Written and directed by Wes Craven
In a sense, New Nightmare has already made its point by the end of its opening scene. Its first images are an almost one-to-one reflection of the first images of 1984's A Nightmare On Elm Street, the first in what was, at the time, a seven film series, and the only other one to actually be directed by Wes Craven; the smaller difference is that Craven's child-killing dreamlord, Fred Krueger, is taking a different tack as regards his iconic clawed glove, having crafted in his hellish furnance-adjacent workshop a full-on cybernetic hand for himself (this appears to be an "origin story," as he has likewise not yet sustained his iconic burns and, accordingly, can't be a vengeful ghost yet). The bigger difference is that the images occupy the whole screen, rather than curiously playing out in miniature while the screen is mostly taken up by credits. In fact, there aren't any opening credits, nor even an opening title, which is a subtle thing, but gets at the idea that New Nightmare is happening in the real world, and the real world does not have itself so reliably announced or tidily categorized. It is, however, also a dream, which is why it's alright that when we learn this is actually a movie set, it will still be edited like a movie, even though those film-starting insert shots probably wouldn't have been filmed simultaneously with the gusher effect of Freddy hacking off his own hand; the important thing, obviously, is identifying movies as dreams, albeit frozen dreams that you can grasp in your hands and that are, at least theoretically, susceptible to conscious control. It's also important that before the dream ends, the Freddy hand has taken on a mind of its own and killed two people and injured another. As for who this dream belongs to—well, it belongs to Freddy. But it's happening in the head of Heather Langenkamp, which is to say, the actress of A Nightmare On Elm Street and A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors fame.
Now, eventually there are the closing credits, with all the information that the law demands. But they conclude with a twist upon the usual disclaimer:
With the exclusion of those courageous individuals who portrayed themselves, any similarity to the name, character or history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Except for the absence of an Oxford comma, that's really cute. A little less cute, I find, is that the forbearing gesture of having no opening credits is more than made up for by Craven's name slathered over the beginning of those closing credits, four times almost in a row, as writer-director, character creator, executive producer, and, of course, in the title itself, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, unmistakably the true full title of the film, and, I admit, earned. (Though my understanding is that New Line did still come to Craven, asking for A Nightmare On Elm Street 7/a replacement Freddy vs. Jason, and he dusted off a pitch they'd once rejected.) But man, that's a lotta Craven. I wouldn't complain except the opening scene does one more important thing, and, honestly, the fact that a first scene is doing so many important things is both great, as a matter of narrative construction, while also being suggestive of New Nightmare's problem, since it's possible that there might not be enough important things left to do for the next 112 minutes of runtime, fully fourteen minutes longer than the next-longest film in the series.
That "last important thing," however, is that while things are going to get scary even before the dream is over—the overt aspect of it, the self-motivating metal hand, is as much a distraction from the point as the point itself—it is, still, a mite goofy, inasmuch as it's still a disembodied mechanical hand scuttling about. But as it's also very similar to the obviously-worst scene in the fourth Nightmare, The Dream Master, wherein Rick is killed by a disembodied glove in an evil dream dojo (which wasn't even its makers' fault!), it's very hard not to read it as Craven all-but-explicitly saying, "hey moron, you liked The Dream Master? Don't you know, you cretin, you imbecile, that there's only one good Nightmare, and yours truly made it?" Later, Craven will write into his own movie, at least once but possibly more than once, a character stating verbatim that "the first one was the best" (even prefacing it with an "of course"). The whole plot of his movie turns on the idea that, in the authoritative opinion of the director of Deadly Friend, all the Nightmare sequels suck—I assume he's exempting Dream Warriors, which he worked on, but didn't write solo or direct, so I don't even know if I'm right—and the literal premise of the movie is that the Nightmare sequels are so bad they're a threat to human sanity and survival. The movie ends with Wes Craven saving the world from these bad sequels; Heather Langenkamp sort of helps.
