Now Available: The Soul of Wes Craven by Joe Maddrey

Joseph Maddrey, author of Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, and many other superb works of genre scholarship is back with a new and exciting project: a meticulous, assiduously researched biography of the late, great horror icon (and so much more...), Wes Craven.

 The Soul of Wes Craven is available for purchase now, and Joe and I recently had the opportunity to talk about his amazing new book, and the incredible work that went into it.

JKM: Let’s begin with the obvious. How and when did you decide to write a biography of Wes Craven? Why did you choose Craven as your subject?

 

Joe: I started thinking about it in 2010, when I interviewed Wes. We had a great conversation and we talked about a book, but at the time I was busy writing a biography of Lance Henriksen. It took me a couple years to come back to the idea, and by then John Wooley had published his biography of Wes. Soon after that, Wes died and I felt like I’d missed my chance. 

 

Then in December 2019, I became interested in Wes’s early writings. He wrote a column for his high school newspaper (titled “Craven’s Ravin’s”), and he had a lot of poems and short stories published in the literary magazine at Wheaton College. While he was pursuing a Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins, he also wrote a novel, which has never been published. I tracked down those manuscripts, then started tracking down Wes’s peers from high school and college. None of them had ever been interviewed about Wes, so that became the foundation of a new biography. 

JKM:  I have always admired your diligence and completeness in terms of research. This book explores facets of Wes Craven’s life I knew nothing about, even having written my own book about Craven’s canon back in 1997. Talk to us a little about your process, and your interviewees.

 

Joe: I believe the best interviews are more than Q&A. It has to be a real dialogue. When I met Wes in 2010, we had a dialogue. He actually preempted my interview questions by interviewing me. “Where are you coming from? Why are you interested in talking to me? What do you want to write about my films?” He was genuinely curious, so I told him. It turned out we had some similar early life experiences, similar beliefs, and similar taste in literature. 

As a result, our conversation quickly became personal. That’s one of the reasons I had to write the book; it was important to me to pursue answers to the big questions at the center of Wes’s life and work, even though I didn’t have access to Wes anymore.

 

When I started reaching out to his college peers in early 2020, I wasn’t sure anyone would talk to me. Wes went to Wheaton, an evangelical school, and I didn’t think most Wheaton alums be eager to talk about the man who created Freddy Krueger. But everyone I talked to remembered Wes and remembered him fondly. The more I learned about him, the more questions I had, so I just kept moving forward through the chronology of his life, tracking down new manuscripts (a lot of unproduced screenplays) and new people, having great conversations, and finding the storyline as I went.

 

JKM:  There have been many books about the films of Craven, including my own, The Art of Horror.  How does The Soul of Wes Craven differ from these other books, would you say? Why is Craven’s story one that needs to be told?

 

Joe: For me, the big ones were yours, Brian J. Robb’s Screams & Nightmares, and John Wooley’s Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares—but there are also hundreds of smaller articles, essays, interviews, etc. I read as many as I could because I wanted to have a comprehensive overview of Wes’s evolution. Then it was a matter of filling in the gaps with new research. I think most of the information in the first three chapters of The Soul of Wes Craven will be completely new to even the most die-hard Wes fans. The same is true of the last three chapters, plus the chapter on Wes’s “lost years” working in adult cinema. And even if you think you know everything about A Nightmare on Elm Street, I promise you don’t.

 

But my goal was not just to generate new Wes Craven trivia. I wanted to present a more comprehensive and humanizing view of the man behind the work, and to treat the work with the kind of seriousness that an academic scholar would apply to great literature. To me, Wes’s work deserves that kind of attention. I have written a couple of books about T.S. Eliot (one of the subjects that Wes and I connected on), and Eliot believed that in order to fully appreciate an artist, you have to know the whole of their work. You don’t have to like it all, but if you make yourself aware of it all, you can see how the artist’s mind evolves, and how all the different individual works complement each other. If an artist’s work speaks to you, you can learn a lot about yourself and your world by studying theirs. That’s why we do this, right?

