I took a much longer than usual break between Nightmare on Elm Street films. Part of it was just because I got caught up in getting Garfield and Fahrenheit 9/11 reviewed, but frankly I have been getting a little sick of reviewing Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees movies. It happened at the right time; I found that I have been able to invest a stunning amount of energy into both the franchises for a while, and now that both series are nearly conquered I can put them to rest with a clear conscience. Freddy's Dead, which may be a worse film than I initially suspected, killed the experience for me. There was a melancholy and a lack of momentum to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, but with it you at least felt that the Freddy filmmakers still had a sense of adventure and imagination. The people who made Freddy's Dead seemed to see The Dream Child as evidence that the franchise needed a mercy killing. Pardon the pun.

There was something romantic about the teenage wastelands in The Dream Master and The Dream Child. The Dream Child has a moment where a teenage mother, knowing that her baby's nightmares are providing a link to Freddy Krueger and the real world, has the option to abort the pregnancy. She decides against it. Freddy killed her boyfriend, and this is all she has left of him. She isn't going to let the gloved one win. Less a pro-life film and not really a pro-choice film, it's more of a choose-life film. On some level it reminds of that discussion in David Fincher's Se7en where Gwyneth Paltrow discovers that she is pregnant and is reluctant to bring the baby into a world so wicked. She confesses to her husband's partner Morgan Freeman, who tells her that if she decides to have the child, she ought to spoil that kid every chance she got. That's sort of what is going on in The Dream Child. The whole thing suggests that these teenagers have a future, and even that they can make it a better one. I was set back, and even inspired by The Dream Child. I enjoyed the purely goofy first three films of the series, but I was excited to see the filmmakers going into these new directions. The Dream Master and The Dream Child were downright pro-teenager. Humanistic even.

Freddy's Dead shames those last two films. Shames them. Freddy is reduced to and not allowed to rise above the level of comfortable pop icon. We often say that Freddy is "evil" and that term never really sat well with me; I always thought that it needed clarity. What is suggested by The Dream Child in particular is that evil is cynicism. Evil is this wisecracking malevolent demon that suggests there is nothing beyond movies like Spaceballs. Evil is the reduction of all of us into mere characters. I think that the Friday the 13th movies are able to succeed with a Jason-centric perspective, because they are essentially predictable and death means little more than abyss. Life in a Friday the 13th film is little more than an electric impulse powering a meat puppet. I’ve been reading a little about Cartesian dualism, which says that we are all made up of both body and mind. In Friday the 13th, we are all basically made of body; the concept of mind is a myth. Friday the 13th is materialist in the strictest sense. Jason, it's important to note, is not trying to make a statement through his killings. The materialist philosophy is consistent throughout the series; Jason is a meat puppet without mind as well, if only more obviously than the others. He kills mostly out of impulse. In the Nightmare on Elm Street series, there is more of a separation of true Good and true Evil. Good and Evil are given a chance to co-exist in the Nightmare on Elm Street universe. Freddy's Dead is all Freddy Krueger's anti-human hyper-irony. Good doesn't exist at all; it's all Freddy's show. Even the title, Freddy's Dead, doesn't suggest that the stage is set for the human being to rise again; rather, it's just a William Castle-esque con that embraces and celebrates the Freddy Krueger aesthetic. Even by dying, Freddy takes over the show.

Freddy's creator Wes Craven loathed Freddy's Dead, as I think he should. Faced with the decision to personally do another Freddy Krueger film, Craven reportedly watched all five of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and could not follow the storyline. He went into another direction, redefining what and who Freddy Krueger is exactly for the umpteenth time. Supposedly Freddy is really an ancient demon that can only be contained in the retelling of a myth; as long as we continue telling the story of him, he is contained as a mere fictional character. The mode that it takes in modern times is what we know as Freddy Krueger. Now that Freddy has been killed off in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the demon can be freed into the real world. It's important to note that this demon exists independent of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. The creation of the Nightmare on Elm Street films is a good thing. There is some level where Craven seems to see them as a venting mechanism, that evil in general can be safely contained if we allow it to exist in the context of art. Freddy vs. Jason, released some nine years later, actually skips over New Nightmare altogether, as I guess it needs to, and adopts the same view of Freddy Krueger as Freddy's Dead: that Freddy gains power only when you fear him.

Craven casts himself in the role of Wes Craven, and Heather Langenkamp (who played the role of Nancy, the heroine of A Nightmare on Elm Street) in the role of Heather Langenkamp, who becomes the hero of New Nightmare. Craven is writing a script for a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie, the definitive Nightmare on Elm Street movie, we're told. The script follows Heather's life directly. There is a scene in the movie where she finds the script, opens it up and starts reading a cue that says that she finds the script and starts reading a cue that says… well, you get the idea, I hope. Robert Englund, the man behind the mask, so to speak, and New Line Cinema CEO Bob Shae also play themselves in the picture. Heather Langenkamp was harassed by a stalker in real life, and so Craven has New Nightmare's Heather Langenkamp being tracked down by a stalker as well. The real Heather Langenkamp also has a little boy and a husband who works as a special effects artist on horror movies. Craven reveals Heather's stalker to be none other than the Freddy Krueger, who murders Heather's husband and has his sights on talking out her kid.

