The Fractured Mirror: Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
As befits a former professor (I’m talking a real professor, not a guy who gets ironically nicknamed “Perfesser” by his pals) who made his film debut with a grind house knockoff of an Ingmar Bergman film, Wes Craven is a filmmaker of ideas as well as a man committed to visceral shocks. Craven is a consummate fright master but he’s also an intellectual, even an academic. He’s into scaring people but he’s also interested in understanding what scares us and why.
Craven’s two iconic 1970s classics, Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes are overflowing with social commentary, not all of it coherent or consistent, and in 1994 he returned to the Nightmare On Elm Street series he famously brought to life a decade earlier with both an abundance of new Freddy Krueger set-pieces and heady ideas about the relationship between entertainment and violence, the persistence and nature of evil and the blurring of reality and fantasy.
But Craven’s most audacious ideas involved turning the first Nightmare On Elm Street series he wrote and directed since the original (he has story and screenplay credits on Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors but did not direct) into a meditation on the series itself specifically and horror in general.
Craven audaciously decided to set Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in the film’s version of the “real world.” This is a realm where Wes Craven is the creator of Freddy Krueger, Heather Langenkamp is an actress best known for starring in Nightmare On Elm Street and Robert Englund, in addition to being an urbane painter, is also an actor both beloved and feared for his portrayal of a razor-clawed child murderer.
In the decade between Nightmare On Elm Street and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy Krueger went from being a terrifying figure of pure evil to an unlikely kiddie favorite and camp cut-up equally adept at dismembering teenagers and dispensing wisecracks.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare acknowledges and comments on this strange evolution, or de-evolution, by having protagonist Heather Langenkamp (playing a fictionalized version of herself) reconnect with Freddy Krueger/her old coworker Robert Englund when the horror icon surprises her by showing up in character on a cheesy talk show.
Langenkamp has been having (what else?) nightmares about Freddy ever since she started receiving threatening voice mails from a deranged stalker in a Freddy-like growl but when Englund bounds onstage he’s a figure of pure camp, a costumed goofball mugging up a storm and joking with an audience filled with adoring fans dressed like their demonic hero.
The re-introduction of Freddy in such a lighthearted fashion feels like a tacit admission that the character, like Chucky, has lost much of what made it frightening in the first place, and now hews closer to camp comedy than genuine terror. With that in mind, Craven has self-consciously upgraded Freddy Krueger. There are even moments when the film takes a brief break to pat itself on the back for making him “more evil” (though, to be fair, as a child murderer who continued killing people after being killed, he’s already pretty damn evil) than in previous installments.
The film opens, appropriately enough, with an unseen person making what appears to be Freddy’s iconic glove. We’re led to believe this is a look back at a core element of Krueger’s blood-soaked mythology: the construction of the murder device that launched a thousand nightmares. But this is a different kind of Nightmare, so it is soon revealed that the glove is being built not by a sadistic, deeply burned child killer but by a special effects team that includes Langenkamp’s real-life husband, who has been recruited to help build a newer, scarier Freddy partially as a way of convincing his wife and the mother of their spooky son Dylan (Miko Hughes) to return to the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise.
Langenkamp is reluctant to return to a series that has penetrated her subconscious in such dark and disturbing ways until she watches in horror as the people closest to her begin dying in ways that strongly suggest that the guilty party is some manner of razor-clawed undead monster from beyond. Yes, Langenkamp begins suspecting that Freddy has somehow managed to escape his world and become a real-life bogeyman when the Nightmare On Elm Street series, which otherwise contained him within a fictional world, ended, affording him an opportunity to break out into our world and add some real-life souls to his formidable body count.
Craven has amusingly written himself as a weirdo whose bizarre statements and crazy ideas frighten Englund. Craven does not have a great deal of screen time. It’s safe to assume that he did not write the film as an acting vehicle but he does burden himself with having to deliver the exposition establishing the film’s nutty yet intriguing premise. That premise holds that Freddy has escaped his world and will enter ours and wreak havoc unless Heather Langenkamp acts as a gate-keeper and single-handedly prevents this evil from being unleashed.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is so audacious and risky that it’s an incredible achievement that the film works at all. In lesser hands, this easily could have been a hopelessly confused train wreck filled with unintentional laughs. It’s the kind of film that requires the real-life president of New Line Films, Robert Shaye, to portray himself onscreen trying to convince Langenkamp to return to the studio using the lines like, “I guess evil never dies, right?” I’m not sure anyone could deliver the line, “I guess evil never dies, right?” naturally, particularly a non-actor like Shaye.
If Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is distractingly clunky at times, a regular problem with Craven’s films, it does a fine job of establishing an atmosphere of perpetual low-level menace, where everything is at least a little off in a way that suggests that everything could be a dream, or pure fantasy.
Langenkamp’s performance can be uneven, in part because she’s asked to play herself, which is never an easy task, especially when you don’t have a persona or public image to play off of, but Craven smartly and subtly conveys that for women, and particularly for actresses, the world is full of threats and creeps even if you’re not being menaced by Freddy Krueger.
Similarly, Langenkamp’s terror over the prospect that her spooky child will become one of Freddy’s victims taps into every parent’s fear that at some point they will not know their children, that they will change in scary ways that will separate them permanently. It plays to our fear that our children may both become the prey of monsters and monsters themselves.
Craven returned to the franchise because he had a lot of bold ideas for shaking things up but he also clearly relished the challenge of creating new and horrifying tableaus for his most famous monster. Sure, the nightmare lair Freddy pulls Heather into looks more than a little like a Freddy-themed section of a Haunted House, but Nightmare manages a surprising number of genuine shocks and scares and the new look Freddy, more muscular and intense and also hatless, helps the character at least temporarily escape his destiny as a campy horror goofball.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare doesn’t always work, but it works far better than it should. It’s at once a continuation of the series from a man who understands the character better than anyone else full of classic Freddy moments, and an ambitious and mostly successful attempt to break new ground.
So perhaps it’s best to see this fascinating, flawed meta-spook-fest primarily as a warm-up for a more important and accomplished movie Craven would direct just a few years later, a film that would define the horror of its decade just as thoroughly as Nightmare On Elm Street defined the 1980s and Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes did the 1970s. The film was a zeitgeist-shifting blockbuster called Scream and, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, it explored the intersection of real-life violence and movie bloodshed. Unlike Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, it was so popular and so influential that its aftereffects are still being felt throughout the horror spectrum, and outside it.
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