The "Nightmare on Elm Street" Franchise

[StevePulaski]

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Directed by: Wes Craven

The iconic image from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Rating: ★★★

Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street has become a quintessential genre classic; when people reference the "good ol' days" of horror or the slasher film, they generally have both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street in mind. Not much can be said about the classic film that hasn't already been said before, aside from the fact that this remains one of the most fundamental genre films of its time and its impact as a film is still widely felt today like the waves of an aftershock. It's one of those horror films that you don't need to put in context of the times because it's so legitimately good and scary that it scares you anyway.

We open in the midst of Nancy Thompson's (Heather Langenkamp) nightmare, where she is haunted by a figure wearing a red and green striped sweater, a fedora hat, and a hand made up of razors. She wakes up shell-shocked and informs her friends Tina (Amanda Wyss), Rod (Nick Corri), and Glen (Johnny Depp) about the nightmare, to which nobody but Tina seems immediately convinced, for she had a similar nightmare that same night. After a while, the gang brushes it off in favor of a sleepover at Tina's house, which ends in tragedy as Tina is brutally murdered in her sleep upon elevating from her bed and being viciously attacked by an unseen force. Because Rod, her boyfriend, slept with her that night, he is taken into custody and Nancy and Glen are left to confront what exactly is haunting them and how to stop it.

The actual haunting comes from a demon named Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a savage character that seems to be extracted from the bowels of your most sinister nightmare. His methods are dastardly original, for he haunts victims in their dreams and daydreams, before murdering them in their sleep, where they'll subsequently die in real life, as well. Wes Craven, who also wrote the film, makes Freddy so quietly ingenuous you might miss the reason why he's such an unexpected villain. Sleeping is when we, as humans, are at our most vulnerable, taken out of our environment temporarily in favor of a night's refreshment to "recharge our batteries," so to speak colloquially, for the next day. With that, we cannot consciously control what and who we dream of, so Freddy shows up in our dreams in order to snatch us at our most vulnerable and make us not see another day. We can't defend ourselves, nor can we adequately predict what will happen.

While Jason Voorhees, who predated Freddy a good four years to the point where he was already finding a new batch of impressionable youth to kill for the fourth time before his genre-counterpart decided to show up, could attack youth when their hormones and sexual energy were at its peak, Freddy attacked his victims during a time when they should've felt safety. With that, Craven emphasizes this realm of the dream-world by merging the likes of reality and dreams together, successfully blurring the line not only to confuse the characters in the film, but us, as well.

None of this would be possible if the cast weren't as strong as they were, and save for some cheesiness in line delivery, most of the cast is strong here, particularly Langenkamp, who I would've loved to see take on varying roles aside from just horror films. The film also features the first on-screen performance by Johnny Depp, who gives one of his only human, everyman roles here in the face of grave danger.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is often buoyed by a wonderful sense of suspense on part of Craven and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin, who do a fine job at not only blurring lines of reality, but creating a film that essentially bleeds creepiness, figuratively and literally. This is a downright spooky film, giving off the vibes of a demented haunted house, where at any moment a character will slip into an unforeseeable abyss and be scarfed up by demons like a piece of meat fed to hungry, feral savages. It's a film that manages to be occasionally gruesome without every being artistically empty or even an ugly piece of film; it's constantly enjoyable and a strong film in terms of its narrative structure.

The only trouble, seeing past the cloud of nostalgia that often cloaks this film, is that the slowburn technique that Craven clearly tries to employ here sort of interrupts itself early in the second act, where we see a bit too much of Freddy, to the point where Nancy decides to engage in a fight with him. This feels like a case of "climax come lately," where what could pragmatically be the conclusion to the film comes far earlier than expected and is instead used as a vehicle for the plot halfway through. Craven would've done better to keep Freddy a more abstract figure up until the end, focusing on his trademarks before revealing the final, hair-raising product. The scene where Freddy and Nancy face off in a dream feels like it happens far too soon and throws off Craven's methodical buildup.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, through whatever flaw I try to accuse it of having, is still an indisputable masterpiece of the genre, destined to live on no matter how many sequels, remakes, reboots, or licensed products leach off of it. Much like The Hills Have Eyes, Craven's earlier work, this is a film that does a wonderful job at personifying fear, although while the former film gave us a taste of personified fear in an unfamiliar location, this particular film gives us a taste of unbridled fear at our most vulnerable. Sleep tight.