Freddy needs to take out Heather in order to get into the real world. It was her strength, or rather the strength that she brought to the character of Nancy, that defeated Krueger in the first place. Yeah, I guess. Langenkamp is one of those actresses who, justifiably some may say, put her family above her career. She's a bit of a ham, which can't help but be accentuated by the goofy material she is sometimes forced to do (these Nightmare on Elm Street movies, especially The Dream Warriors, included). The same year she did New Nightmare, she played Nancy Kerrigan in the TV-movie about the Tonya Harding scandal. I shit you not. I can't say that I really buy that her strength is what is preventing Freddy Krueger from being manifested into the real world. I also can't believe that she would actually be invited onto a talk show to talk about A Nightmare on Elm Street when there is not in fact a sequel being made for her to promote. The only rationale for the talk show appearance is that it's the ten-year anniversary of the film. Pretty weak. There is definitely a sense where Craven is being overly self-indulgent, interested more in frightening and teasing his friends and co-workers than pleasing his audience. The actual Heather Langenkamp is more likely to find the stalker subplot and attacks towards her children and husband frightening than we are.

But I digress; these kinds of leaps in logic are more endearing than distracting. There is nothing in the movie that suggests that there is anything beyond the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The only movie anybody ever watches in this universe is Nightmare on Elm Street. Heather's only friends are people who made Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, there is something insular and thus womblike about the whole thing. The movie seems to be most appreciated by people who watch nothing else but Nightmare on Elm Street movies and collect all the Nightmare on Elm Street memorabilia. Well, in interest of full disclosure, the movie does have a reference to Murnau's Nosferatu, but that doesn't really count as the first Nightmare on Elm Street referenced Nosferatu also. A reference to Nosferatu then comes dressed up like a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street 1. There are a few references to The Exorcist and The Shining, but there isn't anything self-conscious or clever about them. Rather the opposite, they seem to point to a lack of imagination on Craven's part. But yeah, this is all naivety. It's endearingly cheesy.

One of the imperfections of the movie that doesn't quite contribute to the charm of the picture is the Miko Hughes performance as Heather's son, and the dialogue that he is made to recite. All that is hammy in New Nightmare is accentuated with Hughes. He's a mega-ham. It's such an over-the-top, gimmicky, ham-and-cheese performance that it's a wonder he wasn't nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Craven has him talk in a "Freddy" voice, tape steak knives to his fingers, climb up on a playground space rocket and reach up to the sky in a Freddy pose. Hughes is about the most obvious child actor you could cast in a movie. His classically adorable baby-fat face is supposed to give a porny kick to the wicked things he’s supposed to do. (His most famous role is as feral four-year-old zombie in the far-too-black-even-for-me Pet Sematary.) Hughes isn't a real little boy, in other words; he's a precocious Haley Joel Osment/Dakota Fanning mutant. The effect of his perversion is too broad and, I don't know, affected for it to ever become truly horrifying.

Wes Craven is a funny bird. Before becoming a filmmaker, he was a bearded, politically liberal humanities professor. He likes horror as a literary genre; he likes to exploit all these Jungian aspects and examine conventions and the role of the storyteller. But I don't think he really likes violence, particularly because he is so very good at it. Deep down, I think that Wes Craven is a particularly sick fuck, and occasionally he dips down into this quality and it really terrifies him. His instincts as a horror filmmaker are often at war with his liberal-minded morality. Todd Solondz often says that he worries more about people who like his movies for the wrong reasons than people who hate them. In his case, I think this stems from his personal sense of self-hatred. Craven has similar feelings, but I think they result from a talent in something that he doesn't really like doing. Craven's 1972 film Last House on the Left shows two teenage girls being humiliated, raped and then murdered by a bunch of Mansonites. It's a sloppy film for the most part, but the torture sequence is some kind of minor masterpiece. I don't think I have ever seen anything like it before or since. It is successfully voyeuristic, repugnant and truly terrifying. The thugs make one of the girls wet herself if she wants to see her friend live. She does so, and Craven pans down to her crotch. The thugs laugh. A subsequent rape scene has the head thug pumping away at one of the girls in close-up. A string of saliva sticks off of her cheek as he goes at it. Later she stumbles into a pond and vomits. The gang looks on, vaguely frightened at what they have done. They kill her. There's one image that I find myself thinking about time to time, not seen in the version that I saw but apparently available as an outtake on the official DVD, where one of the girls has her intestine reeled out. Craven took it out of the finished film because he felt that he had gone too far. Last House on the Left isn't really an anti-hippy movie exactly; it's more of a lamentation of the ‘60s counterculture, gone the way of the barbarian just like everybody else. The teenage girls aren't punished for smoking pot or enjoying their sexuality; I think that they are idealized for it. They're true innocents, and I think Craven thinks it's repugnant that this is where their idealism led them. It's a legitimate movie, but I think that it went places where Craven was afraid to tread.

