Was New Nightmare Craven’s masterpiece? It may have been.
About an hour into New Nightmare, actress Heather Langenkamp visits an old friend in an effort to figure out how/why Freddy Krueger, the fictional villain from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, seems to be tormenting her in the real world. That old friend, of course, is Wes Craven, who plays himself in what is one of the most pivotal scenes in the entire film. With a dryly-delivered monologue, Craven lays out the basic concept of the movie.
“It’s about this entity, whatever you want to call it,” Craven tells Langenkamp, when she inquires about the nightmares he’s been having and the new script that they’ve inspired him to write. “It’s old, it’s very old. It’s existed in different forms in different times. About the only thing about it that stays the same is what it lives for, really: the murder of innocence.”
“It can be captured sometimes. By storytellers, of all things,” he continues. “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. But the problem comes when the story dies. And 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. Maybe it’s just so upsetting to society that it’s banned outright. However it happens, when the story dies, the evil is set free.”
Now that the Elm Street films have ended, Craven explains, Freddy is out of the proverbial bottle.
On the surface, Wes Craven’s self-written monologue in New Nightmare is little more than an info dump, letting viewers know what the hell is going on in a way that is easy to understand. As Craven notes in the film’s commentary track, that was indeed the goal the scene was designed to accomplish, but when you dig a little deeper into his words, you realize there’s a whole lot more to it than that.
In the monologue, the fictional Craven posits that scary stories, in essence, keep our real world fears from consuming us, and if you’ve listened to any number of interviews over the years, you know that this is an idea the real Craven believed strongly in. A horror movie about what happens when we stop telling scary stories, New Nightmare was, in many ways, Craven’s most personal work, serving as a reflection of the mindset that likely compelled him to spend his career scaring the living hell out of us.
“It’s like boot camp for the psyche,” Craven once described the experience of watching horror movies. “In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers – events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears.”
“I like to address the fears of my culture,” he also once said, touching upon the very same idea. “I believe it’s good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.”
This idea of scary stories literally trapping our fears and keeping the world’s true evil at bay is one that is brilliantly explored in New Nightmare, and Craven’s monologue sums up why they have always been such a popular part of our culture. There’s a reason, as many writers smarter than I have noted, that horror movies tend to be most popular whenever the real world is made more horrifying by events like war and terrorist attacks, and the reason is that horror movies can be a powerful form of therapy. Facing our fears within the safe confines of fictional entertainment allows us to overcome them, or at the very least curb them just a little bit, and I’m not sure there’s any horror filmmaker who understood that better than Craven.
“Horror films don’t create fear,” he famously said. “They release it.”
Maybe without scary stories, evil would indeed be set free.