I somewhat admire the artistic honesty of Craven's belligerence (and New Line's Robert Shaye is certainly a good sport, though the movie can't tell us how, e.g., Rachel Talalay took being personally insulted by someone whose career she helped build). I'm sure I'd find it less grating if I liked New Nightmare more, and I do desperately want to: there are, broadly-speaking, two kinds of metacinema, one basically intended to do film criticism (as Craven did a little later in Scream), and the other intended to grapple, post-modernist-like, with how "reality" itself is only a semi-consistent story we tell ourselves and attempt to tell each other. I generally prefer the latter and its capacity for psychothrills and transcendent-type emotions, and, hypothetically, that's New Nightmare all over. Let's set a baseline here: it's a perfectly fine movie. But I don't think it's as good as it should be, and at least not epochally smart. Maybe it's as simple as seeing the next year's meta-horror, In the Mouth of Madness, long before I ever saw New Nightmare (and that former New Line exec Michael De Luca wrote Madness is the kind of thing that just can't be coincidence, yet it seems like it's never been really investigated beyond people like me casually pointing it out). But we're not exactly dealing with Grant Morrison's last issue of Animal Man or anything, either.
Nonetheless, I was digging New Nightmare on this rewatch, and, looking past the off-putting self-aggrandizement, the long first stretch of it is terrific. So, then: upon awaking from her nightmare, only to find herself in the midst of an earthquake, Heather* also discovers that her husband Chase (David Newsom), a special effects technician, really did get nicked, just like in her dream; she'll later learn his two assistants really didn't show up to work that day, too. (And, for the record, because I bet you also had the reaction, "additional material written by a special effects technician with a wholly justifiable crush on Heather Langenkamp," Langenkamp's actual husband, special effects technician David LeRoy Anderson, was indeed approached. He turned the role down, though I don't know why the name was changed, too. Their marriage, which has persisted till present day through more than their fair share of tragedy, also indicates the special relationship between Langenkamp and Craven, since the couple were essentially introduced to one another by him, at a wrap party for The Serpent and the Rainbow, a movie she wasn't even in.) Well, their son, Dylan (Miko Hughes), has had a nightmare, too, and the shared subjects of their nightmare may have something to do with the fissures that have opened up in the Langenkamp house's walls, with an uncanny resemblance to the wounds Heather knows all too well—or at least her character from A Nightmare On Elm Street, Nancy Thompson, does.
Heather will see those marks again, quite soon, when Chase dies on his way home from a set, a victim of an "accident" instigated when he fell asleep at the wheel. In the meantime, she's learned that Wes has started a new project for New Line, because "he's having nightmares again," and that Chase was even designing a new Freddy glove, much like the one she saw in her dream. And all along, Dylan has been acting strangely—alternating between being afraid of "the mean man" waiting for him at the bottom of the bed and somnambulating through the house and turning on Heather's VHS copy of Nightmare (but never Dream Warriors, though it also feels like one quick route towards not taking Nightmare too seriously is to watch it with your mom Heather Langenkamp doing a running commentary). Heather would like to attribute this to grief, or even to familial mental illness (I'm fairly positive that part's fictitious). Eventually, Wes Craven will tell her point blank what's happening: Freddy was never even "Freddy" until he, Wes, trapped him in that form; for he, or it, is very real, a creature as old as humanity, that exists to murder innocence, that can only be constrained by the stories we tell about it. With the original Nightmare, Wes managed a fitting cage, but the continued exploitation of the franchise, and the watering down of the concept that this occasioned, has weakened the demon's prison, and now it's breaking free. (In practically the only thing that isn't expressly verbalized here, the earthquakes are strongly implied to presage "Freddy's" emergence.) Now Wes has a new script, but he needs Heather—his heroine, his Nancy—to be in one more Nightmare.
