Is this even a hot take anymore or have we reached a point where we all agree?

When it was released in October 1994, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare pulled in just under $20 million at the box office, ensuring that it will likely forever hold a rather unfortunate distinction: New Nightmare is the lowest grossing film in the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, grossing right around half of its three-years-earlier predecessor. Mind you, Craven quickly rebounded by changing the landscape of the entire horror genre just two years later with Scream, a smash hit at the box office, but it’s nevertheless a bummer of a statistic.

An ironic one as well, because New Nightmare may actually be the franchise’s best.

New Nightmare was released exactly 10 years after Craven introduced Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it marked the horror master’s return to the franchise. Craven, who had seldom been involved with the 1984 film’s sequels (he co-wrote Dream Warriors), came back to Elm Street in the most bold and visionary of ways, conjuring up a new installment of the franchise that took place in *our* world; a world where Freddy Krueger was merely a character in a series of horror movies. He cast original Elm Street star Heather “Nancy” Langenkamp as, well, Heather Langenkamp, the leading actress of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise whose life is shattered by the real-life arrival of her fictional tormentor.

How does that make any sense? Well, the concept is laid out, within the film, by none other than Wes Craven himself. Craven, playing a fictional version of himself, has been having nightmares that have led him to write the definitive and final installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. In a dryly-delivered monologue that doesn’t quite show his brilliance as an actor but sure as hell highlights his masterful grasp on horror storytelling, Craven lays out the overarching theme of New Nightmare to Langenkamp, explaining to her that a real-life demon has taken the form of fictional horror villain Freddy Krueger (a demon, mind you, that had been contained within the Elm Street films those previous ten years), and that she, through re-inhabiting the skin of the fictional heroine who vanquished Freddy, is the only one who can defeat it…

“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.”

Craven’s self-written monologue, which one could consider a wee bit self-indulgent, is no doubt an info dump, but it’s during this monologue that New Nightmare really starts to come together as a brilliant piece of storytelling. 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,” Craven famously said. “They release it.”

As much as New Nightmare is Craven’s rumination on fear and the healing power of exorcising our personal and societal demons with the kinds of stories he dedicated his life to telling, it’s also a film that effortlessly glides into exploring the impact scary stories have on those whose minds and talents generate them. New Nightmare is quite literally a film about the core participants in A Nightmare on Elm Street, a classic horror film, being haunted and hunted down by that story; not only do Craven and Langenkamp play themselves in the film but so too does Robert Englund, who is clearly being haunted by Freddy as much as Langenkamp is – even if his storyline never really goes anywhere or plays much into the whole thing.

The late Roger Ebert, who was no fan of slasher films, praised this aspect of New Nightmare in his 3-out-of-4 star review, writing “I haven’t been exactly a fan of the Nightmare series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.”

The character who takes on the brunt of that impact is Heather’s son, Dylan. Young Dylan seems to be compulsively drawn to watching a younger version of his mother in that little ’80s horror movie she’s widely known for starring in, and his terrifying nightmares are no doubt linked to his mother’s involvement in the horror genre. To us, horror films may indeed be “only movies,” as the tagline for Craven’s Last House on the Left famously repeated, but he seems to suggest with New Nightmare that there’s a toll their creators must pay.

A bold, cerebral reinvention for the Nightmare on Elm Street saga, New Nightmare was perhaps a bit *too* far ahead of its time, almost ensuring that it wouldn’t initially be regarded as the brilliant piece of horror filmmaking many have since reflected on it being. Looking back, it’s not hard to see why it wasn’t a huge hit at the box office, as audiences at the time surely had trouble wrapping their minds around what Craven set out to achieve with it. If you were looking for just another Elm Street movie in October of 1994, you sure as hell weren’t getting that with New Nightmare, which dared to defy expectations and shatter the mold to create something entirely new. Not just for the franchise, but for horror cinema at large.

Commenting on horror films within horror films didn’t become “cool” until Wes Craven did it again two years later with Scream, but before that he dove even deeper and perhaps more brilliantly into the genre with New Nightmare, a timeless piece of work that made Freddy Krueger scary again and reminded the world that Craven was a true master of horror.

Without filmmakers like him to exorcise our fears, I shudder to think where we’d all be.