New Nightmare

It takes the great ingenuity of an inventor to revitalize a saga long stuck in a stygian sinkhole of mediocrity. And so, Wes Craven retakes the reigns of his brainchild, now on its seventh chapter, and injects new life into it, directing one of the best films of the series. This “New Nightmare” succeeds by steering clear of the trashy, all-too-common 1990s horror formula, instead achieving a deeply theoretical work that sets out to analyze the relationship between fiction and reality, and in particular, the role that the representation of horror takes on in the Seventh Art.

This film’s thesis couldn’t be more explicit: cinematic horror constitutes an artistic channel allowing us to confront, and thus exorcise, the world’s evil – allegorically envisioned here as an ubiquitous entity that can somehow be captured by competent screenwriters (“Every so often they imagine a story good enough to sort of catch its essence, and then for a while it’s held prisoner in the story“). Thus, horror fiction doesn’t merely serve as a medium to propagate violent and morbidly gory images – a factually baseless platitude that the director enjoys poking fun at from the first minute to the last. In his vision, horror ultimately takes on a cathartic, if not downright salvific, value (“… when the story dies, the evil is set free“; “I think the only way to stop him is to make another movie“).

To suitably develop this theme, Craven opts for a tricky metacinematic ploy (a formula he will reprise in the 1996 “Scream“), casting each protagonist in a symbolic dual role. Representing the realm of reality, actors use their real names and play themselves, while on the fictional level, the film is populated by their corresponding cinematic characters.

That approach also allows the good Wes to venture into a sort of a light-hearted appraisal of the entire series (“The first [film] was the best“), leading to a series of interesting reflections on the often conflicting relationship between marketing demands and the quality of products that get churned out (“But the problem comes when the story dies. That can happen in a lot of ways. It can get too familiar to people or somebody waters it down to make it an easier sell. You know, or maybe it’s just so upsetting to society that it’s banned outright“).

A film rich in conceptually powerful ideas, particularly the parallels with the Hansel & Gretel fairy tale (accessing Freddy’s world on the wake of sleeping pills sticks in the memory) and the harrowing scene before the finale in which we witness reality crumbling away and the fictional characters gradually taking over the actors’ bodies and minds. Numerous commonalities with the contemporary “In the Mouth of Madness” (1994) by John Carpenter.