At Twenty Five: Wes Craven's New Nightmare

“Every kid knows who Freddy Krueger is. He’s like Santa Claus…”

The 1980’s provided us with many, many cultural touchstones. In the media heavy and franchise-saturated world in which we dwelt, we were inundated with names that we all still know, and still talk about all these years later: Ronald Reagan, Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, John Rambo, Jason Voorhees but there was one name that was more immediate than those, one name that was (to blatantly steal from Candyman) the whisper in the classroom, quite literally.

We could describe him head to toe, from beaten fedora and striped sweater, to every last scar. We could recite his back story, quote his dialogue - and we were still too young to have seen the films. The lurid VHS covers, the tantalizing subtitles to each new chapter challenged us, dared us to stay up well into the night and witness bad dreams put to film. We looked forward to the day when inevitably we would be at a sleepover and a friend’s older brother would reach into a white plastic bag and produce one of the movies. Huddled in the dark with a few friends, we felt like we were getting away with something, that we were entering a New Country. It was a rite of passage, and the character’s name was recited with something like reverence.

Freddy Krueger.

It became easy to forget, as Freddy reached a wider and wider audience, that A Nightmare on Elm Street was a legitimately frightening movie, and Freddy Krueger was one of the greatest movie monsters since the Universal days. There was something about Krueger, his charisma, the truly terrifying thought of a killer who had unfettered access to your dreams, that made people clamour for more. Thus, a franchise was born.

The Elm Street sequels painted Freddy more and more as the comedian, cracking wise as he invaded the dreams of victim after victim - each with a more dubious relation to Elm Street, and any semblance of story from the brilliant original.

It must have set Wes Craven’s teeth on edge, watching his creation take on a life of its own, catering increasingly to the Saturday Morning Cartoon crowd.

New Nightmare was Craven’s way of processing that feeling. In the film, Craven (playing himself) begins to write a new Freddy movie. As he does, Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) and her young son (Miko Hughes) begin to have Freddy nightmares in the real world. Are they stress-induced hallucinations, or is Freddy becoming real, independent of Robert Englund (doing double duty as both himself and the new iteration of Freddy).

There was a pointed effort to make Freddy “darker, more evil.” Appearance-wise, they added a trenchcoat, changed up the makeup a bit, and he spent most of the time without the fedora. He had less dialogue and fewer quips - Freddy was more of a cloud on the horizon than an actual presence. In the early stages of the film, he is insinuated, hinted at more than paraded around. And it’s effective. It’s creepy.

It’s really a massive idea - Freddy inhabiting the real world - and it’s handled well enough by everyone involved. What better character to tell a meta horror story with than Krueger? But I have to admit, I feel like it could have been so much more.

I find myself wishing that Craven and Co. had gone the found-footage or mockumentary route. The found footage horror film was still five years from its emergence into the mainstream consciousness, but the genesis of the found footage film was 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust. Craven, the man behind Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, must have been aware.

Hell, This Is Spinal Tap was a thing. Craven even stated that he started this movie without a credits sequence to make it feel more like a documentary. I really wish he’d leaned into that more.

New Nightmare’s biggest shortcoming is that it’s a slick, mainstream horror film. I feel like, had this been made in a gritty, low-budget fashion, it would have been a mind-blowing finale to the franchise (yes, finale, I’m trying to pretend that 2010 didn’t happen, as I suspect a lot of us are). However, this is still a movie of fantastic ideas, effective performances, and decent effects. Craven’s explanation - that Freddy was something ancient, that was trapped in the fiction and was happy to reside there, so the Freddy movies had to keep coming, to contain him - was a really interesting idea that maybe could have used a little more exploration.

This is the best of the Elm Street sequels. There, I said it. But it’s not my favorite of the Elm Street sequels. That title belongs to Dream Warriors, in case you were wondering.

That’s the beauty of horror fandom - there is a clear line between “best” and “favorite.” As horror fans, we are not only aware of, we revel in the cheapness of the effects, the frequently bad acting, the absurd storylines. We don’t need it to be high-gloss and Oscar-worthy. Down and dirty is fine by us. Again, I think that is New Nightmare’s biggest fault. Some grit would have looked good on this one.

But I’m an 80’s kid. I’ll ALWAYS love Freddy Krueger.

7 / 10.