Director: Chuck Russell
Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Larry Fishburne, Robert Englund
Have I Seen it Before: Yes? As the Nightmare movies are not really my go-to slasher series, I get a little bit fuzzy outside of <the original>, <Freddy’s Revenge (1985)>, and <Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)>.
Did I Like It: My uncertainty only grows when I realize that this film certainly does distinguish itself in the series. The effects work is sufficiently gross (and I mean that in the best way) with the the worm creature Freddy takes the form of early in the film is easily memorable.
I’m always a little bit suspicious of long-running horror series becoming transfixed on their own mythologies as a replacement for building actual tension. It had frequently threatened to kill the Halloween series, it essentially did slowly eradicate Hellraiser, and for my money, Jason Voorhees never had anything to lose under the weight of too much backstory. Here, there was always a mythic quality to Freddy, and while New Nightmare may have tapped into that quality with more confidence and resonance, the little bit of additional backstory we get about Freddy here manages to not be too much. And, besides, “the bastard son of 100 maniacs” is the kind of pulpy fun that makes one glad they are alive to take in such fluff.
Most importantly, though, this film exists ahead of its time. Almost every recent new entry in long-running horror series has an underlying theme of protagonists taking power back from their tormentors, but the story of the titular dream warriors here is a precursor to that trend, made all the more strange by the fact that it exists at a time where the slasher genre was content to be nothing more artistic than the local butcher, forming their cuts out of the caucuses of people in their mid-twenties desperate to pretend they are teenagers.