 

JKM: The book is riveting, frankly. My eyes were really opened by the chapter about Craven’s college years. Tell the audience a bit about this very special chapter. What did you find out, and why do you think it’s so surprising and interesting to Craven scholars and fans?

 

Joe: Through my interviews, I learned that Wes had been a part of (if not a leader of) a group of brilliant “literary rebels” at Wheaton. I’d always imagined him as an outsider at Wheaton, but it turns out there were quite a few outsiders at Wheaton in the early 1960s. They were all wrestling with the same issues Wes was wrestling with at that time in his life, which had to do with belief in God, or definitions of God. This is a brilliant, brilliant group of people, many of whom went on to become successful writers and artists in their own right. Wheaton challenged all of them in life-altering ways. 

 

One of Wes’s most formative experiences at Wheaton was when the president of the college “denounced” him publicly during a church service—because Wes, as editor of the school literary magazine, had published a couple of short stories that were deemed inappropriate by some board members. I think this admonishment really brought out Wes’s rebellious streak and played a big role in making him the “Wes Craven” that we know. Wes was always impish, but I think his experience with the literary magazine transformed him. Like his peers, he was forged in fire. The stories of that time and place really help to explain his complexity as a literary thinker, and also the strength of his character.

 

JKM:  Again, most folks familiar with Craven know that he had -- let’s call it a “flirtation” -- with the adult film industry. Your book covers that phase in remarkable detail. How do you think the details of this time in his career add to our understanding of Craven as an artist?

 

Joe: Yes, but most people get the details wrong. Wes did work in adult cinema, because that’s the work he could get as an aspiring filmmaker. That became his film school. He didn’t study to be a filmmaker as an undergraduate. He wanted to be a novelist, then he became a Humanities professor, then he decided to get into filmmaking when he was about 30 years old. He was starting late, he had no c.v., and he had a lot of catching up to do. You also have to remember that in the early 1970s, adult cinema was (briefly) a mainstream phenomenon. Deep Throat was the 5^th highest-grossing film of 1972, behind The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure, What’s Up Doc?, and Deliverance. Certain filmmakers were making artistically ambitious films in that arena. Especially in New York, where Wes was working. 

 

Wes never shied away from admitting he made adult films, but I imagine he would have mixed feelings about the amount of attention I focused on The Fireworks Woman, the one hardcore film he wrote and directed. I gave it extra attention for two reasons: (1) because not much has been written about it, and (2) because the film is, in some ways, very Wes. The major themes of his later work are present in this film, and I don’t think you can talk about Wes’s oeuvre without considering The Fireworks Woman. In much the way that Last House on the Left was conceived as a reflection on American attitudes toward violence, The Fireworks Woman was a serious, and very personal, attempt to explore American attitudes about sex. The former is celebrated today is because the horror genre has achieved some mainstream acceptance. The latter is a dirty secret because adult cinema does not have the cultural currency it did in the 1970s.

 

JKM:  Let’s talk about My Soul to Take (2010), a film that is not beloved by many horror fans, including me. Why was it so important to Wes Craven? Why was it so personal?

 

Joe: One of the reasons I titled my book The Soul of Wes Craven is because Wes said he felt like his generation of horror filmmakers drew more deeply on personal experience when they were telling stories. Younger filmmakers, he felt, draw too much on the old films. They might be more technically adept, but their stories are too often recycled or reheated. With My Soul to Take, Wes was trying to go back to his deepest well, drawing on his early life experiences for inspiration. Ironically, he ended up writing and directing a film that recycled elements of several of his earlier films, because he (or his financiers) felt like he had to meet certain audience expectations for “a Wes Craven film.” 

 

My Soul to Take is a hot mess and I don’t think Wes fully understood why. I believe it could have been a good miniseries or a great novel, with each episode / chapter focusing on a different character. There are too many characters, and the film doesn’t develop them adequately. But the central metaphor—about a collective soul—is intriguing, and I think Wes could have done something brilliant with it, if he’d had a bigger canvas and more time to develop the story. Unfortunately, the film was hastily written and rushed into production during a brief lull between Hollywood strikes. That commercial failure pretty much ended his filmmaking career.