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, and Amanda Wyss. Directed by: Wes Craven.

[StevePulaski]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Directed by: Jack Sholder

Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) returns to terrorize a teenager named Jesse (Mark Patton) this time in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.

Rating: ★★

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge comes as a surprise for anyone expecting the series to keep with its reality-bending, surrealist brand of horror that Wes Craven pioneered for the first film. However, little did people know at the time of its release, this is the film that would hereby kickoff a series of sequels to the classic 1984 film by playing "musical directors," with New Line Cinema acquiring new directors and writers to to etch their own sort of spin on Craven's classic, dream-haunter.

Out of all the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, the first one has a chance at being the most substantial one in the regard that the subtext is more interesting than anything in the way of character relations or legitimate scares. In addition, it also may be the slowest eighty-two minute film I've ever watched, taking its time building up its situation in a way that doesn't feel like the slowburn pacing Craven used for the first film as much as it feels like being just plain slow.

The story revolves around Jesse (Mark Patton), who has been waking up soaked in his own sweat for the past several weeks, worrying his family and his best friend Lisa (Kim Myers). Little does anyone, let alone Jesse, know that he is being haunted by Freddy Krueger, the same demon who terrorized Nancy and her friends in the previous film. The shakeup to the story this time around is that Freddy doesn't exactly haunt his victims in their sleep as much as he serves as a repressed identity or sensation - or like a closeted skeleton, ambiguity intended - for Jesse. The repressed identity in question is homosexual and the gay subtext is so blatant in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 that you could probably watch the film with the sound off and probably get it. Jesse now has the choice to confront the metaphorical and physical demon inside of him as he slowly eats away at his confidence and his mental health throughout the course of the film.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 gets considerable subversive points for being a film that dared to feature a significant level of homoeroticism - including a scene in an S&M bar as well as a clearly homosexual murder - in a narrative where you'd least expect. If nothing else, this is where Freddy became less a nightmarish boogeyman that just seemed to appear in one's head out of nowhere and more a metaphorical albatross that contributed to the slow and painful deterioration of a young person over time.

Director Jack Sholder and writer David Chaskin do all they can to give this gay subtext weight, and the film largely remains interesting for that one idea. To boot, Chaskin infuses one of the best scenes of the franchise, which is the opening sequence here, taking place on your average school bus ride through a typical suburban neighborhood. The nonchalant, unassuming nature of the film that slowly descends into a dimly lit, grim suburban nightmare is the perfect visual representation for the series itself, and cinematographers Jacques Haitkin and Christopher Tufty make this scene's escalation slow and delightfully unexpected.

Through all the unexpectedness that Sholder and Chaskin manage to create, they do, however, forget the most fundamental inclusion to the narrative that, if anything, is the most expected and that's making this a horror film. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is so depressingly mild and largely devoid of scares that it makes everything else questionable as a result. There's no validity to the suspense, nor the immersive buildup here that was in the first film, so what entails is a film that has a real identity crisis in terms of whether or not it caters to substance or caters to its genre.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge pleasantly takes the series in a different, deeper direction, but its lack of scares and sudden change of rules as to how and why Freddy haunts his victims is a bit jarring, especially when Freddy is such a non-character in his own film.

Starring: Mark Patton Kim Myers, Robert Englund, and Robert Rusler. Directed by: Jack Sholder.

