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The thing which always defined Freddy as a villain, to me, was his humanity. Sure it’s a sick, twisted, humanity, but there’s still something innately human about Freddy in the way that Michael Myers and Jason aren’t. They’re monolithic stabbing machines, Freddy is a being of avarice and spite and malice and it always made him far more threatening and far compelling an antagonist.
As such I never took to Wes Craven’s ‘new’ Freddy in the way a lot of Nightmare on Elm Street film fans did. There seems to be a general consensus that New Nightmare is in the upper echelon of Elm Street films and I can kind of understand where that viewpoint comes from. In practical terms New Nightmare probably represents the most artistically sound of all the Elm Street films. It’s well made, well-acted, and most importantly it feels like it is made with a sense of purpose missing from the series since its first outing nearly a decade beforehand. But to me intent doesn’t always equal quality; just because a film has a good idea doesn’t make it a worthwhile endeavour.
The major issue I have with New Nightmare is that in the context of its time it should be something far better. The 90s are something of a roach motel for horror franchises, the big boys check in (Freddy’s Dead, Jason Goes To Hell, Hellraiser: Hell on Earth) but they invariably don’t check out. In fact the only franchise which seems to have a consistent presence throughout the 90s are the Halloween films and even they get something of a proto-reboot towards the end of the decade. What seems to destroy the viability of these films is Wes Craven’s own film Scream. Scream laid waste to the slasher genre as it was. New Nightmare feels, to me at least, like it’s a thematic proving ground for Scream. Scream is arguably one of Craven’s better films (it’s my personal favourite) and the meta elements which are handled so fantastically in that film are tested in New Nightmare.
The problem is while Scream feels vital and fun and manages to combine it’s clever, meta, elements with the trappings of a genuinely great Slasher movie ,New Nightmare feels kind of hopelessly inert. It’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is and it doesn’t really operate all that well as a horror film.
Let’s start with how it works as a horror film. My biggest issue with the film is that as a part of the Elm Street series it doesn’t feel right. Whilst it’s an odd point to dwell on the fact is that Freddy doesn’t do actually kill all that many people. We get two on-screen fatalities, one of which is pretty weak and the other which kind of ruins my favourite bit of the original, and the rest of the time we’re watching what feels like a proto J-Horror film with creepy kids and portents of doom but no real presence from the antagonist. Even the final twenty minutes when Heather finds herself trapped in the reality of the movies and battling ‘Freddy’ in his underground lair feels kind of devoid of menace.
My big issue with the film however is that whilst its concept is interesting it’s handled in a way that feels masturbatory. The idea is that Wes Craven, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp and everybody else who worked on the original Elm Street film has tapped into some ancient, metaphysical, form of evil. This evil exerts power through knowledge of its existence, in the past it chose fairy tales and folk stories and religious texts, now it favours the oeuvre of a so-so filmmaker. What’s fascinating about this concept is that it kind of works in regards to the character of Freddy Kruger, what’s not so fascinating is that anyone we’ve even a vague understanding of social anthropology would have already come across the idea of movies and literature as 20th Century mythology. The other issue is that this subject had been covered two years earlier in the utterly fantastic, and personal favourite film, Candyman. It’s got a very similar idea, about Urban Myth and legend needing to maintain itself by remaining in the public conscious, but it was always willing to take a far more studied and interesting approach to the idea.
A clever idea isn’t enough to sustain a movie and New Nightmare compounds the problem by trying to hard. Wes Craven appearing as himself and apparently authoring the defeat of evil in its most primal state feels arrogant in the same way that M Night Shylaman kind of being Jesus in Lady in the Water does. Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp talking about the new Freddy as being darker and scarier almost ruins the effect of the Freddy redesign, it also doesn’t help that in redesigning Freddy they seem to complicate the design and make some weird aesthetic choices. Kruger with bio-mechanical claws and a trench coat feels like some weird IMAGE comic version of the character and the fact he never seems to be shown with proper lighting makes the truly great makeup job look kind of lousy at times.
Craven chooses to present Freddy in brightly lit rooms or rooms with unhelpful lighting and they just make the new Freddy look odd and plasticky. I’m sure there are people who love the Freddy design, but this is my blog so I get to speak in absolutes.
In general I feel that New Nightmare is kind of dull, not forgettable in the way that Dream Child is, but just kind of plodding and meandering. There is the skeletal structure of a great film, but it’s overlong and doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. On one hand the film accentuates the spookiness of the film series, with Freddy operating as an almost possessive spirit rather than his usual sadistic self, but then ends with an all-out brawl in what can only be described as hell.
I also think the biggest crime in the film is the way in which it restages Tina’s death and SHOWS us just what Freddy is doing to the victim. As I said in part 1 one of the most effective things about the original Nightmare on Elm Street was the fact you weren’t sure what was happening, seeing Trench-Coat Freddy drag a girl by the ankles along the wall just feels like Craven losing sight of what worked in the original.
Where the film works however is in its imagery. Craven crafted possibly the best of the dream sequences in the entire series in the first film by using unreal elements to invade a classroom with horror. New Nightmare works on a visual level because Craven understands the visual disconnect between Freddy Kruger and reality. Having him stood at horizontal angles on the wall, or using his claws to antagonise Heather are when the film works at its best. It’s an evocative, interesting, flawed, pretentious, work which puts it head and shoulders above the Dream Child.
It’s just a shame that the film feels more like Craven taking his ball home than him trying to do something truly creative.
3/10