JKM: The final chapters of the book are a bit more emotional, and affecting, or at least I read them that way. Were they harder to write? Was that your intent? A result of you getting closer and closer to your subject, as you continued to write?

 

Joe: Wes was disappointed that the success of the Scream films didn’t give him the freedom to make non-horror films. That’s what he wanted, and he tried really hard to break out of the horror genre in the new century. There’s an entire chapter about unrealized dream projects. As a result, it is tempting the interpret the last 15 years of Wes’s biography as an anticlimax. But that’s only part of the story, because Wes was more than his films. In the middle of the book, the story of his personal life gets overwhelmed by the stories behind the films, because that’s where he was putting so much of his energy and enthusiasm. In the last fifteen years, I think his personal life was more rewarding and fulfilling than the film work. During that time, he met and married his wife Iya, and they built a beautiful home and a new life together on Martha’s Vineyard. And he was writing prose again, instead of just screenplays. Had he lived a little longer, I think we might have a few more Wes Craven novels.

 

The book illustrates that artists have a meaningful life beyond their art. Art comes out of our life experience and informs our life experience, but art is not life. This is something I thought about a lot while working with my friend Bruce Joel Rubin on his new memoir, It’s Only a Movie. Initially, I thought that would be a book about intersections between Bruce’s spiritual life and his film work, but the book Bruce ended up writing is so much more—because his life is so much more. I wish Wes had written his own memoir. For years, he talked about it. In lieu of a true autobiography, there’s The Soul of Wes Craven, a “collective soul,” incorporating the voices of many of the people who knew and loved Wes.

 

JKM:  What lessons do you think Wes Craven’s life teaches us about horror, and, more broadly, about art, today, in 2024?

 

Joe: You mean, does a book about a dead horror filmmaker really matter in our crisis-driven everyday world? Yeah, I think it does. Making art and telling stories are things we do to understand the world, cope with the world, engage with the world, disengage from the world (when necessary), transcend the world and transform the world. Wes did those things in a sincere and meaningful way, so we can learn from him. Anyone who dismisses that opportunity because Wes was a horror filmmaker is missing out on a powerful life story.

 

JKM:  What’s next for you? Can we look forward to another horror icon biography? 

 

Joe: Honestly, I don’t know. I have a few new book ideas—and even a few works in progress—but right now I’m waiting to see how this one is received. Believe it or not, I’ve been writing nonfiction books about filmmakers for twenty years. My first book was published in 2004, and it ended with a chapter on Wes Craven. I feel like I’ve come full circle, so now I have to figure out what’s next. 

 

JKM: Finally, where can readers find the book?

 

Joe: Dustin McNeil of Harker Press, who has been a wonderful collaborator on this project, has created a website for the book. www.wescravenbook.com

 

For now, the easiest way to get The Soul of Wes Craven is on Amazon, but it will eventually be available via Barnes & Nobles, Walmart, Target, and the usual online retailers. Thanks for your interest!

 

The Films of 2002: Wes Craven Presents They

The umbrella franchise title “Wes Craven Presents” promises a lot, but doesn’t often deliver. I carry great fondness for Wes Craven Presents Wishmaster (1997), for example, a fun rubber-reality horror movie that seems imported directly from the late 1980s era of Hellraiser (1987). 

Contrarily, Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls (1998) is one of the worst horror movies I’ve had the misfortune to sit through.

This film -- Wes Craven Presents They -- occupies the middle space between those two poles. It isn’t fun at all, but nor is it a jaw-dropping train-wreck.

Being of more recent vintage, They at least looks good, even if the script and characterizations can’t quite keep pace with the cinematography. Except for the (poorly-rendered and dated) CGI monsters, this Roger Harmon looks of apiece with other genre films from the same time period -- the early 2000s -- including Mothman Prophecies (2002) and The Ring (2002). 

Alas, They is not frightening or effective, like those efforts. It's a bit muddled, actually.