Which means, amongst other things, that this is a "sequel" to Craven's original vision for Nightmare, where Nancy beat Freddy, rather than the Nightmare we have, where Nancy unmistakably died (or Dream Warriors, where she died again), while also, oddly enough, sort of the opposite of Craven's preferred original vision for Freddy, which was a tulpa, but is now something more independent. (Plus, I'm just going to throw it out there: Freddy's archenemy was Alice, not Nancy, but Alice only achieved one out of two good movies—and, of course, in Craven's view, zero.) But to start, this is all very good stuff, and done at a remarkably slow boil, such as (along with Mark Irwin's sharp, very 90s-looking, slightly-more-"realist" cinematography) gives this "real" Nightmare a sense of heft, gravity, and human flavor, befitting the much more adult, intellectual complexion that this very unique "slasher flick" is presenting.
Above all, and the biggest reason it's still a good movie, is Langenkamp herself, who in the previous seven years has shaken off the embarrassing performance she gave in Dream Warriors, and not solely by virtue of having grown up; she's simply quite good, from playing strong, non-boilerplate reactions to such big things as "your husband just died," to just the way she reacts to small things like walking into the new New Line offices, no longer the comparatively rinky-dink operation that Langenkamp (or Heather) would remember, which might be the most strikingly subtle in-joke I've ever seen in a movie, to the extent I suspect it's Langenkamp's in-joke and not Craven's. (Craven, by contrast, will do something like the following: despite an obviously-pivotal, motif-establishing scene of Heather reading "Hansel and Gretel" to Dylan, he still has Langenkamp explain aloud to nobody that the trail of sleeping pills Dylan's left behind after his abduction into the dreamworld is analogous to breadcrumbs.)
Langenkamp is naturally giving good Nancy once we get there, and of course the movie requires much slippage between Langenkamp's character Heather and the character Heather (and Langenkamp) played. Something that I thought was fascinating, until Craven drove it into the ground in his apparent disrespect for our intelligence ("so you liked The Dream Master, huh?"), was the deployment of John Saxon, Nancy Thompson's screen dad, not likely a close associate of Langenkamp's, but not so-implausibly a friend, as a subtly paternal figure, comforting her at her husband's funeral in lieu of the evidently non-existent Robert and Alice Langenkamp (also in attendance: Tuesday Knight in lieu of Patricia Arquette, and I think I approve of the weirdness of that); Saxon's deployment, however, is not "subtle" by the end, and I don't think we'd necessarily want that, but there's not much between the beginning and the end of his participation, just this gearshift from "John, my buddy and confidante" to "Donald Thompson, my daddy." Would it be churlish to point out he also died in Dream Warriors?
The missing middle is where New Nightmare hits its problems, and once Heather confronts Wes, not so deep into things, the movie simply doesn't know exactly what to fill its time with, because at this point it has already achieved its purpose, basically telling you outright, "maybe you don't like scary movies, maybe you even want to do away with them, but you don't understand, because the horror tradition that I, Wes Craven, am propounding here—from Nightmare all the way back into our earliest folklore—serves the crucial function of allowing us to confront all the darkness out there in the world, and within ourselves, on safe ground. Or at least safer ground, because if you remove the story, there's whatever 'Freddy' really is beneath, and that can only be worse." And I agree with you. Now what?
Well, the "now what" Craven offers is a third act (almost second half) that's just a Nightmare On Elm Street movie, and a subpar one on those merits, which hopes that Nancy/Heather finding a script in Freddy's boiler dimension—indicating that we must be currently watching the movie that Wes made, whoa—is a powerful enough concept to get past how it's otherwise not original, or scary, or even that well-made. David Miller's renovated Freddy makeup is just awful, for one thing, more "18th century anatomical study of a goblin" than "the burn-scarred clown that Wes explicitly told us the demon has come to enjoy being" (the coat that's now part of his costume isn't necessarily bad, but baffling); the intermingling of Heather's "reality" and the increasingly-violent, Nightmare '84-style campaign of bed-related terrors had been scary, but the startlingly awkward staging of the finale isn't (and the tongue thing would've been bad in, like, Freddy's Dead), and while the third act has some good notions, a lot of it really is just Freddy Takes L.A., and not imaginatively at that, plus the post-Batman pomp of J. Peter Robinson's orchestral score that isn't doing nearly enough with 80s Nightmare cues to make it feel like it's an active partner in Heather's reality collapse.
