New Nightmare (1994) - film review

Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played Nancy in the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, is disturbed when she has a dream in which her husband Chase, a special effects designer, is attacked by a mechanical claw that he has created.   When producer Bob Shaye offers her the leading role in the next Nightmare on Elm Street film, Heather declines, partly because of her unsettling dream, but also because she has started to receive sinister phone calls from someone pretending to be Freddy Krueger, the razor-fingered psychotic killer from the Nightmare films.  Heather realises that something is badly wrong when her husband is killed in a road accident and sees large claw marks on his corpse.  In addition, her young son Dylan has started to behave very strangely, sometimes looking as if Freddy Krueger has taken possession of him.  In desperation, Heather pays a call on Wes Craven, the director of the first Nightmare film, in the hope that he may be able to explain what is happening.  Craven admits that he too has been having nightmares and has developed a theory that Freddy Krueger is not an imaginary creation but the manifestation of an ancient evil that has somehow managed to get trapped in the Nightmare on Elm Street films.  Now that the series of films has ended, Freddy is able to escape into the real world and perpetuate his cycle of sadistic killings without the help of screenwriters.  The only way to prevent this from happening is for Craven to make another Nightmare film, and for this he requires Heather to play the part of Nancy one more time...

The Nightmare on Elm Street series had pretty well driven itself into the ground by the time it came to an end in 1991 with the fifth sequel Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.   In contrast to the first film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), one of the most imaginative and frightening entries in the slasher genre, the slew of sequels that followed were incoherent self-indulgent fright fests that were content merely to retread the same old ground in pursuit of a quick buck from an easily pleased audience.  The series deserved to die.  But just when we thought we had seen the last of Freddy Krueger and his deadly razor hand, Wes Craven, the director of the original film, re-entered the fold and brought it back to life.  In the process, Craven gave us one of the most inventive, thought-provoking and disturbing of all the slasher films, a true nightmare.

What made the original Nightmare on Elm Street film so distinctive and memorable was the way in which it blurred reality and dreams, to the extent that the demarcation between the two became irrelevant.  In his New Nightmare, Wes Craven goes one step further and weaves a fantasy within a fantasy - the pseudo-reality of a film in the process of being made being overtaken by a slasher fantasy which ends up inspiring the film that is being made.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of the Möbius band.  We like to think that reality and fantasy are completely separate domains, existing side-by-side like the two faces of a piece of paper, but in fact they have a tendency to run into one another, so that sometimes it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.  Craven doesn’t just break the fourth wall, he drives a fleet of bulldozers through it and convinces us that that the world of physical experience and the realm of the imagination are two halves of the same reality - we kid ourselves if we think we can always distinguish one from the other.

What this film offers is an ingenious, but not overly laboured, attempt to deconstruct the horror film (and indeed cinema more generally).   In doing so, Craven prompts us to reflect on the value and significance of the horror genre.  Do horror films serve a social good or are they intrinsically harmful to society?  Like children’s fairy tales, they open our eyes to the malignant forces that exist in our world, but do they not also inspire more evil, encouraging impressionable viewers to replicate what they see on the screen?  This film and Craven’s subsequent Scream films (which continue in a similar self-referential vein) would seem to suggest that horror movies are beneficial to society, as they provide a medium within which evil can be contained.  Without such films, the likes of Freddy Krueger would manifest themselves more easily in the real world, and do far more damage, maybe.  The gospel according to Wes Craven seems to be that horror is good for us, providing it is confined to celluloid.

With actors and crew from the first Nightmare on Elm Street film (apparently) playing themselves and with countless references to the original film, New Nightmare is the definitive post-modern movie, and arguably the most effective film of this kind to date.  Heather Langenkamp, a confident young actress who has now settled down to have a family, refuses to reprise the role of Nancy when offered the chance by her producer, but ends up having to play the part "in real life" in order to defeat Freddy Krueger, who has somehow acquired a life of his own after being killed off in the last Nightmare film.  Meanwhile, the actor who played Freddy, Robert Englund, can hardly wait to get back into the red and green sweater and bides his time by painting weird pictures and acting like a closet psychopath.  Wes Craven appears in the film, as himself, desperately struggling to put together a screenplay that will save Heather and put Krueger out of harm’s way.  To make things even more interesting, Heather’s son Dylan looks as if he is simultaneously auditioning for the parts of the scary kid in the next remake of the The Omen and The Exorcist.  The only way out of this madness is for Heather to return to the set of the first Nightmare film and have it out with Freddy for the last time.  This time, however, Freddy is ready for her, plus the special effects are better.  But what neither Heather nor Freddy realise, yet, is that they are merely characters in a Wes Craven film.  They do not exist.  Or do they?

All this would seem to imply that New Nightmare is a film that will only appeal to degree-waving intellectuals and film students.  Far from it.  It has its fair share of thrills and shocks, but it delivers these more subtly, and therefore far more effectively, than most films in the slasher genre.  Wes Craven may appear to have a natural affinity for the morbid, the macabre and the viscerally horrific, but his films contain little in the way of gratuitous violence and rely far more on suggestion than implicit horror images to thrill and frighten us.  The most chilling sequences in New Nightmare are not the ones in which the razor-fingers come out and start ripping people apart but those where the characters sense a demonic presence lurking in the background.  An invisible threat is far scarier than one that you can see.   No, New Nightmare may be a piece of groundbreaking cinema art which challenges the conventions of filmmaking with a wicked tongue-in-cheek slyness, but this is not why you should watch it.  What makes it so appealing is that it provides a deeply unsettling yet thoroughly compelling viewing experience, in which dark humour and visceral terror are willing bedfellows in a slickly composed horror story.  It is a film that challenges our assumptions about the nature of reality and reminds us that evil is all around us, not just confined within the four edges of a cinema or television screen.  Freddy is out there, somewhere, and he’s coming for you...

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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