I found Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to be artistically interesting. This is almost an impossible feat for the seventh in a slasher film series! Nobody would really expect such a movie to be all that great, especially
after parts 4, 5, and 6 got progressively worse, each becoming more comedic and
forgettable than the last until the entire franchise had pretty much run its
course and Freddy Krueger was no longer quite the scary boogeyman he once was,
becoming instead some sort of culturally iconic horror movie clown. But then Wes Craven came up with a superb idea: What if, in light of all of this, this decent into sequel hell, he decided to make one more Nightmare
film, one in which the idea is all about him making one more Nightmare film, and in so doing,
whatever demonic force he had originally dreamed up to become Freddy on film
was, because of this, attempting to break out of the fictional film world and
into the real one, and using the actress who played Nancy in the first film,
Heather Langenkamp, to do it.
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| Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, and Robert Englund all play versions of themselves. |
And so the
film has Wes Craven playing himself, and Heather Langenkamp playing a version
of herself that wasn’t really her and her family, but was still an interesting
twist for the nature of the film. John
Saxon, and of course Robert England, are back for more, playing themselves, and
with England hamming it up as the commercialized Freddy when he appears in
Freddy makeup on a local talk show with “Heather”, but is then haunted by
nightmares himself of the real demon who inspired Freddy and who is waiting to
be born into our world, and his nightmares of this “Freddy demon” start to
become realized in his paintings. It is
so reverential and interesting, especially when you realize the ways in which
this is like their real lives, but not, with actor Miko Hughes, not really related to Heather Langenkamp, playing her son Dylan, and another actor
playing her husband, and just like her real husband, also a special effects
technician and yet, in real life, still very much alive. The commentary
track on the DVD refers to the fact they shot in other houses standing in
for Heather’s and Robert’s, and that Robert Englund doesn’t really paint for a
hobby like his “Robert Englund” character does here. What was so interesting about this film,
despite the fact that the final confrontation with “Freddy” was, unfortunately, a let down, was how metaphysical and self-reverential the
whole thing was, making this rise high, high above most other entries in this
franchise, and taking it in a whole new direction. It made the actual
filming of this movie imitate the movie itself when Wes Craven added
earthquakes to signify the Freddy demon's attempts to enter our reality coinciding with real earthquakes that were occurring during the actual filming of the movie,
and which Craven actually used in some of the movie for the “aftermath” shots. There are moments in this where they manage
to break through the “fourth wall” and really play with this vivid concept, such
as the dual scene where Heather’s filmic son, playing her real son, almost dies
when he climbs up to the top of a play fort on the playground and tries to
reach his father in heaven, and the follow up scene where Heather visits Wes Craven as he is writing the script, and sees the
entire event having already been dreamed up and written on his computer! Other than the cheesy
final battle with “demon Freddy”, there are quite a few inspired scenes, and not all
of them dealt with the rather ingenious metaphysical aspect of this film. Before the final fight, Freddy here is often downright scary, and a few other inspired elements include the menacing Dr. Heffner or Heather chasing
after her son Dylan on foot in the middle of dangerous highway traffic!
But these kinds of scenes are not what make the movie the best of the franchise, and in fact, without the metaphysical, self-reverential script, there isn't much here beyond the usual slice and dice variety, and is the reason the final battle with Freddy in some otherworldly boiler room is such a letdown. This film tends to really come alive whenever that fourth wall is shattered and it the film skates on the edge of what could be considered "reality." I
loved the part where Heather is speaking with John Saxon, and as they leave her
house, he is suddenly wearing his character’s police uniform from the first
film and calling Heather “Nancy”, and as Heather finds her clothes have changed
to the nightie her character Nancy was wearing in the first movie, and that her house has
changed to the Elm Street house, the demon Freddy starts to enter into the real
world through her bed sheets as he did at the very end of the first film, but he hesitates, as if waiting for her to accept what
is happening, and when she calls John Saxon “Daddy”, like he was to her fictional character in the first
film, that is when this Freddy finally rips through the sheet and comes fully into
“reality”. It turns Freddy from a fictional demon haunting the dreams of fictional characters into something a bit more "real" and attempting to cross over from the fictional world of ideas and characters on page and screen into reality, haunting the very actors, special effects technicians, and the writer/director who first gave him "life." It turns this film into a wholly intelligent undertaking, whereas the most recent attempts were bordering on brain dead! This is pretty fascinating and heady
stuff, especially for the seventh in a horror movie franchise! The ending has Heather confronting the Freddy
demon, saving her son, and making it out of his bed (with shades of both Alice in Wonderland and Hansel and Gretel), falling onto the
floor of his room, battered and bruised, and finding the delivered, finished
script. She reads the last page aloud to her son, which describes how the "character" of the "actress Heather Lagencamp" falls out of her son’s bed, finds the script, and starts
reading it to him, which she, in fact, is doing right now!
I find that to be just so clever!
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| By this point, is she "Heather" or "Nancy"? In the demon Freddy's unreal world, she finds Wes Craven's "New Nightmare" script. |
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