. Kreuger’s murders in New Nightmare do away with the more outlandish special effects deaths of the sequels, and even of the original, and go for a more surreal sexual threat. Dylan’s babysitter Julie is dragged up the wall, and killed for having a virginal attitude. While Chase is killed while driving when Kreuger’s claw comes up between his legs and slashes his chest. Both not only reprise ideas from the original film, Julie’s death echoing the death of Tina, and Kreuger’s claw coming up between Chase’s legs mirroring the bath scene from the original.
It’s telling that to defeat Kreuger in New Nightmare, Langenkamp and Dylan are forced to push him into a furnace to burn to death, not just as a reference to the fairytale that underlines the film (Langenkamp follows a trail of pills in place of breadcrumbs), but to defeat him the way he was made, by way of immolation.
What the film deals with is the legacy of making films, Craven himself commented that New Nightmare laid the groundwork for Scream. Which happened to be a much bigger success, owing it to being about the film watchers not the filmmakers. Craven’s interest in the meta-fiction comes through as he kills only fictional characters in New Nightmare, but all of whom having a basing in real life people. New Nightmare looks at what these films do, in a similar way to Videodrome, it asks the question – what do these films do to the people that make them? What sort of people delight in scaring other people, in making films where young people are hurt for entertainment?
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Langenkamp and Englund never fully moved away from being Nancy and Freddy, and both careers will forever be painted by it, Craven dabbled in other genres – Red Eye, Music of the Heart – but his horror standing was forever cemented by his work with genre bending actions.
If films are our dreams, and dreams are our films, then Krueger isn’t just a boogeyman of the silver screen, he’s a manifestation of our worst fears, that we’re never truly safe from our own fear and our own mind. Craven, certainly, is fearful of what he has done to the world, but when you wake up the nightmare ends, and when the credits role the horror ends too… right?
New Nightmare is available to stream on YouTube or iTunes.