"The fans, god bless em, they're clamorring for more. I guess evil never dies, right?"
"It was a script... it was a dream."

The consequence of working in arts and production and being able to turn your dreams into reality is that you can inadvertently do the same with your nightmares. Starts out as something resembling a very strange, funny little industry satire before gradually unfurling itself into a genuinely uncanny piece of horror metafiction where the monster known for infiltrating our fantasies (and gruesomely, viscerally blurring the line between tangible reality and surreal imagination) infiltrates the ultimate collective fantasy in some of the scariest, most delirious setpieces Craven ever conjured up. Miss him so much. Also, never got old seeing my pals Robert Englund and John Saxon just play themselves for a bit.

scariest one even tho freddy looks like a dick tracy villain

Meta horror is so annoying unless it's Wes

wes craven really said fuck y’all lame ass sequels here’s how to make a good horror movie

The most Wes Craven that Wes Craven has ever Wes Craven'd

Reality, meet fantasy.

I adore the first two acts of this movie, culminating in what may be my favorite sequence in this franchise—after the freeway scene when heather runs back to her home where she cinematic king John Saxon starts talking to her… The moment he stops calling her heather and starts calling her Nancy as Freddy finally breaks through and Nosferatu walks out of Dylan’s room is aces, plus the street scene where we now see 1428 elm as the nightmare theme kicks in still gives me best possible movie watching feeling an idiot like me could get. I’m not the biggest fan of the third act but regardless… this is fun and always a pleasure to revisit.

Hard to believe this came out ten years after the OG Nightmare... harder to believe it’s been 27 years since then.

84

Wes Craven's ode to the fantasies and nightmares of his career. Scary, silly, deeply moving - the Craven special. Heather/Nancy's dive into Freddy's netherworld dreamscape is one of the greatest moments in 90s horror.

New Nightmare is the best one in the franchise after the original and Dream Warriors. The plot is so meta, blurring lines between reality and fantasy. In previous sequels Freddy became more camp than scary, Wes brought him back to his scary roots here. Tho the movie feels kinda lengthy and without any of the humour of the rest of the series. Heather Langenkamp's performance is surprisingly good unlike her last two in the series.

“The more she read, the more she realized what she had in her hands was nothing more or less than her life itself. That everything she had experienced and thought was bound within these pages. There was no movie. There was only...her...life...”

Regards, Wes.

Craven's speech in this as himself seems to be calling out the sequels for not taking this shit seriously enough. Maybe he was right to: back under his watch the series course corrects from self parody to self actualization as Craven folds together fairy tales, bogus mythology and something vaguely apocalyptic on top of what essentially seems to be about the truly horrific procceses of creativity, grief, aging, and parenting. It's often silly, but never impotent. We were lucky to have Wes Craven in mainstream horror.