Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

In a lot of ways, this movie is just the prototype to Scream. Here Wes Craven plays with the conventions of a certain set of films (here the Nightmare on Elm Street series), while exploring the impact horror films have had on pop culture and the arguments from the right wing that they contribute to violence in the real world. Just like Scream and its sequels, though, New Nightmare tries to juggle being both an effective horror film on its own terms and a commentary on the horror genre, but only ends up dropping both balls.

The plot, placed this time in "Our Universe," suggests that the character of Freddy Kreuger is alive, albeit trapped in a limbo between fiction and reality. After being "killed off" in Freddy's Dead, the Freddy Kreuger entity now has a chance to escape into reality, but only if he can murder the actress who portrayed the woman who first defeated him, Heather Langenkamp. Before you can say "someone's ripping off Exorcist and The Shining again", we discover that Freddy's main target is Heather's young son, Dylan.

Throughout most of the movie, we're treated to scenes of Dylan having nightmares, Dylan acting creepy, Dylan acting strange, Dylan making weird voices, Dylan being obnoxious. As The Phantom Menace would so painfully demonstrate to aspiring filmmakers, hedging your entire film on one child actor is usually a terrible idea. That's not to say that Miko Hughes does such a bad job as Dylan. On the contrary, he carries a few scenes well for a child actor, and he never once made me want to gorge my heart out of my chest with an ice cream spoon the way that kid from The Phantom Menace did. It's simply hard to really spark a feeling of horror or suspense from a kid throwing bizarre tantrums and speaking in a monotone voice.

Through Dylan, his Freddy-related torments, and his mother Heather's paranoia about exposing him to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the film makes the hypothesis that exposure to evil via stories (and by extension films) really helps children deal with evil in real life. Being a definitely not-right-wing kind of guy, I tend to agree with this, and the fact that Freddy is reinvisioned in this film as a kind of fairy tale boogeyman is an interesting twist that fits the film's moral. Sadly, the film takes itself and its message too seriously for its own good. While Freddy's Dead was (and, more importantly, knew it was) camp, New Nightmare thinks it's an epic. This falls flat rather quickly, especially when you have Dylan saying in a deadpan voice that "He's trying to come up into our world!" and an incredibly goofy scene where a giant Freddy holds Dylan over a busy highway (I really can't describe how silly and badly conceived that scene is). Sure, just like in Scream, you have enough gratuitous references to previous Nightmare on Elm Street films to amuse the hardcore fans, but they'll already be disappointed that so much of the film time isn't spent on Freddy, but on the decently portrayed but ultimately uninteresting trials of Heather and Dylan.

This is a shame, since at its heart the film has an interesting premise that gathers dust. Now, I've always had a soft spot for films that do a lot of fourth-wall breaking, but I felt that there was quite a few directions this movie could have gone off on that ended up being barely touched. How would a pop culture icon given life interact with the actor who portrayed him and his "creator"? There is mention that Freddy has also haunted Robert Englund and Wes Craven, but almost nothing is done with it except some self-referencing on Craven's part. What would the existence and life of a living fictional charaacter whose story has ended and remains trapped outside reality? In the closing sequence we get a look at the world Freddy inhabits, but it's used for little more than as an excuse to bring out some elaborate sets. In the end, instead of what might have been an unpredictable and refreshingly original flick with insightful comments on modern day mythology and the problems of creating a character that passes out of its creator's hands, we just get another "small family terrorized by supernatural evil" movie.