[StevePulaski]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Directed by: Chuck Russell

Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

Rating: ★★★

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a more complete and well-paced film than both of its predecessors, much more consistent in its narrative and its creation of the laws by which Freddy Krueger abides. The first Nightmare on Elm Street focused on a setting that was largely eerie and a slowburn narrative approach whilst the second film largely abandoned the logic of the previous film and had Freddy serve as a metaphor for an insecure, homosexual teen's repressed side. The third installment in the franchise continues playing "musical directors and writers," switching up who occupies the director's chair and who holds the pen, for the better, this time allowing Chuck Russell to direct and a quartet of writers - among them the series' original creator Wes Craven and The Shawshank Redemption writer/director Frank Darabont - who finally emphasize the fear and vulnerability that Freddy places on each of his victims.

Our new troubled protagonist is Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette), who is haunted by the burnt-faced, sweater-clad figure Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in her dreams, much to the dismay of her mother. Following an instance of alleged self-harm, however inflicted by Freddy while Kristen was in her sleep, Kristen is taken to a mental hospital, where she meets a slew of other troubled souls her own age: Philip (Bradley Gregg), a marionette puppeteer, Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), a short-fuzed, humorous loudmouth, Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow), an aspiring actress, Taryn (Jennifer Rubin), a recovering drug addict, Joey (Rodney Eastman), who has taken a vow of silence due to the terror his nightmares have given him, and Will (Ira Heiden), who is wheelchair bound following a failed suicide attempt.

The curious thing about these teens is all of them were haunted by dreams of Freddy before ever having met each other. As a result, they are counseled by Dr. Nancy Thompson (Heather Lagenkamp), who was haunted by prolific nightmares on Freddy in the first film. The film revolves around the teens being imprisoned, not only by a mental hospital and the faculty who don't take them seriously, everyone except for Nancy, in addition to being held captive their dreams and recurring nightmares. The rules of Freddy's game have reverted back to the rules of the first film that were abandoned and stretched in the second installment: if you die in your dreams, you, in turn, die in real life.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 has a plethora of interesting characters, even more-so than the original film. These characters carry personality and their frequent group meetings, where they talk about the previous events of the day and, specifically, their nightmares, further develop them as more than just young, fresh faces soon to be victims in a horror film. Their personalities shine through brightly and the screenwriters etch enough of a balance between comedy and humanity in these characters to make their deaths actually send meaningful pangs of shock and disappointment through the audience.

This installment is also the point in the series where the dream sequences started to get much more elaborate and realized, in return, making them creepier and more effective. The specials effects give the feeling of being trapped within the endless boundaries of a frightening and unrelenting lucid dream, and Freddy remains a universally frightening presence that manipulates and slowly takes over. He doesn't work too fast in terms of killing his victims, nor does he spout endless quips and pop culture punchlines as if he's a standup comedian. He's pure, unadulterated evil, and the fantastic, decorated dream settings give him all the power and make us feel just as helpless as the innocent souls on screen.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is a lot of fun as a horror movie, not too self-serious or meta to be taken seriously, nor too bleak and dreary to be considered monotonous or uninteresting after an extended period of time. It reinvigorates the franchise with a commendable amount of emphasis on scares and set-decoration after a film that was too concerned with forming a metaphor and rejecting the fundamental rules of the series' newly instated playbook. We go back to the basics with Dream Warriors in a way that sets everything up anew in a thoroughly entertaining manner.

Starring: Patricia Arquette, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Larry Fishburne, Bradley Gregg, Ken Sagoes, Penelope Sudrow, Jennifer Rubin, Rodney Eastman, and Ira Heiden. Directed by: Chuck Russell.

[StevePulaski]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Directed by: Renny Harlin

Rating: ★★

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is the point in the franchise where comedy began to eclipse the franchise's almost unbridled devotion to horror sensibilities. It was the film that turned Freddy Krueger into a pop culture figure, capable of regurgitating every lackluster pun imaginable like an MTV VJ rather than a horror figure you'd hate to see in your nightmares. Finally, it was the film to bear the franchise's peak budget, showing it off by including very elaborate and immaculately detailed dream sequences that toyed with the perception of reality in a manner so believable that you swore you were being haunted yourself. It's safe to say that the series most expensive installment also turned out to be its most divisive and revolutionary.

