Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Wes Craven – 1994 – USA

    

After four or five sequels – (all directed by others) – to his original landmark horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven returned to the series ten years later to re-focus it on the issues that led him to write it in the first place.  While the franchise mostly deteriorated into gory silliness, Craven was much more concerned with psychological and anthropological trends regarding fear, nightmares and more specifically, the function of storytelling in human culture.  As campfire tales evolved into the movies, Craven argues, relaying stories, especially scary stories, serves to keep horror somewhat under control.  Therefore if you deliberately stop the storytelling, those horrors erupt in other ways beyond the confines of books and movies.  Heather Langenkamp, heroine of the original film, plays a version of herself, dealing with the legacy of having helped create and destroy the famous boogeyman Freddy Kruger.  She’s experiences nightmares and other strange things; like her young son being harassed by Kruger in both dreaming and waking life.  Freddy actor Robert Englund and director Craven make cameos as themselves as it is gradually revealed that Craven is writing a new Freddy movie as a means of containing the character, who in turns out is merely a fresh manifestation of a much more ancient evil.  As an exercise in aggressive post-modern self-awareness, the film is clearly a dry-run for Craven’s next career-boosting film, the mega-hit Scream (1996), which spawned its own franchise, except this time one that he maintained control of through its (to date) three sequels.