In preparation for making New Nightmare, director and writer Wes Craven sat down and watched all the previous Nightmare on Elm Street films. Apparently by the time he had finished, he claimed he just could not follow the storyline at all. After attempting to reconcile the plot of Freddy's Dead to the rest of the franchise yesterday, I think I know how he felt. Craven, of course, went back to an idea he'd had all the way back in 1987 while Dream Warriors was being made - breaking down the 4th wall and having Freddy Krueger trying to break through from the "film" world into the "real" world.
It's the 10th anniversary of the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie and Heather Langenkamp, now married and with a young son, Dylan, is doing publicity connected with that. Heather is stressed, however; there've been a lot of earthquakes lately, she's got a stalker who likes to sing the movie's children's rhyme down the phone at her in a Freddy Krueger voice, and she's not sleeping very well - and when she does sleep, she tends to dream about a creepy animatronic Freddy hand that goes bezerk on a set and starts slicing crew members up of its own accord. Then she gets asked by producer Robert Shaye and Wes Craven himself to star in a new movie. Craven's been having nightmares again, and he'e writing his new script based on them - and he needs Heather to return and play Nancy again against Freddy one last time. As things develop, the lines between fantasy and reality start to get very blurred indeed, as Heather begins to realise that the very evil behind the concept of Freddy Krueger is real and wants to escape into the real world to carry on where the films left off.
Obviously, New Nightmare is a very meta film, jumping between the idea of the "film" world and the "real" world with gay abandon (don't try to think too hard about where that leaves those of us watching the film or you're liable to make something go 'pop' in your brain). It plays with some of the ideas of horror film rules and customs that Craven would come back to a few years later with his postmodern hit Scream, but takes them in a different direction to where the latter film would end up. Here the lines between the story and Heather's "reality" become more and more blurred as the film progresses, until at the end where she "becomes" Nancy one last time to finally face down and defeat the Krueger-demon once and for all. Heather is, of course, aware that she's not actually Nancy, but the story doesn't care, and as it's in control it just shapes everything around her so as to make her play the role whether she wants to or not. It does this quite slowly at first, in ways that one wouldn't even notice (when things start falling apart for Heather, the first person she goes to for support and advice is the man who played her on-screen father, John Saxon, rather than any of her own family), but then gradually ramps it up - "Screw your pass," and one character's death mirroring a death from the original film being two examples before the end, where Heather finds herself dressed in Nancy's pyjamas once more, outside the house at 1428 Elm Street. It's never made entirely clear whether Wes Craven is seeing all of these events in his dreams as premonitions, or if his dreaming these events is actively writing them into existance, but either way it's clear that it's out of his control.
The concept of fairy tales is also strongly threaded through the story, specifically the story of Hansel and Gretel that Heather reads to her son through the movie. The whole story, in fact, can be seen as one dark fairy tale, complete with the Krueger-demon as the wicked witch, who needs to be defeated once and for all so that everyone can live happily ever after. I also personally liked the idea of the toy dinosaur as Dylan's "dream guard", as I had a similar setup when I was a child (although in a strange piece of lateral thinking, I imagined that Freddy Krueger himself guarded my dreams, figuring that there was going to be few people better to deal with nightmares than him. I'm fully aware that my childhood was strange.)
If there are any real complaints about the film, it's that it maybe feels a little too long in parts, particularly in the hospital scenes (yes, we get it, they're being dicks!) New Nightmare also has the lowest body count of the entire series, with a grand total of two on-screen deaths, which might well put off the more gore-hungry. Overall though, its willingness to play with the meta and take a risk with the storytelling as it does pays off and makes it one of the more enjoyable (if occasionally confusing) entries in the series.
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