31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 20 (Wes Craven's New Nightmare)

What if we had ideas that could think for themselves?
What if, one day, our dreams no longer needed us?

Wow. Holy fuck. I almost regret not doing this one last year. I guess I didn't want to load up on Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Still, we did get our Wes Craven on pretty good with two of his films. Nightmare On Elm Street was a real cool and heady slasher film with lots of thoughts on the nature of dreams and reality and all of that. Scream was this weirdly meta thing that brought slashers back into the mainstream, creating utterly reprehensible and petty villains in its own right. In between we have this movie, Wes Craven's grand return to his original creation. I've skipped over 5 whole other films to get right here, but I didn't when I first marathoned all of these in college. At the time I remember it being a totally jarring shock. The first few films were scary in their own right, but they veered more and more into camp with Freddy giving one-liners and ironic dream kills and all of that. Then Wes Craven hops right back in and makes it scary again and it's like a bucket of cold water. There's a lot more to this one than just moving the tone back to straight horror rather than horror-comedy, and it sets it apart from plenty of other horror films. I really dig it, so let's examine that for a moment. This is Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and it's brilliant.


It's metafiction, okay? That's the gimmick, the trick. All the actors are "playing" themselves and it's set in the actual Real World. This movie is imaginary gossip about real people, and Freddy Krueger is haunting Heather Langenkamp as Heather Langenkamp, The Real Actress. Bad shit is going down, earthquakes are happening all the goddamn time in LA, people around Heather are dying. Robert Englund as Robert Englund, The Real Actor, is haunted by nightmares of Freddy. Freddy is a monster, but behind all that makeup is an ordinary guy. Even he is being plagued by these visions. All of this is somehow down to Wes Craven as Wes Craven, The Creative Type, who has been using his own bad dreams as inspiration for a new Nightmare On Elm Street film. Freddy, as it turns out, is simply an ancient godlike thing which preys on bad dreams and murders innocence. This reckless Idea was bound and chained, first by Wes's own Creativity in making Freddy Krueger to contain it, then by all of the sequels and whatnot keeping Freddy as a constant idea in the public eye. Then, oops. Freddy's Dead. The franchise is over, and the rogue Idea has been set free and now wishes to enter our world... and it's gotten used to its Freddy form so it's using those same ideas. Heather Langenkamp, as Nancy Thompson, defeated him in the fiction of 1984... and the Freddy-Idea has to kill her now to gain form because Heather gave Nancy that strength. Quite frankly, this is all pretty goddamned genius; especially that last bit. Fiction has the power to inspire and strengthen us in reality, so what about the reverse? Nancy Thompson, a character existing only on the page, was given strength and form by Heather Langenkamp in 1984. It's exactly this strength that the Freddy-Idea wants to get at; killing Heather will grant him the strength of reality and make him Real. We're haunted by specters of the original film, and then after 90 minutes of terror comes our climax. Freddy-Idea has Heather's son in the dream world, and Heather must follow. The world bleeds, and Heather's soon back on Elm Street in her pajamas. Dreams are just fictions you have while sleeping, and as Freddy is half fictional and half real now? Heather becomes the same.


It's Heather's son who ends up being a key to all of this. He's protected himself from Freddy-Idea by putting his stuffed dinosaur on guard duty at the foot of his bed. Once removed from it later in the film and forced to sleep, all hell breaks loose in an invocation of Tina's death from the first film. Still, the fact that this keeps Freddy-Idea at bay is interesting; this early on, when Freddy-Idea is still mostly fictional, a child's imagination is enough to block him. In Dylan's dreams, Rex would not be just stuffed but a ferocious T-Rex from a bygone age. The final battle takes place in some sort of gothic hell with water and columns and flames everywhere, and Freddy-Idea stalking. Watching Heather fight him is oddly satisfying; this isn't some Final Girl situation, but a Real Actress who's had enough of this sentient idea shit and is fighting for her very life. There's more invocation of the original with quicksand stairs, but the end of Freddy-Idea comes with the use of another idea. Put simply, Heather and Dylan pull a Hansel and Gretel and knock Freddy-Idea's ass into a hot oven. Fiction defeats fiction, but more than that... the original Freddy was born from dying in a fire and swearing vengeance. That Freddy-Idea should die from fire in this form is some form of equivalent exchange. We end, then, on Heather reading the script to her son. This movie, not to put too fine a point on it, is brilliant. The idea of reality inspiring fiction and fiction inspiring reality has been on my mind as of late, but by god if this movie doesn't run with it and do well. It would be the last Freddy film for a while, but the evil was defeated. Even Freddy vs. Jason sort of ran with this, with Freddy having to use Jason's renown to build up his own mythic status again to manifest as a fully-formed slasher. It makes a perfect bookend to the original films, and goddamn if I don't like what Wes Craven was going for with this and Scream. This was a man who had real passion for the slasher genre, and wanted to really examine what made it tick. I've nothing but respect for what he did, and I'm proud I have the Blu-Ray of this sitting on the shelf.


Wes Craven may be gone, but Wes Craven-Idea will remain with us for a long while yet.