Twenty years ago, Wes Craven resurrected Freddy Krueger in a meta-horror film that starred Nightmare on Elm Street lead Heather Langenkamp as herself. Now, the writer-director and star reflect on New Nightmare ‘s influence on the ever-evolving face of horror.
New Line Cinema / Graphic by Dave Nguyen for BuzzFeed
When Wes Craven made his directorial debut in 1972 with The Last House on the Left, the film's ad campaign proudly proclaimed, "To avoid fainting, keep repeating, 'It's only a movie.'" But 1994's New Nightmare, which he wrote and directed, completely disrupted that notion.
In New Nightmare, the seventh installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, producer Bob Shaye plays himself as he brings Craven back to the franchise and courts Heather Langenkamp to star in a brand new Nightmare film — despite the fact that her character Nancy died in 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and Freddy Krueger himself bit it, seemingly for good, in 1991's aptly titled Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. But as the lines between reality and fiction blur, it becomes clear that what Craven is writing is the movie the audience is watching, a meta-mindfuck in which Langenkamp stars as both herself and Nancy, the original Nightmare on Elm Street Final Girl.
Years before the trend of actors playing distorted versions of themselves — in shows like ABC's Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and films like 2013's This Is the End — New Nightmare was groundbreaking for casting its star Langenkamp as Langenkamp, alongside Craven, Shaye, and Freddy portrayer Robert Englund as themselves.
As a thoroughly self-referential subversion of audience expectations, New Nightmare's established a move toward metafiction in horror that continues to play out, from 1996's Scream, also directed by Craven, to 2012's brilliant satire The Cabin in the Woods.
"It wasn't really breaking the fourth wall; it was breaking the fourth dimension," Langenkamp told BuzzFeed News in an interview at AFX Studio, a makeup and special effects company that she owns and operates with her husband, David Leroy Anderson. "It's not like we're looking at the audience and winking at them. We're taking the audience into a new spatial relationship with the real lives of people who act in them."
Breaking the fourth wall, or dimension, is an inherently distressing concept — it disrupts the sacred relationship between the audience and the movie — but breaking the fourth wall in horror is downright terrifying.
Because in horror, when you knock down that wall, you might not like what you find on the other side.
In full Freddy Krueger makeup, Robert Englund slashes through the wall to make a talk show appearance alongside Heather Langenkamp in New Nightmare.
New Line Cinema
It was in a phone call that Shaye first revealed his tentative plans to bring Freddy Krueger back — with Craven at the helm. "It's almost exactly like in the movie," Craven recalled to BuzzFeed News in an interview at his Hollywood Hills home.
Craven was resistant, and with good reason. He had grievances over how he'd been removed from the franchise — the details of which he hashed out with Shaye and is no longer interested in discussing — but beyond that, he worried that Freddy's devolution from sadistic child murderer to pun-happy quipster, along with increasingly convoluted plots, had pushed the Nightmare series past the point of no return.
"I said, 'Wow, it seems like the stories were getting more and more sui generis,'" Craven said. "It didn't seem like there was any linkage that much except Freddy."
Then came what Craven calls his "aha moment": Inspired by his conversation with Shaye, he would write a script for the seventh movie that was largely about writing a script for the seventh movie. It would be a return to the beginning of the series — with original heroine Langenkamp as the lead — but also a significant step forward. If A Nightmare on Elm Street smudged the lines between reality and dreams, New Nightmare would do the same for reality and fiction.
"But I still didn't have a story," Craven said. "I decided to have a lunch with Robert Englund, and I decided to have lunch with Heather. It was interesting from both how the movies had changed their lives, and they were imprinted with it, whether they liked it or not."
With that — and Englund and Langenkamp's willingness to participate — Craven had his fleshed-out idea: "'We should make a movie about everybody who made the movie and the issues that come up and how it's become part of the culture,'" he said. "So I pitched that to Bob, and I said — I think what I wrote in the script was — 'You'll have a scene too.' And he said, 'I kind of like that.'"
Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Writing the script was a balancing act for Craven, who had to make the film self-referential without pandering. It had to be witty without losing its thrills. And it had to be complex without being alienating.
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