The story picks up on characters from Dream Warriors, the previous installment, such as Kristen (Tuesday Knight), Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), and Joey (Rodney Eastman), all of whom have been released from the mental hospital that confined them for the past months and back into the public school system and their normal homes. Kristen winds up reacquainting her friend Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and her boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones), and is enjoying living her normal life until she realizes that dreaming of, or even expressing paranoia over, Freddy Krueger, the burned-faced, sweater-clad killer that haunted them before, could potentially make him return. When Freddy (Robert Englund, the only constant in this series, so it seems) winds up returning to haunt the victims in his dreams, the focus lies in Alice, as she's the most ignorant of Freddy's ways.

Consistency has long been a problem with this franchise and The Dream Master shows a refusal for it to accept any kind of remote pattern. Because of the constant directorial and screenwriting shakeups, and Craven's varying and largely debatable involvement with each individual film, little in the way of tonal or narrative cohesion could be retained. The overall scope and reach of the Freddy Krueger character got hazy with the second film and found itself resorting back into the laws of the first film, with no acknowledgement of the second film other than a vague, ambiguous line of dialog from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The Dream Master's refusal to assert itself by accepting the emphasis on fear and vulnerability ideas from the first and third film or the metaphorical significance of the Freddy Krueger character is evident by the film's emphasis on comedy from what was previously the franchise's main source for terror.

Being that The Dream Master is the most expensive film from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, one can see where director Renny Harlin and his set/production designers wanted to put their emphases - the dream sequences. To the film's credit, the dream sequences are the most elaborate and well-conceived dream sequences the franchise has yet to see, even more-so believable and immersive than in Dream Warriors. Consider the scene where Kincaid is trapped in a nightmarish junkyard that molds and crafts itself at what is ostensibly the snap of Freddy's fingers, effectively trapping him in a sea of broken-down cars that is revealed to be a lot bigger in scope than we could've imagined. The scene works beautifully because it focuses on the core idea of being trapped in a dream lucid enough for you to actively move around and possess your own decision-making skills but not lucid enough where you can control the dream. The result is especially terrifying and this is one of the few dream sequences where Freddy is mostly serious.

The remainder of the dream scenes only get more decorated in appearance, and continue to live up to this first major one in size and scope. The problem is, with each sequence, Freddy gets less and less convincing. Writers Brian Helgeland (who would go on to direct Oscar-nominated screenplays for films like L.A. Confidential and Mystic River) and Scott Pierce turn Freddy into a pun/quip machine, who seems to always be in search for the next cheeky line to say rather than anything that provokes a kind of uneasiness for the audience. This desecration of a frightening character, turning him into a second rate comedian, significantly lessens his effectiveness as a character, especially when we see him command some of the most visually stunning locations he has yet to be apart of in the entire series.

Finally, though it's a relatively minor, almost moot, point, the acting here has noticeably taken a turn for the worst. The Dream Master feels like a lackluster display of amateur-hour, Second City acting, particularly from the likes of Tuesday Knight and Andras Jones, who just do an immensely poor job at being believable screen presences. While acting in horror films is traditionally never the first thing one judges on, when it's so wooden, as it is here, it can't help be a jarring feature, especially when the film itself already isn't particularly good.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 works in the way it decides to further construct and elaborate on the many worlds of which Freddy inhabits, in addition with taking on some seriously twisted and quirky scenes the franchise has never seen before. However, it does a miserable job of sticking to whatever guns the series had drawn at this point by sacrificing scares for cheap quips and capable actors for whomever could fill the part quickly and inexpensively. The result is a film that was evidently rushed on every level that wasn't visual effects or production design.

Starring: Lisa Wilcox, Robert Englund, Tuesday Knight, Andras Jones, Ken Sagoes, and Rodney Eastman. Directed by: Renny Harlin.

