[Wes Craven's] New Nightmare (1994)

I'm so glad my daughter persistently nagged me to revisit Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) because it really was a palate cleanser after "The Dream Child" and "Freddy's Dead". I badly needed "New Nightmare" just so I could once again see a version of Freddy that is actually sinister. Even if Englund plays a version of Freddy (known as "the entity") and not necessarily the dirty-brown-hat, cut-up-sweater, glove-knife-fingered nightmare killer resurrected with burns and playfully terrorizing teenagers we grew up with in the 80s; seeing a menace of an origin of great age Wes wants to take the strength from with help from his actress who played Nancy, Heather Langenkamp, sort in a form of Freddy but far more demonic is a breath of fresh air. Because the makeup for Freddy in "Freddy's Dead" looked so ineffectual and pepperoni-pizza, the decision to go with a "Freddy from the pits of hell" was much appreciated by this fan. And the blades reaching from this Freddy's hand, with actual metal in the fingers, too, made him extra threatening. He even dons a trenchcoat with the neck collar opened when scaling a hospital room wall and ceiling while pulling on a bloodied and cut-up Middendorf as young Miko Hughes (as Heather's son) looks on in horror. The "hell coliseum" of the nightmare realm Heather travels to in order to get her son back is right out of a dark fairy tale, complete with an oven and boilers, leeches and snakes, even a pterodactyl. This Freddy asks Miko if he ever played, "skin the cat", with a knife used to stab his tongue to the inside of an oven which has the entity pulling it free causing this cut down the middle, seemingly intentionally visualizing him as a devil (the eye contacts adding to the effect). And how Heather must follow her son's sleeping pills like breadcrumbs to under the sheet of his bed which leads her down the shaft into the "belly of the beast". All these touches Craven adds to just take the 1984 film and its most memorable characters is a nice change of pace.

Now, I can see why Freddy fans might reject "New Nightmare" as pretentious and perhaps too "meta". I see "meta" thrown around from Letterboxd review to Letterboxd review. So many young people using Letterboxd see so much of what "Scream" (1996) would be come while watching "New Nightmare". How the fiction of yesterday bleeds into the reality of today. Craven toys with that concept, playing it to the hilt in "New Nightmare" and I was all here for it this afternoon. When I noticed the screentime of the film, I was a bit concerned that "New Nightmare" would lag with some irritating pacing, but I found myself so wrapped up in the entire presentation. This was just a hell of a lot of fun.

I get why plenty of viewers might feel as if Craven was just too cute with his concept, going all "insider baseball" with his use of New Line Cinema, the likes of Robert Shaye, Robert Englund, himself, and John Saxon as themselves, visiting studios, addressing "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) as a popular film and Freddy Krueger as a pop culture icon the fans want to see return upon the tenth anniversary. Craven discussing his script and the entity remaining attached to Freddy when Heather visits him, Heather visiting Robert Shaye's office at New Line, Heather and Robert at a talkshow with fans in the audience dressed like Freddy (his fandom and merchandise quite on the market still), the special effects team working with that robotic metal-fingered hand, and the script pages laying out "New Nightmare" as it is ongoing while Heather combats the trauma of the events spilling out of Wes' mind; all these particulars could be dismissed as too meta for their own good. I guess the film could even be considered product of such a big ego, so disregarding the last few sequels, Craven felt the need to revamp his formula and go completely in a different direction. Since, I embrace all these details now at age 43 (almost 44), I figure I rejected the film in the past perhaps because this wasn't my Freddy (#NotMyFreddy). Remembering that I was a teenager in 1994, really still getting familiar with the franchise as a whole -- watching the Nightmare films a lot in the early 90s -- I wasn't prepared for such a wildly divergent Craven film.

But to those who might have said that "New Nightmare" has no business even being tied to the first six films, I feel differently in that regard because Craven includes plenty of homages to the 1984 film as Heather's fight with the entity causes fiction of the past to gradually influence her life. The murder of her babysitter thanks to nurses injecting Miko Hughes' Dylan with a sleeping agent, allowing the Freddy entity to surface (though he can't be seen by anyone but Dylan), the gray streak in Heather's hair similar to Nancy's in the first film, the demand by a nurse for a pass (and Heather telling her to "screw her pass"), the Freddy entity emerging from a bed sheet (his head, then a blade of his hand ripping open a slit) as Freddy did from Marge's bed in the original, John Saxon's Lt Thompson "replacing him" as Heather's "real life" (in the film) and Nancy's life seemingly converge, and Nancy's house revealed to Heather which lets her know that movie she once starred in seems to have eclipsed her own reality all spill out of the fictitious creation of Wes Craven into a world to close to Heather's own. While Heather is the focal point, those intimately involved with the initial success of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" like Shaye, Englund (whose painting seems to reveal what nightmares he is also having), and Craven also suffer similar issues. 

So Craven takes a fictitious version of himself, Heather, John Saxon, Englund, and Shaye, with actors such as Hughes, Middendorf, David Newsom (as Heather's effects wiz husband), Lin Shaye (as a nurse), and Fran Bennett (as a doctor who believes Heather is a crackpot and her son is in need of distance from his mother due to potential mental health problems) in roles and concocts quite a story. This idea has been done since, but, at this time, taking such an approach felt so fresh and less formulaic. I commend Craven for trying this approach. "Scream" certainly capitalizes on looking at the genre similarly, acknowledging fiction while creating more fiction that "feels real".

There isn't a whole lot of violence in the film actually, so such an audacious move meant that Craven had to make a compelling movie by carrying us on a journey with Heather as she encounters all these extraordinary experiences, with a manifestation of the character from a movie given form the actress herself must upend in order to rescue her son. Two deaths in a film with a character that looks similar to Freddy, Craven could have went a different route there, too. The horror genre often puts pressure on filmmakers to bring the savagery far more than Craven does in this 1994 film. One last dalliance with Freddy while affording himself the chance to tamper with the genre in a fascinating way I credit as a gamechanger...even if it wasn't popular. It didn't set the world on fire or make New Line that much money. It sure gave us a bunch of Freddy duplicates emerging while Miko and Heather are in the middle of traffic as motor vehicles pass to and fro. Even a god-like Fred using his finger blade to lift Miko above passing cars leaves quite a visual not easily forgettable. Even Fred with a mouth that extends quite wide in an attempt to eat Miko's head, seemingly right out of "Hansel and Gretel" in the hell coliseum is something right out of a nightmare that leaves quite an impression. But I definitely grooved the most to Craven's homage to Nosferatu as Freddy's shadow, with his blade hand opening wide, casts across a bedroom wall.

The entity needing to kill "Nancy", through the use of Miko, with Heather the very one who embued that character with what she needed as the roadblock keeping it from truly occupying the world in whole...that's quite a role as heroine for Langenkamp!

I noticed that Heather's performance has came under scrutiny, though, I personally had no such objections. And those blue eyes are striking! Heather, to me, has never been more beautiful than in this film. Her business dress for the talkshow, Heather was stunning! Craven really did provide Heather with a damn good role, too! Not to mention, Craven provokes parental nightmares with Miko at the top of a park structure's steeple, with his arms reached towards God, in a strange attempt to grapple with his father's death...this as John Saxon and Heather talk about her "celeb stalker" and the harassing phone calls, all the Freddy shit seemingly haunting her. Included in the film are California earthquakes, a funeral (Freddy pulling Miko into the "hole" of a coffin is eerie!), scenes from the 1984 film on television, and Englund one last time (well, before "Freddy vs. Jason") in his old costume. 4/5