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New Nightmare Movie Review

New Nightmare is a 1994 meta supernatural horror film directed by Wes Craven and starring Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp. It’s a stellar sequel and one of the series’ best outings.

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“Miss me?“

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Freddy Kruger, a fictional villain, enters the real world to murder the people who have escaped from death in his films. Heather is requested by the film fraternity to reprise her role to kill Freddy. This was the only movie since the original that was directed by Wes Craven himself and it shows – it’s by far the best film in the franchise since the original. It might even be the very best one.

This was a groundbreaking movie in its post-modern meta narrative, preceding Craven’s own meta film ‘Scream’ by two years. In it, all of the actors from the first couple of movies play themselves, including even the director and producer. This was a brilliant move by Craven as it not only made the movie fresh and unique, but also thematically intriguing – it explored the influence on horror movies on audiences, especially the youth.

Blurring the line between fantasy and reality, the movie achieved the right mixture of real and unreal, similar to the very first movie. The dream scenes equaled the best moments from ‘Dream Warriors’ without going into overly fantastical territory. The third act is a blast to watch – Krueger extending his hands and his tongue made for instantly campy and fun imagery.

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Speaking of Freddy, he is actually much more competent and scary this time around than he was before this feature. This is because Craven changed his personality and his attire to make him more of a dangerous than a campy horror villain. The camp and humorous elements are definitely still retained, but aren’t as overly emphasizes as they were in some of the previous entries. Robert Englund was up to the task and he was fantastic here while the character’s clothes and especially his new, scarier face made him feel quite contemporary.

I also really appreciated the performance of Heather Langenkamp. She was never better than she was in this meta sequel that used her character wonderfully, putting her in the history books for this franchise as the most important actor and character after Englund’s Krueger. She was smart, capable and proactive. I also liked her kid and how he factored into the story. Their scenes together were a delight.

New Nightmare is quite artistic in its very good cinematography, superb production design and a phenomenal use of practical effects. The movie aged like fine wine due to those strong technicalities. The score is also incredible and quite elegant in its orchestral pieces. The movie is so meta and so self-aware that it really should have been funnier overall. The humor is there, but it’s too sporadic to make a bigger impact. Still, the storyline is for the most part quite engaging and the movie is very well paced in spite of its longer than usual runtime. It could and should have been even more creative in execution, but the premise alone is so amazing that it ended up being the best movie in the franchise.

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