Movie Review: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Wes Craven’s return to the Nightmare series was a lot more triumphant than Sean S. Cunningham’s with the Friday series. It’s one of the best movies in the series, and definitely a step towards the series that would occupy the last part of Craven’s career: Scream.
Heather Langenkamp also returns to the series, and you may be wondering how, considering Nancy Thompson died in Dream Warriors. Well, she’s not playing Nancy; she’s playing Heather Langenkamp.
This movie is about people making a Freddy movie, and due to that, it features people like Wes Craven, Robert Englund, and New Line Cinema head (and producer of this movie) Bob Shaye all playing themselves. It’s a fun little concept, but it’s played straight. It’s a welcome return to the serious horror of the first two (sort of three) movies of the series, and it’s genuinely scary at times.
The movie opens much like the first film had began, only for the camera to reveal that it is the filming of a movie. Heather Langenkamp is on set with her son, Dylan (Miko Hughes, Pet Sematary), because her husband, Chase (David Newsom), is a special effects technician. The Freddy glove he had constructed turns itself on, and kills two of the crewmembers, and Nancy wakes up in her home during an earthquake.
When Chase leaves for work, Heather catches her son watching the original film on TV, which upsets her. She then gets a few phone calls from someone reciting Freddy’s nursery rhyme. She’s taken to a studio for a talk show appearance.
On the talk show, the conversation strangely turns towards her son, who she doesn’t want to watch her movies. Robert Englund shows up in Freddy makeup, and the live studio audience loves it. After the show, he apologizes to Heather for not telling her ahead of time that he was showing up in makeup, and they appear to be good friends.
Heather gets a call from New Line, and goes and meets Robert Shaye to discuss her appearing in a new Freddy movie. She doesn’t like the idea of it, and it’s clear Shaye doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. She looks around his office, littered with Freddy memorabilia (fittingly, considering A Nightmare on Elm Street basically built New Line Cinema), and thinks of her kid. Shaye tells her that Wes Craven is returning to horror because he started having nightmares. She learns that her husband has already been working on the prop glove.
When she returns home, her son, Dylan, is having some kind of episode. He speaks as Freddy, and mentions that in his dream, he was saved by his toy, Rex, a stuffed animal. The stuffed animal has slash marks resembling that of Freddy’s glove. His babysitter, Julie (Tracy Middendorf) goes to stitch it up while Heather calls her husband, who is working on set. She tells him to come home, but he says that he’s bus because two of his technicians didn’t show up to work, but he decides to head home when he hears that Dylan is having issues.
While driving, Chase falls asleep and is attacked by Freddy. It’s a really violent, scary death, and a much more stripped down version of Dan’s from The Dream Child. Cops show up at Heather’s home and tell her that her husband is dead, and she demands to see the body. At the morgue, she notices some cuts on the body, and she pulls the sheet back further to see Freddy slash marks all throughout his body.
There’s a funeral/burial where we get some cameos by some of the actors throughout the Nightmare series. The casket falls into the grave, and Dylan gets pulled down inside it by Freddy, who Nancy climbs in to pull out. Then her husband’s body starts bleeding out the mouth and coming at her, until John Saxon pulls her away, revealing that it had been a dream.
Heather meets with John Saxon at a playground while Dylan is off doing his own thing. John tries to reassure her that her Freddy nightmares are only due to her stalker, and then they see that Dylan has climbed up to the top of the playground and is reaching out above him.
She calls Robert Englund up on the phone, and tries asking him about the script. He says that Wes won’t let anyone read it until he’s done, but that he had gotten as far as “Dylan reaching up to the heavens.” This worries her, and she detects that Robert has some more knowledge than he’s letting on, that he may also be having nightmares. She asks to meet with him, but he says he can’t, and it’s revealed that he’s working on a painting of Freddy that looks like it belongs in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
At home, after a nightmare, Heather finds her son reciting the Freddy nursery rhyme, and then gets another call from the stalker. Dylan freaks out, and Heather takes him to the hospital, where he has to stay overnight.
Heather drives to Wes Craven’s house to talk to him about the script. He says he doesn’t know what direction it’s headed in, and that he writes scenes in the morning following his nightmares at night. He describes the villain as some kind of demon entity that thrives on innocence. The demon has been held captive as Freddy in the Nightmare movies, but with the character of Freddy killed off, the demon has emerged, though it’s used to behaving as Freddy. Wes tells her that she has the power to hold him back, as “the first to humiliate him, defeat him.” He says the only way he thinks they can stop him is to make another movie. It’s then revealed that this exact conversation he has had with her is already written in the script.
At home at night, Heather is finally attacked by Freddy, giving us our fullest glimpse of his new look yet.
He’s played once again by Robert Englund, of course, and he’s sporting a very different look, and has different body language. He’s got more skin missing from his head, and Englund said he based his portrayal of the character on Klaus Kinski’s portrayal of the titular character in Werner Herzog’s 1979 film, Nosferatu the Vampire. It’s probably my favorite Freddy look there has been. Going along with that, the finger knives are no longer part of a glove. Instead, they extend from the bones that stick out of his hand. It’s also something that I like a lot.