I understand that the film apparently went through extensive testing, re-shooting, and even had an alternate script, at one point, so I suspect such creative disruptions are the cause of the film’s maddening vagueness.  I enjoy a good, ambiguous or mysterious horror film as much as anyone, but there’s no ‘there’ in They. Nothing seems to connect, make sense, or build to any meaningful conclusion.

The idea underlying the film is good, however. Basically, They is all about psychology, and and childhood trauma. Those things that scare us as children, the movie warns, return in adulthood, causing depression, isolation, and even suicide.  Other people can't see or detect these "monsters," but you know they are there, right at the edges of periphery.

That’s not a bad, general template for a horror movie, though not an overly original one, either. They touches adeptly on its core concept -- of childhood monsters coming back -- a few times, but basically functions as a series of not-terribly-effective or intriguing jump scares that lead, finally, to a baffling and unsatisfactory conclusion.

“They come for me when it’s dark.”

One night, a little boy, Billy, begs for his mother to save him from the monsters in his bedroom.  She doesn’t, and something terrifying drags him under his bed.

Twenty years later, Billy (Jon Abrahams) is a depressed, drug-using adult. He calls a friend, Julia Lund (Laura Regan) to a diner to meet with him, and confides in her that the monsters from his childhood have returned.  He recommends she stay in the light, and then commits suicide

After Billy’s death, Julia, and Billy’s friends -- Sam (Ethan Embry) and Terry (Dagmara Dominczyk)  --meet with her, and report that they are also experiencing a return of their childhood night terrors.  

Soon Julia experiences this phenomenon as well, even though her boyfriend, Paul Loomis (Marc Blucas) tries to convince her that she is just experiencing stress related to her school work.

Julia goes back to her childhood therapist, Dr. Booth (Jay Brazeau), to see if she can help uncover the truth about these monsters.  

But when Billy’s friends begin to die, Julia knows he was right; that the monsters have returned...and want to take her away.

“Something that scared us as kids has come back to collect us.”

The opening scene or set-piece of Wes Craven Presents They hits the trifecta of childhood fears. 

Young Billy must contend with a thunderstorm, a closet door that won’t stay shut, and a monster hiding under the bed. These are the specters all children contend with, and the landscape, indeed, of the bed-time or night-time ritual. They's prologue is effective and creepy, and succeeds in one very profound way:  It reminds what it feels like to be “five years old again," as one character notes later in the action.

I was not prone to nightmares as a child, but I always had to sleep with my closet door shut, and I would cower under the bed-covers during thunder and lightning storms.  I still recall one night, after a long trip away from home, when I saw strange lights dancing on the wall of my bedroom, and became terrified that they were sinister. I had to call for my Mom to help.  One composition in They -- of a toy shadow moving on the ceiling -- reminded me of that occasion.

As children, we don’t truly possess the necessary governing mechanism to always control these fears of what lurks in the dark, or under the bed, or inside the closet, so They’s opening is fertile territory for a horror film. One thing that strikes me about the meticulously paced and orchestrated scene is how uncaring and unconcerned Billy’s mother seems by his terror, especially in the face of his comment that “They” are in the dark waiting for him.  She is just a blank slate. She is mildly comforting, I guess, but mostly seems to not want to be bothered.

One has to wonder if this lack of caring, or help, for that matter, is the childhood trauma underlying all the aforementioned bedroom/night-time fears.  What these things -- the creature under the bed or int he closet -- seem to be really be about is the fear of being alone, of being in the dark with no one to help. At one point, Billy cries out for his mother…and she doesn’t answer.

The creepy prologue is probably the high-point of They because it establishes a nice alternate reality. In this cinematic world, childhood night terrors are real. Monsters are hunting and taking children from their bedrooms for some dark purpose.

The rest of the movie doesn’t really work because we never learn that purpose, alas. 

We never even get a hint of it. Why are Billy, Julia and the others selected in childhood for abduction? What makes them special?

If they are abducted (as we see in the prologue) as children, why do the monsters send them back to our world and come for them again in childhood?  What's with the wait time?