Craven, likewise, clearly wanted to pull back on the baroque fantasy horror of the disfavored sequels, including the one he co-wrote, but that impulse only translates into the burliest kill in New Nightmare being a "play the hits" re-do of Tina's end in Nightmare '84, now with Dylan's babysitter Julie (Tracy Middendorf) dying on the ceiling of a hospital room at a significantly reduced level of horror. (And the hospital subplot eats up a lot of screentime for what it accomplishes, which is virtually nothing, mainly just a weird quasi-conservative streak coming out in the form of Dylan's doctor (Fran Bennett), a caricature of baby-snatching liberal technocrats. It's also where I'll wonder if Langenkamp can stand to watch this movie anymore: the movie incorporates enough of Langenkamp's real life troubles to play with the idea of the stalker that harassed her for years—I've sometimes seen it reported he was a fan of Just the Ten of Us, not Nightmare, though here he's definitely a Freddyhead, and probably just actually Freddy—but while I can't imagine she had so much as a premonition of it in 1994, there's some truly upsetting resonance to New Nightmare now since her actual son's death, only in his 20s, from brain cancer.)
What New Nightmare does not do, however, is really much of anything with the rest of its cast; along with Craven, Robert Englund is naturally on hand as himself as well as Freddy (the most frightful thing in the movie, in fact, is Heather's fuguelike appreciation of the scene as Englund plays "Funny" Freddy to a crowd of fans at a morning talk show), and while there's some early indications that Robert, this Phil Collins-looking mellow fellow, will have some role to play, Craven evicts him from the movie before he can amount to anything, so that besides the basic facts of Craven foisting that makeup upon him and channeling Englund's Freddy performance into overcorrecting, unsmiling grimness, this movie about "Freddy Krueger, the concept" boasts virtually no input from the one actual constant in Freddy's existence. (Simultaneously, it patently shifts its goals as a horror movie, too: before Robert stops being in the movie, there's a distinct sense that Freddy is attacking New Nightmare itself, to sabotage Wes's plan; by the halfway mark, he's attacking Dylan just because that's what Freddies do, and if that's sort-of the point of Wes's in-universe screenplay/binding spell, I've never felt like this shift was intentional, graceful, or good.)
Wes is scarcely more fully-used, which is the only way Craven seems remotely aware of such a thing as humility, so of course it's misapplied. Heather talks to Robert, Heather talks to Wes, and it points to the shortcomings of the film that there isn't a single scene with all three (let alone all four) of them. It's like the opposite of The Dream Child: that movie, terrified, fled from its idea, and tried to compensate by throwing tons of movie at us (however clumsily) as a distraction; New Nightmare has a big, brash idea, and, despite its runtime, not really a whole lot of movie to put it in. I guess I prefer the latter, but ultimately the meta-movie's not even meta enough when meta's all it's ever got.
Score: 6/10
*Given names for characters here, surnames for real people outside the movie, obviously.
Spot on review. I always thought they missed a big opportunity not having a "Freddy vs. Robert Englund" set piece. Also it would've been fun if Freddy managed to kill Wes himself!
ReplyDeleteNot trying to ruin your thesis or anything but I recall reading somewhere that Wes Craven actually quite liked The Dream Master, lol.
:[ It would ruin my thesis, at least that part of it, inasmuch as I'd have a substantially harder time feeling personally offended on behalf of The Dream Child. But it wouldn't ruin it too much, given that Wes Craven has Wes Craven more-or-less literally say the sequels weren't good enough for Freddy Krueger, so whether he meant all of them are terrible, or he just meant some, there's clearly some level of shade that attaches to the whole bunch.
DeleteAs for Englund, it's just... so bizarre, I'm surprised I never see it brought up. If Wes needs Heather to be Nancy to bind "Freddy" into a story, then doesn't he by necessity need Robert? If so, should Robert be part of the meta-story? A little? Just anything that gives Englund something to act with and be a real presence in the movie rather than, essentially, a cameo-as-himself.