NEVER SLEEP AGAIN (AGAIN)
LEADING LADY HEATHER LANGENKAMP AND DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGR APHY MARK IRWIN DISCUSS Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,THE DIRECTOR’S BOLD ATTEMPT TO BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO THE NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET SERIES
WORDS: OLIVER PFEIFFER
WHILE 1996’S SCREAM IS THE FILM THAT’S remembered for bringing a self-referential, meta approach to horror, the late great Wes Craven had already laid the groundwork with the intended epilogue to his other iconic franchise, back in 1994.
To provide a more fitting finale to the Nightmare On Elm Street series (after the comedic pratfalls of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare brought back the horror by having the once wisecracking boogeyman enter the real world to wreak havoc upon the talent behind Freddy Krueger. Here actors and producers from the original film (and some of its sequels) would be portraying themselves in the movie.
Heather Langenkamp as Heather Langenkamp.
However, this was no mere Hollywood satire – it was an attempt to address what might happen if you banned Freddy and tried to suppress the entire culture of horror films. Craven’s reasoning: that horror was inherent in the human experience and had to be dealt with by art in order to comprehend it.
“I started asking myself, ‘Well, if you ban scary movies, what might that do to a culture that can’t express that?’” he reflected in 2014. “The feeling was if you’re going to ban Freddy he will come into your real life in some other form. That’s the way I got through from one world to another. So, Freddy now had the power to attack the people who had portrayed him and was ultimately not Freddy any more, but the entities of whatever it is that is representative of him.”