And if the monsters want these particular people so badly, how come they don’t instantly grab them once the young adults have entered their domain? One scene reveals Julia wandering into another dimension, where the monsters lurk and wait. But they don’t attack her for a few minutes. They don’t even notice she’s there. They don't seem interested in her at all, a fact which goes against the idea of tagging and retrieving certain people.

If they are tagging and marking their victims (as the film makes plain), these monsters might at least notice when their victims happen into close proximity. Instead, the monsters seem sleepy and quiescent at first.

Although an attempt is made to link the monsters of They to the folklore of the incubus, it seems half-hearted, in some way.  Incubi and aliens are often linked to night terrors, it's true, but the monsters of They seem to boast a complex m.o that those mythological beings do not; one including capturing, releasing, tagging and abducting.

They works better on a metaphorical level than it does on a literal level. 

The kids who experienced such traumatic night terrors grow up to be…terrorized.  Billy -- described by Paul as “permanently freaked out” -- has sought out drugs (like Prozac) and battled depression to contend with his demons.

 Sam has become a morbid painter, creating huge black canvases of nihilist art. 

And Julia seems in denial about her past, at least at first, but everyone suspects she is having a psychotic break from reality.  

Issues like abandonment, perhaps, from their youth, have returned to spoil their adulthood.  

And things not handled in childhood have a way of coming back, affecting the present, don't they?  The monsters are therefore the personification or manifestation of such unresolved issues.

But again, as much as one can read all this psychology into the narrative, the plain fact is that the movie doesn’t provide literal explanations or motives for the creatures.  

They aren’t well-delineated in terms of their behavior, either. We see hints that they possess technology, for instance (in their tagging ‘darts’) but again, their behavior in the dark world makes them seem more like animals than beings with distinct motives and the capacity for reason or intelligence.

After the scene in which Billy establishes the rules -- that the creatures hide in the dark, affect lights, phones, and power, and  that crying children serve as a kind of an early warning system --- They hits the skids, featuring numerous encounters with the monsters, but no real rhyme or reason as to when, why, how, or where they appear to their victims.

I suppose the question I most want answered involves the disposition of the victims. Why do the creatures take them in adulthood? 

What do they do to them once they have them? 

What finally becomes of those they abduct?  

There are no clues really, and so They, as noted in my introduction, seems maddeningly vague at times. We know there are monsters in another dimension and that they tag kids, and abduct those kids as adults.  Anything beyond that is all speculation, and there aren’t even good clues here to go by.

They fails too, because the main character, Julia, as played by Laura Regan, is a bit insipid.  She is slow on the uptake, quick to panic, and just sort of irritating. Her boyfriend, Paul, is an unimaginative dullard, and one cruising on automatic pilot. His sole duty is to ignore and disregard Julia's stories of monsters terrorizing her.  Sam and Terry show more life, but exist mostly to form the movie’s victim pool. And Sam's loft apartment looks imported straight from The Ring.  I always wonder, when I see a setting like this, how a starving artist can afford such digs.

When you throw in the lousy CGI monsters, They proves remarkably unsatisfying. Like The Mothman Prophecies, They features numerous God’s Eye views of modern cities, with the camera peering straight down from a tremendous height. In Prophecies, these shots suggested a force “above” human sight and identification. Here, they add nicely to the feelings of isolation and abandonment.  

Several times in the film, we also see newscasters discussing “rolling black outs,” and this is not only an historical reminder of the Gray Davis/Enron Era in the early 2000s, but a sign that our technology is being manipulated by the monsters so they can more easily access our world. Modern society, in other words, proves as neglectful as Billy’s mother proved to be in the film’s prologue. There is no help for these people in childhood or adulthood. Nobody cares enough to actually prove helpful.

I can see why the late, great Wes Craven would produce and present a concept like They.  The notion of a group of people joined by their night terrors is highly reminiscent of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the concept of psychological disorders appearing as ‘monsters’ is also familiar from his film canon.  But given the pedigree declared by its title, They should be more than a half-explained outline of a familiar story.

It’s weird that a movie called They never decides, even for a moment, who “they” actually are, or what they want with their victims.  

