Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

I’ve always considered Wes Craven to be a very concept-driven director. Instead of just making rehashes and copies of other horror films (a popular method, basically responsible for Friday the 13^th), Wes Craven forged ahead using his own ideas. In many cases he created films other directors would copy, popularising the ‘cannibal hillbilly’ subgenre with The Hills Have Eyes, and even horrific rape revenge movies with The Last House on the Left. Even past that in the later phase of his career he was trying new things, going self-conscious with the Scream series. Sure, a lot of his movies are straightforward, or aren’t the best, but he tended to try new, different ideas. And that’s the same with New Nightmare, which isn’t so much a Nightmare on Elm Street movie as it is something else. New Nightmare marks Wes Craven returning to direct and write an ANOES film, a decade on from the release of the first film.

So when is a Nightmare on Elm Street movie not a Nightmare on Elm Street movie? When it’s a movie about a Nightmare on Elm Street. Sound confusing? Well strap in, because New Nightmare is a meta horror movie. It’s not quite a nightmare on elm street movie (though some would argue that), it’s more a movie about a nightmare on elm street movie, the actors and filmmakers involved and the influence being in a horror movie might have on their lives. Sort of. Or at least that’s what the concept is.

New Nightmare is bad. It’s long and slow, and it gets a bit too meta. It’s a high concept film, but the execution is lacking and the ideas themselves are a bit hazy and convoluted. If you liked any of the previous ANOES films at all, any of the, then you’d be surprised to learn that you might not like this because this is nothing like any of them. It’s hard to tell who this is for, other than Wes Craven trying something vaguely new.

 

Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, lives in Los Angeles with her young son Dylan and her husband Chase. She starts having bad dreams, compounded by Dylan acting strange and receiving harassing phone calls by horror fans quoting ANOES lines. This all culminates in a TV interview where Robert Englund announces a new ANOES movie is in the works, and a film studio approaches Heather to reprise her role as Nancy. The stress of all this causes problems at home, as Dylan begins having seizures and Chase gets killed in a freak car accident. A new evil is targeting Heather, taking the form of Freddy Kreuger and aiming to take Dylan away from her. Heather needs to become Nancy once more and fight back, stopping the evil, and Freddy, and saving her son.

So we get meta. Heather Langenkamp plays a fictional version of herself, with the movie taking place in a world where the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies exist and are popular. Robert Englund plays both himself and Freddy Kreuger, John Saxon shows up as himself. Hell, Wes Craven even shows up to play himself as the director/writer of the original ANOES, and of this movie in an exposition-heavy scene where he basically explains the film’s plot. Freddy is back, sort of – technically, in the film’s logic, it’s not Freddy Krueger at all but an evil entity that has taken the form of Freddy Krueger. It’s a really weird distinction, and doesn’t amount to much other than letting Wes Craven ignore everything that’s happened with, to or about Freddy from the last five sequels, and try and make him scary again. It doesn’t really work, though the redesign can seem a bit menacing.

The movie focuses on the effect a popular horror movie and fan base can have on the actors themselves. For a short while they try and take things psychological – is any of this happening, or is it all in Heather’s mind? Is she having a mental breakdown? She’s highly strung and frazzled at the beginning, and the announcement of a new ANOES movie, and Dylan’s strange behaviour, stresses her out even more. It actually gets pretty irritating. Constant earthquakes rock the house, Heather receives harassing phone calls and Dylan becomes quiet and distant. None of these things are particularly menacing, though they stress Heather out big time, so she acts crazy, blabbering about nightmares, imagined earthquakes and Freddy. Other people notice her acting crazy and just exacerbate things. Towards the end it gives up all pretences and just becomes an ANOES movie, with Heather encountering Not-Freddy in a nightmarish lair to save Dylan. At this point it becomes much more ridiculous, and more like an ANOES movie, with Heather and Dylan trying to kill Freddy in a dungeon-esque temple lair full of pillars, flame pits, water and statues.

 

Freddy (or Not-Freddy) gets given a much more menacing redesign. His claw is now made of flesh and muscle, weaved into his hand, and his overall look is more sinewy and bloody. He now wears an overcoat, the red and green sweater is now a turtleneck, and while the fedora makes a reappearance, Freddy is mostly hanging around without it. I can’t say he’s particularly threatening, and he’s not helped with some bad special effects work. Gone too are the quips and jokes, as he’s played seriously, but unfortunately the things they make him do still come across as silly and ridiculous (his stretchy long tongue and extendable arms are back). It actually take a long time for him to show up – it’s over an hour into the film before he shows up, with everything before then largely involving Heather freaking out over earthquakes, prank calls, Dylan’s behaviour and her nightmares.

Heather Langenkamp playing Heather Langenkamp is ok, but doesn’t really have that much of an impact or importance since, to be blunt, her role in the original ANOES didn’t exactly propel her into stardom. She’s not a household name, and not somebody the tabloids talk about. I feel that they’d need somebody more famous and in the public eye for this sort of meta narrative to work. She sells that she’d be a bit annoyed that her fame is tied to a horror series she’s really only had a little involvement in. And ugh, Dylan sucks. I get that he’s meant to be playing a troubled little boy, but he’s annoying, either acting silent and creepy or shrieking and thrashing as Not-Freddy stalks him in his dreams. The kid also sleepwalks and acts creepy. I found him annoying and really didn’t like him. He didn’t act like a kid, not even for a second. The child actor was garbage as well. Not a good horror movie kid. They’re really the two main characters here, with the focus on them. The other original characters are pretty bland. Heather’s husband dies pretty soon so we don’t know anything about him, and the babysitter is only in a few scenes until Freddy kills her.