The film is marred by some jokey bits involving two bumbling cops and some corny thigh-slapping music. It seemed that Craven was trying to get away from it. His subsequent films are mostly fairly goofy, though occasionally and very casually, Craven gives it a hint of something really fierce. He has it in him. It's in the first Nightmare on Elm Street with the rape on the ceiling and Krueger’s various passes on 15-year-old Nancy. This edge, or rather, instinct for sleazy dehumanization has been pretty much completely repressed in New Nightmare. A major reason that I think he defines Freddy Krueger as a demon that can only be self-contained in myth is that he wants New Nightmare and his creation of it to be seen as something downright socially responsible. There is a scene in the film where Heather is in a limo and the driver fawns over her movie, talking in detail about how much he enjoyed the especially gory parts. She rolls up the limo window. Craven is saying to the critics that he is as worried about his fans as they are. And I believe that he means it.

Mind you, New Nightmare is actually pretty scary. Krueger's first real appearance in the film produces a genuine jolt. Obviously modeled structurally after Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Craven gives us little tastes throughout the film before abruptly laying the money shot on us. We do get a glimpse of Freddy at one point in the film, but somehow that doesn't really dilute his sudden full-on appearance here. Craven satirizes the comical Freddy Krueger that we saw in the last Nightmare on Elm Street movie, Freddy’s Dead, by having him pop out (as Robert Englund in costume) at Heather’s talk show appearance and give the audience high fives. To set up the contrast, the “real” Freddy Krueger is bulkier and has new make-up and glove designs. It’s much bonier and more angular than the traditional pizza-face look. Real Freddy also has a sweater that seems to be red-on-green more then green-on-red. The colors are inverted, I suppose to indicate that this is the Freddy Krueger that has not been translated by art. There is something Platonic about the decision to dress Freddy this way, perhaps an illustration of the Heisenberg Principle, in that the very act of observing something changes its nature, and so basically we can never observe something as it truly is. Very artsy-fartsy, Wes.

New Nightmare is really a very classy and very slick film. It marks one of the very first times that Craven didn't have to make cuts for the MPAA to secure an R rating. He re-enacts the ceiling rape and the tongue through the telephone receiver gags from the original Nightmare on Elm Street, but they are modulated by the fact that we recognize them as slick re-enactments and the characters are twice as old as they were in the original film. That ceiling rape doesn't even go on as long as in the first one; that I can even interpret it as a rape in the first one is dependent on its length: Freddy is really enjoying himself. Here, yeah, it feels more like he's taking the girl out of the way. It's a pretty tame "R.” There is no sex, no nudity, and not really any foul language beyond "damn" and "sonuvabitch.” I first saw the film, before I saw any of the Freddy Krueger movies, on Joe Bob Briggs' Monstervision on TNT. You aren't missing a whole lot if you see it edited on TV, I have to say; there isn't a whole lot that they could take out. I saw it a second time when I was trying to waste a weekend afternoon with my wife. This third time I saw it on DVD, and I have to say it really looks great in a way that few films can really justify. The DVD also includes an audio commentary from the director, in this case one of the rare people I would actually enjoy listening to for two hours through a film that I have just sat through once. The DVD's menu screen is even more brilliant than usual; what appear to be metal fishhooks are dangling from the sprocket holes of a piece of film.

New Nightmare was very well received by critics. Roger Ebert actually reviewed it, and not only that gave it three stars, which qualifies as a thumbs-up recommendation. It's the sort of film that critics are supposed to like. It's well-made, intelligent and, well, tasteful. Somehow, it all adds up to something rather minor. Everything considered, this film is a tough tie with Last House on the Left as Wes Craven's best film, and it's a tough tie with Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master as the best Freddy Krueger movie. (Well, second best if we were to include Freddy vs. Jason.) I can certainly imagine Wes Craven calling it his personal favorite film. But I don't think that you can accurately call the picture Craven's masterpiece, or the masterpiece of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The straight-faced corniness, the glossy filmmaking, and that Jungian college-boy nonsense is a more pleasurable defense mechanism than that of Shocker or even Nightmare on Elm Street 1, but it's a defense mechanism all the same. Craven is holding out on us. Like most of Craven's work post-Last House on the Left, there isn't any real sense of nihilism in New Nightmare or anything to really disturb us. Craven has classed it out. People who liked M. Night Shyamalan's films or The Others will probably view this as being in the same class, if not quite on the same level. That isn't really where I want my Freddy Krueger movies to be, and of course I'm not sure you can really appreciate this movie without being familiar with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. But taken purely on the terms of a glossy and clever Hollywood thriller, it's often really pretty good. My praise could not come in any stranger of a package.