Wes Craven's New Nightmare

By the time Wes Craven’s New Nightmare came around, the character of Freddy Kruger had turned from antagonist to protagonist.  Yes, the later Nightmare on Elm Street films still had a formula of a dreamer battling Freddy to keep him from killing and sending him to the grave, but that is not what people went to the theatre to see.  They wanted to see the bad guy.  Freddy had turned into the attraction, the spectacle, and the whole show.  He now had a vocabulary that centred around funny quips, and audience members would cheer for the son of a hundred (or a thousand… I can’t remember this part of the overly done mythology) psychos.

Craven showed a daring ambition to turn him once again into the villain, and returned to the matchup, and relationship, between Freddy and Nancy.  It used the real life actors Heather Langencamp and Robert England to portray themselves in a story where Wes Craven was writing a new script, one that was mirroring reality as was no longer kept at bay from the dark tales of horror.

Craven’s genius came through in the script, and the manifestation of this was in the interaction between Langencamp and England, Nancy and Freddy.  Yes, she had only been the central character in one of the films, but she was the quintessential opposite force to the demented Kruger.  It was through subtleties in the first film that their relationship was established as one of the best horror duos of all time.  It is this relationship, and that of Langencamp and her vulnerable son (whom Kruger looks to mess with) that the weight of the story is held.

It looks in many ways to return Freddy Kruger back into the dark villain, and even pokes fun at his comical reception from audiences within the film.  Craven aims to show that he is not the star, that the evil is what we should root against, and that it is the good that we should identify.  If anything, this movie just proves the fact that any Nightmare on Elmstreet movie without Nancy is impotent at best.  That she is the forgotten force in a film that needs balance, and that through Langencamps acting, the invincible Freddy Kruger has a mortal foil.