Things get a little weird with most of the other roles, which are short and really only a little bigger than cameos. Wes Craven, having written the script, gives Heather the lowdown on the evil spirit, while Robert Englund, before going missing, describes the monster in intimate detail. John Saxon loses grip on reality and begins to believe he’s his character from ANOES, treating Nancy like his daughter. That’s it for them. They could have gone so much more interesting here, particularly with Robert Englund (like having Freddy’s influence overtake and possess him or something). Instead we just focus on Heather freaking out.

For a long time not much happens. Nancy will freak out, an earthquake will cause cracks in the wall (that look like claw marks), and Dylan will scream or have a seizure or speak in a creepy Freddy voice and its rinse and repeat for a long time. It’s never suspenseful or creepy, it’s just dull overall. The special effects are somehow worse than the last few movies with cheap looking digital effects (a robot Freddy claw coming to life is awful, as are the superimposed CG green screen images for a highway chase). Even practical effects like Freddy’s mouth stretching or his arms extending look cheap and flimsy. Compared to the imagination and creativity (and, yes, silliness) of the last few movies, it’s pretty dull and unspectacular all things considered.  

We’ve got a bunch of horrible doctors and nurses. When Dylan starts having seizures, Nancy takes him to the hospital, but the head doctor is mean – she blames Nancy for Dylan’s issues (because she’d been in horror movies). They think that Nancy is causing Dylan’s issues, and outright accuse her of being high on drugs, being insane or just abusing Dylan, and start threatening to put Dylan in foster care. Knowing that her husband has just died and that she’s visibly distressed, you’d think they’d try extending a little help or care her way, but nope, instead they hurl accusations at her, treat her like she’s a dangerous lunatic and threaten to take her son away. Surely that won’t stress her and her kid out even more.

The evil Freddy Kreuger entity is defeated in a reference to Hansel and Gretel, the children’s fairy tale (and one that Heather tells Dylan). They push him into a furnace and burn him to death, defeating the evil together and waking up from the nightmare with everything ok, and Wes Craven’s new script is there with them, with a congratulatory thankyou message from Wes Craven. It’s a bit of a weak ending. There’s also still a hell of a lot of issues though – Nancy’s husband is still dead, their babysitter got murdered, the doctors and police will still want to potentially arrest Nancy and take Dylan away from her. And what? Now she’s going to make a new ANOEs movie with Wes Craven, after having lived it? And what about the horrific implications of Wes Craven writing movies based on portentous dreams of evil spirits, giving them life in the movies he makes? Does that mean the family of redneck cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes are out there somewhere?

Wes Craven appears as himself here, and he comes across as a bit awkward and strange. Apparently he gets his scripts from dreams, which is how he learns about the evil entity. As he explains to Nancy, the evil is an ancient entity that exists to make innocence suffer. It can, however, be trapped in a form, where it can’t do any harm. That form was the ANOES movies, where Wes Craven wrote the evil into Freddy, trapping it on the screen. For ten years the evil had been trapped, but with the end of the ANOES series it’s free. It has gotten used to taking Freddy’s form and wants to cross over to the real world, but first it wants to enact vengeance on what it considers to be its enemy, Heather’s ANOES character Nancy. It’s all a bit of nonsense, and since we just see Freddy the evil entity aspect goes nowhere. The scene does allow Wes Craven to take digs at the last few entries in the series, saying they watered down and cheapened the series. Everything that’s happened is in a script Wes has written for a new ANOES film, which means he’s responsible for Heather’s misfortunes – he apologises, and says “it’s just a script”, but as Heather picks up that means he wrote that her husband would die horribly in a car accident and that her son would have seizures. He shrugs it off and deflects blame, and then Heather goes about trying to solve things herself (but not really).

While it’s a movie based on ANOES, there really aren’t many call-backs to the original film. One of the very few deaths (really only two actually), of Julie the babysitter, is a reference to how Tina died in the original (dragged onto the ceiling and slashed to death), but with the exception of Freddy and having the actors play themselves there’s not much of a connection there. Wes Craven had originally wanted to have Johnny Depp cameo, but was too nervous to ask him since he’d gotten so popular – Depp later said he would have been happy to do it.

I’m not fond of New Nightmare. It’s a high concept horror movie, and while I think the idea was interesting the actual end results are anything but. The movie drags and can be a slog to get through. Wes Craven had originally planned for this to be the sequel to the original ANOES, but I can’t see this having done very well back then. If anything it probably would have killed the series right at the beginning. With ten years and six films behind it, the idea stands up better, but the execution is still underwhelming and plain not interesting. There was one good thing to come out of this – the meta-ness of this movie pretty much directly lead to Wes Craven going on the make Scream, a horror movie savvy to horror movie rules. Say what you will about the series, but it did reshape horror movies for a while by acknowledging horror movie tropes and audience expectations. New Nightmare essentially marked the end of the ANOES series, and would be the last time Freddy would be seen until Freddy vs Jason almost a decade later, and the last ANOES movie until the awful remake/reboot sixteen years later. Speaking of that awful remake…