It’s been ten years since Freddy Krueger started invading the dreams of children on Elm Street, launching one of the biggest and most successful horror series of all time. Even though the last installment purported to be The Final Nightmare, a sequel was inevitable. But instead of once again entering the surreal, schlocky horror dreamscape of the previous six films, series creator Wes Craven takes the director’s chair and takes at different, meta approach to the horror series.
Heather Langenkamp returns but not as Nancy Thompson. Instead, she plays Heather Langenkamp, star of the Nightmare on Elm Street and The Dream Warriors. But what once was just a job becomes more when her dreams are haunted by Freddy Krueger and she keeps receiving creepy phone calls and weird notes from a stalker fan. Has she allowed the fiction of her life to consume he dreams or is there something more to the nightmares?
In this way, Wes Craven takes the series away from all the corniness, gore and bad one-liners and presents a thoughtful psychological thriller, getting into the mind of a fictional version of Heather Langenkamp. It’s an interesting step back from the franchise , examining the way the series might have effected and haunted the lives of the people who made them and how it might, in the end, actually consume their existence.
This makes for easily the most human cast in the entire series. There’s something immediately real about this meta world Wes Craven has crafted for the film and the way he presents the characters makes them believable people working in the Hollywood industry. A sense of weighty drama permeates Heather’s story as these dreams begin to tear apart her life and, even worse, corrupt the mind of her child, Dylan (Miko Hughes).
This element makes the series more of a social commentary as Craven examines how the popularity of his series might have a negative impact on society. Dylan ends up getting a few peeks at snippets of the horror series that then become manifested in his dreams. Likewise, the fandom seems to be going too far with the prank calls. And then there’s the torment of Heather herself who isS falling apart over the idea of a character Craven made up.
A lot of the nightmares are thoughtful, blurring the lines of reality like the original film but also hearkening back to a lot of the gags and iconic sequences of the series. Some of them are unmistakable like girl being dragged across the walls of the room while others are more subtle like the rendition of the bathtub sequence from the original film. This might seem like blatant fan service, but it actually suggest that Heather could simply be letting these films get the better of her and invade her own dreams.
But then Wes Craven decides that he’s still got to appease the fans and New Line Cinema with some crazy gross dreamscape sequences, pandering to his audience and ruining the film. The last act goes all out with the gross factor, the corny Freddy lines and the supernatural dreamscape. It reduces the plodding, deliberate thoughtfulness of the film so far into what taken by itself is one of the worst sequences of the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
It’s a shame too because this Freddy Krueger is actually scary and menacing. Up to this point, no film in this marathon has frightened me in any way (unless you count that stupid cat in Friday the 13th Part II) but this film got quite a few scares out of me and if I saw this Freddy in my dreams, I’d flip out. Part of this is because for so much of the film we just get glimpses of him, leaving a lot of his menace hidden and in our minds, much like Heather’s. But part of it is also in the eyes. While the well-known Freddy had dark, playful eyes, this Freddy has the eyes of a predatory animal, ready to kill at any moment.
It’s the moments of implication and suggestion, the moments when the fantasy seems to become a reality that prove to be more frightening than anything else in the series. It’s a shame that Craven then feels a need to go back into the fantasy again one last time, ruining the menace and dread built up over the entire film.
In many ways, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the experiment upon which Wes Craven built the superb film Scream. Beyond the obvious meta approach to the horror genre, they both share many similar plotting elements and both have the same visual style and social commentary on the horror fan. It’s a shame Craven couldn’t walk the high road, deprive fans and create an artistic, thoughtful horror film, but there’s at least three-fourths of that film here that deserved to be watched by any horror fan who has seen the original A Nightmare on Elm Street.
© 2010 James Blake Ewing
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare [DVD]
One Comment
I’m pretty on board with New Nightmare — you’re right though, less than a horror, more than a thriller — but Wes Craven really had a good idea with this.