This Is Robert Englund’s Favorite Nightmare On Elm Street Sequel

1994 was a near-elegiac year for slashers; the “Hellraiser” movies saw their final theatrical release two years prior with “Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth,” while the Sawyer family of the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” films had grown stale enough that a new generation had to carry Leatherface forward in 1995. The same year, the Boogeyman returned to Haddonfield but needed magic runes to drive him in a sixth “Halloween” chapter. Jason Voorhees had gone to Hell in 1993, and it would be nearly a decade until he would show up again, this time light-years away from Camp Crystal Lake. 

The ’90s were dire for the slasher movie cycle, which had seemingly exhausted all goodwill with genre-savvy moviegoers. Something needed to change.

Freddy Krueger has haunted dreams since 1984, reaching his bladed glove through REM sleep to collect the souls of Elm Street kids. As Craven, playing himself, explains in “New Nightmare,” the not-entirely-fictional Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs is just one form of an ancient, innocence-consuming entity, in a similar way that Pennywise is just one of the faces worn by something much older and more powerful than a dancing clown. Craven gently tells Heather Langenkamp (also playing herself) that this entity “has gotten used to being Freddy now” and finds this plane of reality to be too cozy to leave — thus the crossover from the Elm Street tales into the “real” world of “New Nightmare.” 

Freddy breaks the fourth wall as often as he did before (with fewer cheeky one-liners), but the narrative change-up is emphasized in other ways; Craven nixes the usual screen-slashing title card, real destruction footage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake made its way into the film, and one of the film’s taglines emphasizes its breach of narrative safety: “This time, the terror doesn’t stop at the screen.”