[StevePulaski]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Rating: ★★★

I feel a good part of the reason for the prolific inconsistencies in quality for a number of slasher franchises in the 1980's can be attributed to two main factors: the short release window between films and the constant decision to play "musical writers and directors." The demand by studio-heads to spit a new franchised horror film into theaters in or around the fall season was absolutely incredible during this time, and as a result, you got a saturated marketplace that got to see Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers, sometimes all in the same year, leading to a massive lack of interest and concern by the time the franchises decided to conclude. Then there's the element of these films constantly swapping writers and directors at the end of every film; this particular factor is notable for the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, which only had one particular writer/director show up to do a film more than once and that was Wes Craven on both the original and the last film Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

The combination of these two effects lead not only to a rushed quality with each of these Nightmare sequels, which some can overcome but others cannot, and the element of narrative logic and the interworkings of the world being manipulated to fit the differing needs of the respective writers and directors. The road of the Nightmare franchise has been anything but smooth and comfortable and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is the second time the series has effectively pulled itself up from its bootstraps after a slight deviation in quality.

The film reinstates its focus on Alice (Lisa Wilcox), the lead from the previous film, The Dream Master, who is now dating Dan (Danny Hassel) from the original film. After going a long period of time without being haunted by Freddy, Alice finds herself nearly drowning when her shower's drain becomes clogged and begins overflowing with water in the opening sequence of the film. This leads to Alice being absorbed into Freddy Krueger's (Robert Englund) vicious and unpredictable dream world once again, with her lucid abilities still unable to save her except for in the nick of time when she transports back to reality. The dreams of Alice and Dan have taken on much more vivid, almost Gothic/Victorian representations of distorted reality, which eventually lead to Alice becoming pregnant with "the dream child," who is known as Jacob (Whit Hertford) and seen through Alice's visions. Worried about the safety - and sanity - of her child, Alice works, yet again, to try and stop Freddy before he takes a toll on haunting others, including her fragile son.

As stated, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child takes on a brand new stylistic design that director Stephen Hopkins and cinematographer Peter Levy employ with exquisite detail and frightening buildup. The dream sequences carry a much more detailed and lucid vibe, ranking comfortably alongside Dream Warriors, the third film, for the some of the best of the series. The scene where Freddy manipulates Dan's control and perception whilst driving a vehicle all in the matter of a few minutes winds up being a wickedly effective fright in terms of making the audience feel like the entire scene is out of their control. Also intensely effective is the scene where Alice's friend Greta (Erika Anderson) winds up victim to Freddy's games in a violent, brutal way at a dinner party also works to show off the elaborate dream sequence setups in addition to the amalgamation of Freddy's ability to be both a comical and sinister force.

What I formerly saw as a dichotomous approach to Freddy - in a sense where he had to either be unadulterated evil or comical and cheeky - writer Leslie Boehm blends to give us a Freddy we haven't seen before. That is an unpredictable force that exercises both comic and horror tendencies through his ability to spout one-liners and give you the ride of your life in more ways than one whilst trapping you in layered, scary dream sequences that showcase darker imagery than ever before.

On these notes, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child works very well. It disregards the more unbridled, primary comic elements of its former film to continue to assert Freddy's role of being an ugly, menacing character. The story at hand may show signs of the franchise panting and wheezing to an uncertain close, but the costume/set design show that this series had more inventive visual schemes that could've materialized and continued for much longer than the franchise itself did, even in the face of alternative directions and frequently changing writers and directors.

Starring: Lisa Wilcox, Robert Englund, Danny Hassel, Whit Hertford, and Erika Anderson. Directed by: Stephen Hopkins.

[StevePulaski]

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Directed by: Rachel Talalay

Rating: ★★

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare does little else but signify that this was the appropriate time to conclude the long-running franchise, which, at this point, had spanned a good seven years. After every mediocre attempt to reinvigorate the franchise, the series always seemed to be able to catch itself in a way that maintained some level of quality control with each passing installment. After the fifth film took the series in a more Gothic direction, while pleasantly adhering to the laws of the world of which Freddy inhabited, Freddy's Dead can't seem to adequately discern reality from the dream world. What entails is a hybrid of genres that dives head first into supreme campiness and forgoes much of the horror elements to continue with the trend of turning Freddy Krueger into a one-liner machine rather than an effective horror villain.