Freddy disappears with another earthquake, and Heather rushes to the hospital to see her son. She’s treated for some cuts she got there, that she says she got in the earthquake, but she learns that there was no earthquake that night.
When Heather falls asleep, Dylan wakes up and has his voice morph into Freddy’s. He throws up on her, and has an episode. The doctor appears, and becomes Freddy. Heather violently wakes up and learns that they’ve moved Dylan to another room.
She goes and sees him, and he asks her to get Rex, because Freddy is getting close to her. Heather leaves, with Julie, Dylan’s babysitter staying with him. She tells him not to fall asleep before she goes.
As she leaves, two police officers and the doctor talk to her, suspecting child abuse. Some nurses sneak a sedative into Dylan, and Julie tries to keep him awake, locking the nurses out.
Dylan falls asleep and sees Freddy emerge behind Julie. She doesn’t see him, and she’s stabbed and lifted from behind.
In the other room, Heather, the doctor, and the police officers all hear the scream. The nurses manage to get the door open and they see Julie floating in the air, eventually to be dropped. Freddy then drags her to the ceiling, like Tina’s death from the first film. The movie cuts back and forth with Freddy there and Freddy not there, which is a neat choice. Julie then falls from the ceiling.
Heather eventually makes it into that room to find that her son is missing. She gets in her car to go looking for him, calling John Saxon along the way. She finds him walking across the busy freeway to get to their home, and he sees a giant Freddy appear in the sky. He dangles Dylan above traffic until his clothes rip and he falls. Heather gets hit by a car, and sees Dylan get away. She makes it back to her home, where she finds Dylan with Rex, and John Saxon shows up.
Heather tells John all about what happened, how Freddy killed her husband. John refers to Heather as Nancy, and Freddy starts coming out of Dylan’s bed. Heather notices that John has his character’s police badge from the first movie. He then leaves in a police car, telling “Nancy” to get some rest.
Heather turns back to her house to see that it’s now the Elm Street house, and we get to hear the classic Nightmare theme for the first time.
Inside, she grabs a knife, and sees that the TV is showing A Nightmare on Elm Street, despite not being plugged in. She follows sleeping pills as breadcrumbs (she had been reading Hansel and Gretel to him earlier) into Dylan’s bedroom, where she finds Rex completely torn apart. She takes the sleeping pills that Freddy left in order for her to follow him, and she takes it. She goes underneath the bedsheets, which become a tunnel, and then eventually a waterslide, spitting her out of a giant Freddy mouth into a creepy and ruinous underworld with fire all about. She hears Dylan calling for her, and tries to follow.
She finds Wes Craven’s script, and reads it, which of course is about her reading it, declaring “There was no movie; there was only her life.”
Dylan finds her, but so does Freddy. She fights back, of course, punching Freddy in the face and coming at him with a torch. When Freddy is about to stab her, Dylan picks up her knife and stabs it through his leg. He takes it out and then goes after Dylan, with Heather jumping on him to try and stop him. He throws her against a pillar and she lands in a pool of water. Dylan then runs, pursued by Freddy.
Dylan escapes into an oven thing that Freddy can’t fit through, but his arm extends to pull him in. Heather comes to, and gets there to stab Freddy just before he swallows her son whole. Freddy starts choking Heather with his tongue, but Dylan is able to stab it, causing it to become forked, and for him to retract it. They then close the oven door on him, and pull a lever that makes more fire come up and burn Freddy, revealing him to have devil horns. As the entire underworld starts to explode, Heather and Dylan escape, and wake up.
Heather finds Wes Craven’s script with a note from the director thanking her for playing Nancy one last time, and that the Freddy demon is back where he belongs. She turns to the last few pages to see the dialgoue that Dylan is about to tell her, asking if it’s a story, and asking that she read it to him. She starts from the beginning.
I like that the movie doesn’t end with a cliffhanger scare like most of the other movies in the series. It has a kind of finality to it that feels very earned. It’s a very meta movie, and has plenty of callbacks to the other films, but still stands on its own.
The movie has plenty of legitimately creepy scenes, and it has an eerie sense of dread throughout. Even some of the conversation scenes end up being creepy. Though I do find the music to be too much at several moments.
It’s certainly one of the strongest in the series, right up there with parts 1 and 3. It’s a good movie about people’s reactions to horror movies.
It arguably does the best job in the entire series of blending dreams with reality, and after all, it’s playing with an additional layer of reality. I especially like the scene when Heather and John are talking, and he drives away in his police car.
The cast is largely good. Miko Hughes is pretty good in scenes in which he’s not supposed to be scared, which unfortunately isn’t too often. He’s quite bad when he’s supposed to be scared. Heather Langenkamp is once again very likable, and probably gives her best performance in the series. Most of the supporting cast is quite good.
It’s a triumphant return not just of Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and Wes Craven, but of scary Freddy.
Rating: 7/10
