To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Up next; the meta-Nightmare, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare…
After Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare failed to live up to fan’s expectations of a “final” movie, Robert Shaye once again went back to its series creator to make a movie that would celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. But rather than just rehash what he had already done and try to make sense of the franchise’s convoluted continuity, Craven took the series in a completely different direction – and one that would become a major catalyst in re-shaping the slasher genre.
Released in 1994 and titled Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, we move away from the realms of Elm Street and instead move into our own reality. The movie focuses on Heather Langenkamp, who is brought back to New Line Cinemas to discuss the possibility of reprising her role as Nancy for an upcoming Nightmare on Elm Street sequel which is being penned by Wes Craven. She’s reluctant to take on the role, but little does she know that her husband Chase is already working on the movie in the special effects department and worse still, her son Dylan is having nightmares about a bogeyman who seems all too familiar. This all comes to a head when it transpires a real dream demon has taken the form of Freddy and is using the original A Nightmare on Elm Street movie as his template.
Utterly bizarre, a true mind-bender and brilliantly theorised, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare should by all rights be the best movie of the franchise – even if it’s “technically” not part of cannon. It perfectly blends the lines of fantasy and reality, what’s a movie and what’s real and it will constantly have you guessing where it will head next – even if you are scratching your head trying to work out just what is actually happening. But amazingly it all doesn’t quite come together.
Some of the movie is flat out genius with some great moments for franchise fans, like Robert Englund getting all the attention over Langenkamp, Robert Shaye trying to milk the Nightmare franchise one more time and the final reel acting as a real-life reenactment of the first movie. The scene in which Wes Craven talks to Heather about his script only for the end reveal to show that he’d already written their conversation word for word before she’d even arrived is like something from The Twilight Zone and the movie never gives away too much on what is really happening. In an original draft, Craven had written himself to be a crazed writer, tortured by this dream demon to the point where he’d cut off his own eyelids but in the end felt a warm and sunny mansion setting would be more fun to film in. Pieces of trivia like that are just one example of where the movie drops the ball.
It’s not like that moment would have been a deal breaker, but those kind of ideas would have tipped Wes Craven’s New Nightmare into next-levels of brilliance. The film already has a dark tone, but the idea of Craven being forced to write a script so a dream demon can breach into our reality using his own creation to the point where he feels the need to self-mutilate would have been a terrifying turn of events. Another draft featured a dream sequence in which Freddy attacks Robert Englund, the man who made the character famous. Fans of A Nightmare on Elm Street would have lapped scene that up and it would have served as a better conclusion for Englund’s ‘real life’ appearances in the movie as opposed to just not showing up for the second half of the film. It just feels at times that Craven didn’t have the guts to fully follow this idea through.
On top of that, the film is overly long and a lot of scenes drag and feel bloated. Clocking in at just under two hours, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare never creates an atmosphere frightening enough to warrent its longer running time and it brings an already slow paced film to a painful pace. Perhaps if Craven had further explored some of his earlier ideas the pacing would have been fine, but there is a certain spark missing to make Wes Craven’s New Nightmare a stone-cold classic.
Fans are either hot or cold on the movie and, depending on your mood and ability to immerce yourself into the idea, different watches can illicite a different reaction. There might be times you watch it and it’s slow and tedious and other watches will excite and thrill. It’s a mixed bag of a movie for sure, but at least it wasn’t just a lazy retread of previous ideas explored in less-than-average sequels.
But while Wes Craven couldn’t quite get the idea of a meta horror movie 100% right, a writer by the name of Kevin Williamson did. Taking inspiration from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Williamson put together an 18-page treatment for a self-aware meta-slasher titled Scary Movie, that would eventually become the 1996 mega-hit, Scream. Williamson perfected what Craven tried to do with New Nightmare in what is hands down the movie that re-invented the genre. The product of its success however, is another story all together.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare may be a touch messy and poorly-handled at times, but it still ranks as the third best of the whole series and was the perfect way to finally kill off the Freddy character before resurrecting him one more time for his showdown between Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees. A showdown that would take over a decade to get to…
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Flickering Myth will be presenting a one-night only screening of zombie-comedy Stalled at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London on Novemeber 14th 2013. For more information on where to buy tickets, click here.
Originally published October 28, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.