The story revolves around a character known as "John Doe" (Shon Greenblatt), the last surviving teen in Springwood, where most teens have succumbed to an ugly, nocturnal fate from Freddy. In efforts to try and stop Freddy once and for all, an older psychologist named Maggie (Lisa Zane), who is looking to treat John for amnesia and mental illness, as well as his prolific and lucid nightmares about Freddy Krueger, and her friend Tracy (Lezlie Deane) work to try and enter the realm of Freddy's dreams in order to stop him from the source of his madness - his mind.

The concept of Freddy's Dead loans itself to a lot of introspection for one of the most recognized killers in mainstream horror. The problem lies in the fact that, for one, we don't care about he characters. The previous films saw our connectedness to the characters stemming from the idea that we recognized them as helpless souls victim to the violent, merciless actions of Freddy. We saw them at the mercy of their fragile states of mind, often confined to the four walls of a mental asylum in order to try and maintain some level of sanity. Freddy's Dead robs us of that level of helplessness and fails to provide a compelling alternative, giving us characters with little backstory or detail to them and a pacing that is so slow that it fails to amount to anything.

During the nineties, horror films became far more campy than their seventies and eighties predecessors. Newer horror films, both theatrically released and made exclusively for the direct-to-video market, excessively added the campiness factor to their films. Even franchise titles released during this decade saw a turn far more into cheeky, meta territory. Freddy's Dead is no exception. Its change becomes solidified when, during the film's most absurd scene, Freddy controls Breckin Meyer's slacker Spencer character as he haphazardly wanders through a traditional nineties platform video game via his claw-hand, which has somehow morphed into a Nintendo Power Glove. While doing so, Freddy recites popular Nintendo marketing slogans from the time period, in addition to adding his trademark zingers to the mix, as well.

Scenes like this cut somebody like me off fairly quickly, somebody who admired the sheer helplessness and peril the audience was victim to, much like the helpless characters, in films like Dream Warriors and The Dream Child. Freddy's Dead goes for the cheap laugh, on top of creating a film that, once again, abandons the conventional laws of what Freddy can do and where he can go. Instead of confining him to the dream world, directress Rachel Talalay spins the story in such a way that blurs the line of what's reality and what exists in the dream world, and not in the mindbending way you're expecting from reading that. She does so in a muddled fashion that creates apathy to the point where once the characters are not interesting, the suspense is far too slow and unrewarding to really pay any mind to, and Freddy is more a joker than someone who can legitimately terrorize and haunt you that the film becomes more of a joke laughing at itself.

The film is most known for its 3D end sequence, which I indeed experienced with the now-vintage red/blue, cardboard 3D glasses. The good thing about this sequence is that it makes you grateful that some executive at New Line Cinema refused to greenlight a feature-length 3D Freddy film; even for the time period, this is some of the most atrocious 3D I've yet to see. Normally, when one takes off the cardboard glasses during a 3D movie, they see a distorted picture on the screen that becomes almost incomprehensible with the presence of wavy red/blue outlines around characters and dichotomous color hues taking prominence on screen. Even with the glasses on, this effect remains, effectively making an incoherent picture that made me feel like I was taking an eye exam instead of watching a film. It doesn't matter, however, as the 3D isn't even used for an added layer or sense of depth, but for a cheap gimmick, as we see fiery skulls, Freddy's face, and various kinds of worms propelled in our face for the fourteen-minute sequence.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is a depressing way to conclude such a legendary, indelible franchise, which practically begged that the series needed to be rebooted in some way by its original writer and director. It's a film that's too campy to be scary and true to the themes and approach of its predecessor, and too gimmicky to be of any particular substance. Without Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a seriously underrated and commendable attempt at meta and psychological horror with Craven using his trademark Freddy character to bend reality and fiction in a far more believable and organized way, we could've ended this franchise on a film that is little more than a curious, early-nineties oddity that should be delegated to the back pages of a cult/forgotten cinema catalog.

