Sweet Dreams: Wes Craven's New Nightmare!!!

RIP based spoopy movie man.

You could be forgiven for tuning out (of life) after Freddy's Dead, and audiences at the time did (the first part), leaving Wes Craven's return to the series he created to underperform at the box office. That's a pity, because against all reasonable expectations the seventh Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best in the series and a perfect way to wrap things up and go out on a high. Faced with the reality of a series that had devoured itself in an orgy of stupidity, Wes Craven did the only sensible thing you can do: he stepped outside the series.

I for one welcome our new dream demon overlords.

New Nightmare posits the first six films as just that: movies, entertainment that exists in the pop culture of the "real world" in which it's set. Wes Craven is a real person who makes films, Robert Englund is a real actor who plays Freddy Krueger, and Heather Langenkamp is a real actress, wife and mother who is called upon to play Nancy and stop Freddy one last time, but for real this time.

This prop seems to be inspired by a scene in 5. Despite Craven's ambivalence toward the other sequels, New Nightmare is full of these little nods.

Freddy Vs Godzilla still in development hell.

One thing that stands out about this approach is that Craven doesn't go for the cheap and obvious gag of having Freddy slaughter the hacks who made Freddy's Dead. Although that would have been satisfying, it would have been fix fic, and run the risk of verging on Chris Chan tier revenge fantasy bullshit. Instead, the focus is squarely on Heather as protagonist, with the Freddy-demon released from the prison of the film series returned to his roots as a mostly-straight-faced villain. The idea is simply floated that he slipped the bonds of his confinement in the story world because the suits ran the series into the ground, and that's all you need.

Together again.

Heather's husband is named Chase and works as an effects technician on horror movies. Her son is played by the kid from Pet Sematary. She does the chat show circuit and deals with autistic fans, creepy phone calls, and a nurse who thinks she's going crazy and is a bad influence on her son on account of her movie roles. Craven has fun sending up the culture and the perennial moral panic over scary art, but never quite tips over into soapboxing.

Freed from the 80s, she actually has great hair.

Heather humours her spergy driver.

Me on the left.

One night Chase falls asleep at the wheel and is killed by Freddy, leaving Heather alone to protect her son and kill the dream demon once and for all.

"Cut to the Chase FX" - kino foreshadowing.

New Nightmare feels more naturalistic compared to the previous instalments. There's less stylised lighting and surreal imagery, and in some ways that's a shame, but it helps separate the "real world" from the "movie world". Real-life events such as Langenkamp's stalker and a contemporaneous earthquake are rolled into the script too, making the fake-real-world even a little realer. Freddy gets a redesign too, which was probably necessary to distinguish him from the cartoon character he had become by Freddy's Dead. They even recast Freddy with...himself:

Freddy Krueger is a successful actor and you're a NEET.

It doesn't seem like high praise to say this one gets it right, but given everything that's happened in this series, you couldn't expect a better conclusion. It was seven films, a TV show, a game and various comics, novelisations and merchandising that veered erratically from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, packed with effects, jumps, deaths, one-liners, waifus, retardation, darkness, surreality, brilliance and catharsis. Freddy Vs Jason and the r*make would follow, but thematically, New Nightmare was the perfect ending.

Absolutely cathartic.

The final scene even suggests a sort of looping back to the beginning, an infinite recursion as of a classic story being endlessly retold. Based Nancy always keeping Freddy down in the boiler room so we can all sleep soundly in our beds.