Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Comparatively restrained, especially for such a late sequel, Wes Craven's New Nightmare renounces tick 'em off teens to focus on torments with real weight and pain attached to them. This seventh outing for Fred Krueger defies its more formulaic predecessors by really spending time soaking in the anxieties and trauma generated by a killer who is, innately, supernatural. The marks he leaves demand to be explained away, to be attributed elsewhere by victims ashamed to even be considering this phantom's existence. Where previous instalments have careened from teenager to teenager, as they drift off towards oblivion, New Nightmare attaches itself to 30 year old actress Heather Langenkamp, playing herself as a widowed mother, as she slowly loses her grip on reality. Langenkamp, who starred as Nancy Thompson in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, is assailed throughout New Nightmare by a variety of terrors that can be broadly defined by the tabloid-baiting idea of disreputable media having physical purchase in, and a pollutant effect on, the real world.

This notion goes beyond a badly made up Robert Englund (this time wearing leather pants and sporting a plastic looking bone claw) crawling all over a hospital ceiling, dragging a bleeding babysitter behind him. Miko Hughes plays Langenkamp's son Dylan as a sleepwalking preschooler gripped by what appears to be sustained abuse. Craven's New Nightmare forgoes presenting Krueger as the quipping serial killer of its immediate predecessors, here he's monstrous in ways that defy deification. A series of telephone calls in which Langenkamp is taunted by Freddy culminates in an episode in which the phone receiver transforms into a tongue to lick Langenkamp's face while the voice at the other end of the line gloats that it has touched her child. Craven then does not shy away from the paedophilic aspect of his creation: Krueger revels in the degradation and corruption of children. Indeed much of the New Nightmare's third-act is built around teams of nurses and paediatric doctors trying to separate a Freddy tainted Dylan from a mother who has, they believe, conjured up genuine obscenity by starring in a video nasty. New Nightmare pivots on the idea that, in the wider cultural conversation, these films - Craven's life's work - are often seen as so contentious as to be mind-altering.