Starring: Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt, Robert Englund, Lezlie Deane, and Breckin Meyer. Directed by: Rachel Talalay.

[StevePulaski]

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
Directed by: Wes Craven

Freddy Kruger returns in a meta-sense in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Rating: ★★★

Wes Craven's New Nightmare comes as the sixth sequel to the long-running Nightmare on Elm Street franchise but finds itself more functional and ambitious than many franchises that have made it this long do. Infused with a great deal of meta-writing to the point of intrigue, crafty ideas about the effects horror films have on those who make them, and darker, more terrifying portrayals of the film's beloved dream-haunter, New Nightmare revives the franchise that, according to Craven, was beginning to get too off-task with its practices.

By this point, Craven had already expressed frustration over the fact that the character of Freddy Krueger had become far too comical, and the later films were written with far too much silliness, masking the true horror and fright he originally conceived for the series. Freddy had become "cartoonish" and lost his original abilities to frighten audiences as much as taunt them with silly phrases and ubiquity in pop culture. As a result, Craven created New Nightmare to give that life back to the franchise, and he did so in a way that explored a fascination with the concept of "metafilm," or a movie that is referencing beyond the film into the real lives of the actors or to some other, unrelated film universe, as if the characters are wiser beyond their own definitive world.

This fascination with "metafilm" Craven began to toy with would only get further explored in his critically/financially-successful Scream franchise, which was brewed two years after New Nightmare. For now, however, Nightmare concerns itself with Heather Langenkamp, the actress who portrayed Nancy Thompson in the original Nightmare film, as she lives with her husband, who works in special effects, and young son in Los Angeles. Heather has gone onto receive a great deal of recognition for her as Nancy, and learns that Wes Craven is contemplating using her again for his forthcoming Nightmare project, which will further which will, of course, have Robert Englund reprising his role as Freddy Kruger.

In the mix of this, Heather begins experiencing lucid nightmares of her or her family being attacked and assaulted by Freddy and taken as "his children," completely losing sense of reality. This is only furthered by the abundance of earthquakes Los Angeles is experiencing, as well as the constant stress she's under with managing her child and her other projects.

Craven decorates New Nightmare much differently than the previous installments, most notably through the abundance of different costumes Freddy boasts, with one of the most stylish and menacing being a black and blue cloak. In addition, Englund is much less concerned with sloganeering and finding just the right punchline for his character Freddy than returning to the haunting and demonic presence Freddy can truly be. The idea of a figure haunting our dreams and finding ways of sneaking into our reality, distorting it, and leaving it at his mercy is a wickedly frightening idea, and Craven returns to the elements of exploring that idea rather than turning it into black comedy.

New Nightmare can be quite eerie at times, but it also has a pleasantly subtle sense of sass to it, especially when Craven comes on-screen, or when one of Heather's costars tries to but in and help her out. This is where the Scream foundation ostensibly came into play, with Craven experimenting with self-referential humor in such a way that makes the film more interesting and not entirely consumed in its own cheeky ways. Combining these elements, especially in a way meant to evoke humor and make fans of a franchise recall moments from films past, could easily destruct in a big way, but Craven is so smooth with the incorporation of the aforementioned elements that we get the idea he had this idea festering in his mind long before he put the pen to the paper.

Because evident care and thought went into Wes Craven's New Nightmare is likely why it plays like a unique horror film, quietly proposing ideas about those who work in the film industry, specifically making horror films, and what effect such work has on their psyche and their own personal lives. The tone is much more frightening, and given the seriousness and ambition Craven has for the material, the film feels much more sincere in ways the abundance of Nightmare sequels lacked, leaving this to be one of the most unlikely contenders for one of the strongest sequels to a horror film, especially trying something new this late in the game.

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, and Miko Hughes. Directed by: Wes Craven.