Wes Craven's New Nightmare

The tagline of the film was This time, staying awake won't save you. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7: The Real Story and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7: The Ascension were working titles of the film.

Wes Craven set out to make a deliberately more cerebral film than recent entries to the franchise - which he regarded as cartoonish and not faithful to his original theme. The film was well-received critically, particularly for a film in its genre, but failed to make as big an impression at the box office as any of the previous six films - the United States take was $18m dollars. Several critics have subsequently said that New Nightmare could be regarded as a prelude to the Scream trilogy - both sets of films deal with the idea of bringing horror movies to "real life". Whilst the Scream trilogy appealed to huge audiences, New Nightmare is talked of as a clever project, personal to Craven.

Plot Outline

Of course, we know they're from the dream because this is Freddy we're talking about, but the rest of the movie keeps us guessing by portraying these events as actually happening to people in real life, not just to characters in a movie. After the earthquake, they go about the rest of their day just like we would. Heather's been receiving harassing phone calls from "some deranged fan" acting like Freddy, but they've stopped for the last couple weeks. There have been five earthquakes in that time, and Heather has been having nightmares. Chase leaves to drive a few hours away for a job, the babysitter arrives, and Heather gets picked up in a limo to appear on a talk show. On the set of the talk show, the host starts asking questions about Freddy, "Is he really dead?"

Suddenly, Freddy slices his way through the back of the set! ... Well, actually, no, it's just Robert Englund dressed as Freddy. "Love ya, Babe! Let's do lunch!" he hams it up for the crowd. From here on, Heather's week goes from bad to worse. She learns Craven has been writing a "New Nightmare" script, and gets offered a part in it, which she turns down. When she gets home, her son has some sort of episode during which he warns her in a voice not his own, "Never sleep again!" When she asks Chase to come home immediately for Dylan's sake, Chase falls asleep at the wheel on the way, and dies in a car crash (with a little help from Freddy's claw). Dylan, now also grief stricken, continues acting ever more strangely. When Heather takes him to a hospital, the doctors suspect her of being insane and of abusing him.

She goes to Wes, who also plays himself, for help making sense of what's happening. Craven tells her he doesn't know much more than she does - he dreams a scene or two each night and wakes up and writes them down. He goes on to tell her that in the script he's been writing, Freddy is trying to cross over fully into our reality, but a guardian, a gatekeeper of sorts, bars in his way. He tells Heather, Freddy sees her as that gatekeeper. Nancy defeated Freddy in the first movie, and Heather gave the character of Nancy her strength. Freddy is attacking her at her weakest points, trying to break her down before confronting her. The question is whether she has the courage to play the part of Nancy "one last time". She leaves him as confused as when she arrived.

Finally, Freddy really shows up and Heather's week goes from worse to nightmarish. By removing all her supports and friends, through death or obfuscation, he forces her to accept the role he wants her to play. At the same time, he eviscerates the toy dinosaur Dylan believes has been protecting him and abducts the boy. The final showdown between Freddy and the mother-son duo occurs in a steamy and water logged dreamscape ruin, apparently Freddy's home turf. Even so, the two succeed in killing Freddy and escaping back to the real world. There they find the script of the film Wes has been working on waiting for them! Dylan asks his Mom to read some of it to him, which she does: "We open on an old wooden bench. There's fire and tools, and a man's grimy hands building what's soon revealed as a gleaming set of claws. And the claws are moving now as if awakening from a long and unwanted sleep..."

Review

Overall, if A Nightmare on Elm Street was Wes Craven's senior project in for his bachelor of arts in terror, New Nightmare was his Ph. D. Everything about it speaks not only of his deep passion for mythology and psychology, but also of his mastery of the medium and the genre.

On a technical level, he starts the movie without opening credits and uses a steadicam from there on, lending strength the sense that we're seeing a documentary, not just another slasher flick. On a storytelling level, Craven gives us "real people", trying to live their lives in the face of extreme circumstances most of which we can identify with - earthquakes, death of a loved one, and illness. In the film Freddy is the hidden force behind all these, but that only increases our sympathy for the characters; we've all felt betrayed and overwhelmed by the world at least once in our lives. On an emotional and conceptual level, Craven uses that sympathy to touch that part every person that would like to believe that the painful things that have happened to us were due to something other than random chance. In doing so, he expresses quite clearly his views on violence and evil in stories and films, and also their proper place in our culture.

Sacrificing no one part for any other, he then weaves all these elements together in a manner that lets us see our world from a new perspective. Now, that's great filmmaking.

Trivia