Movie Trailer: Wes Craven Presents They (2002)

Cult-Movie Review: Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

The tenth birthday of cinematic boogeyman Freddy Krueger should have been a big deal to start with, that's for sure. 

Why?

Well, in the late 1980s, Freddy Krueger veritably ruled the box office and the horror genre, thanks in large part to three or four very talented people: Wes Craven, who gave birth to Freddy, Robert Englund, who gave the silver screen monster body and personality, and talents like Heather Langenkamp and Lisa Wilcox, who, on more than one occasion, gave Krueger worthy nemeses.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Freddy was truly flattered throughout the eighties.  In the latter part of the decade, every new issue of Fangoria  seemed to trumpet the arrival of "a new
Freddy, a boogymena challenger to knock Krueger from his long-held king’s throne.  

The candidates didn’t end up being so imposing, from Harris (Richard Lynch), the cult-guru of Bad Dreams (1988), to I Madman’s (1989) Malcolm Brand.  Even Craven himself took a shot at toppling Freddy with his new monster: Horace Pinker (the great Mitch Pileggi) in 1989’s Shocker.

But by 1991, somehow, Freddy Krueger was played out. The last series film, Freddy’s Dead (1991), was a disaster, and his TV show (Freddy’s Nightmares) was cancelled after just two seasons.

After years holding on, and being praised as the best of the slasher pack, Freddy lost his cultural currency.

So New Line Studios did the only thing that made sense. It went back to Freddy’s dad, Wes Craven, one more time, and he devised a new twist on his most beloved character.  Craven revived the series, -- at least from an artistic stand-point -- with the brilliant Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994).

As Kim Newman pointed out in Sight and Sound (Jan 1, 1995, pg.62), “The major achievement of the film, given the complicated mix of in-jokery and philosophy and the by-now familiar nature of Freddy’s schtick, is that Craven manages to make things scary again.”

That was a big deal, considering the fact that after five sequels, Freddy had become more circus ringmaster than slashing, menacing murderer.

But even better, New Nightmare was scary in a smart way. The New York Post’s Thelma Adams observed that it is a “rippingly good movie-within-a-movie, a pop Day for Nightmare.”  Indeed, the film’s is-it-real-or-is-it-a-movie approach to the action might very well be seen as the missing link binding 1980s slashers to the most popular horror franchise of the 1990s: Scream (1996).

I love New Nightmare, however, not merely because it is scary, and not merely because it plays with our understanding of reality (and indeed, franchise history). 

Rather, I adore the film because it speaks meaningfully about the horror film’s place in American society.  It erects, brilliantly, in my estimation, a pro-social case for the horror film as art. 

Horror films offer a very necessary catharsis for our society, states the film's thesis. The monsters that we don’t capture on the screen will haunt us in real life. Thus horror movies not only “bottle” such monsters, butthey  help children grapple with the idea of evil in a way that does not endanger them, and, to the contrary, shows them how to survive.

A good scary story is more than entertainment. It is a journey survived, an obstacle overcome, a mountain climbed. A good horror movie can demonstrate how, once destroyed, order can be restored. It can shows us that monsters are defeatable, just as life's troubles can be defeated.

In case you couldn't tell, I love this film, and everything it stands -- and fights -- for.

"Every kid knows who Freddy is.  He's like Santa Claus. Or King Kong."

Former horror movie star Heather Langenkamp grows agitated when, following an earthquake in Los Angeles, she learns that her young son, Dylan (Miko Hughes) has been watching her Nightmare on Elm Street films.   

Worse, she is being stalked by an obscene phone caller, and is having nightmares about Freddy.

Before long, it seems as Freddy (Robert Englund) himself is crossing over into our reality, and using Dylan as a vessel to do so.

Desperate, Heather seeks the advice of her friend, John Saxon (himself) and horror movie guru, Wes Craven (himself), who suggests that it is time for the actress to reprise her role of Nancy Thompson if she hopes to defeat an ancient demon that has taken the shape of Freddy Krueger.

"I think the only way to stop him is to make another movie."

