Where to watch New Nightmare
3 1/2 Stars
It’s nearing the 10th Anniversary of the film ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and one of the stars, Heather Langenkamp is being scared by a voice on a phone, sounding very similar to the film’s villain, Freddy Krueger. When Heather’s husband is killed in a car accident and is discovered with slash marks on him, Heather starts to wonder something. Especially when she discovers that Wes Craven is writing another ‘Nightmare’ film. Soon, she realizes that Freddy has now entered the real world, and the only way to defeat him is to become Nancy Thompson once again.
I was blown away when I saw New Nightmare 30 years ago. I deemed it a brilliant masterpiece with a self-referential quality that was rewarding to longtime franchise fans while taking the story and series into fresh territory. Now, revisiting it three decades later, the movie isn’t quite as clever as I had given it credit for. The screenplay has a movie within a movie structure that is very effective, and seeing Robert Englund get to playing himself and lampooning his image is a lot of fun.
New Nightmare isn’t as successful as Wes Craven’s Scream, but it has the same sense of mischievous fun while also, in spots, delivering the expected quota of killing by Freddy Kruger. Of all the 1980’s iconic horror series, ‘Nightmare’ is my favorite. Freddy Kruger was the Darth Vader of the late 1980s; he became the first rock and roll movie monster with multiple appearances on MTV and frequent cameos in some of the era’s hair metal music videos. So, I grew up with Kruger and these movies, which were a staple at sleepovers during that decade. New Nightmare is an interesting exercise in subverting audience expectations and delivering a surrealistic horror film with heavy philosophical overtones.
Directed by: Wes Craven
Written by: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Jf Davis