#Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Brought The Horror Genre To A Meta Crossroads

In “New Nightmare,” Craven speaks of Freddy as an ancient entity, “a nightmare in progress … captured by storytellers.” Freddy’s never scarier than he is in the hospital, where he appears in a black trenchcoat, reenacting his first onscreen kill by dragging the babysitter up the wall and onto the ceiling.

Craven’s contemporary, John Carpenter, provided his own meta answer to “New Nightmare” in 1995 with “In the Mouth of Madness.” Though it came another fifteen years after that, James Wan’s “Insidious” re-utilized scream queen Lin Shaye. Its whole third-act dip into the astral plane furthermore owes a debt to Langenkamp’s rescue mission to save her son in the dream realm at the end of “New Nightmare.” Speaking of Wan, in “Scream,” Ghostface says, “I want to play a game,” which would become Jigsaw’s tagline in the “Saw” franchise.

After “New Nightmare,” there was nowhere left to go, really, for the Freddy Krueger movie series except the gimmickry of crossovers (“Freddy vs. Jason”) and reboots (the 2010 “A Nightmare on Elm Street” starring Jackie Earle Haley). A better epilogue for Englund would be his Dr. Loomis-esque role in “Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon,” which dictated its own set of narrative rules, similar to Randy, the Tarantinoesque video store clerk in “Scream” — only for it to ingeniously subvert those rules in its last act.

“Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” bookended a decade of Freddy with the quintessential meta-horror deconstruction of an existing franchise. Yet even as he put one slasher icon to bed, Craven was gearing up to create another and to launch a new franchise, “Scream,” which would bring horror kicking, and, well, screaming into the 21st century. Together, they mapped the meta-horror landscape for years to come.