At its most basic form, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is a parent’s personal journey towards enlightenment.  

As the film commences, Heather obsessively protects her son Dylan from the danger of “scary movies,” of horror films, that she perceives. 

She admits that she wouldn’t allow Dylan to see her own motion pictures, namely Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, and that she is uncertain about “doing horror roles" because of their impact on Dylan and other children his age. 

She thus makes an argument that all horror film fans  have heard again and again. Horror movies are bad! They are bad for society, and bad for young eyes!

Additionally, Heather does not understand why her boy -- here representing all of America’s children -- is drawn to scary stories in the first place.  Regarding Hansel & Gretel, Heather declares, “it’s so violent, I don’t know why you like it.”  

Horror movie fans have heard that one too. 

I get this one all the time, especially when I reveal how much I appreciate Last House on the Left (1972), or Straw Dogs (1971).  

How can someone so gentle, so nice, actually like movies filled with such horrible violence?  

Well, unlike a lot of folks, I prefer all my horrible violence to be on screen, not in real life. I work out my fears, my anxieties in these movies, imagining the unimaginable, and feeling a catharsis when I have survived it.

But back to the movie.  

As a result of his mother’s repression of horror films and bedtime stories, young Dylan becomes partially possessed by the demons he has only half-glimpsed in these apparent fiction.  

Because he has not seen the entire picture, the whole film A Nightmare on Elm Street, he has not witnessed his mother defeat Freddy’s evil. He is therefore left vulnerable to evil influences and emotions. He has nowhere to put that "horror" and no way to achieve closure.

To illustrate this point, Craven’s screenplay has Dylan awaken as if from a trance each time Heather turns off the television to censor his viewing.  His need for security is shattered, and Dylan screams in horror.  

Significantly, he is not frightened by the images of terror unfolding on the screen, but because his mother has robbed him of narrative closure; of the knowledge that, in the end, evil is defeated and the world is returned to normal.

Similarly, as Heather reads Hansel and Gretel to Dylan for the umpteenth time, he orders her to finish the story before he goes to sleep.  

“Say how they find their way home, it’s important,” he insists.  

Craven’s implication here is that children like to be scared and that stimulating horror stories/films serve as an outlet for this need.  By seeing a scary story all the way through to its conclusion, children learn that they too can beat scary influences in real life. Horror makes them aware that they will survive.  

The form is cathartic, in addition to being fun.

As the plot of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare develops, Heather realizes that, as Craven eloquently puts it, an evil repressed can sometimes break through into “safe” reality.  A woman who has refused to allow her child to see horror films is then thrust unexpectedly into the position of defending them.  

“I’m convinced that those films can send an unstable child over the edge!” the well-meaning but parochial Dr. Heffner declares, but the horror Dylan faces is not imagined bur real, ironically, because the Freddy films are no longer being made in the 1990s.  

When they were produced in the 1980s, the series served as a healthy outlet for teenage fears and anxieties.  Since they have stopped, evil has escaped into the real world and is doing massive damage.

Craven explores this theme of horror as acceptable, even desirable outlet for fear by crafting an ongoing parallel between his Elm Street universe and the grim childhood story Hansel and Gretel.  

Since Hansel and Gretel is deemed acceptable “bedtime reading” by most parents, a Nightmare on Elm Street is, by extension, also acceptable. And like the witch in the scary fairy tale, Freddy Krueger even tries to shove Dylan into an oven and in the film’s denouement is cooked himself. 

In stalking the young boy, Freddy declares, “I’m gonna eat you up!” and that he has some “gingerbread” for the boy, and these moments heighten the film’s similarity to written folklore. 

The film’s conclusion is the final reiteration of this leitmotif as Heather and Dyaln sit together and read the New Nightmare script from start to finish as the camera gently pulls away from the duo, both safe and sound. 

This reading provides closure and vanquishes Freddy forever to the world of imagination…or at least until people stop making horror movies about this particular demon once more.

Rich in theme and intellectual heft, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare not only examines parental responsibility and the healthy aspects of the horror film, it is also profoundly self-referential in its commentary on the world of Hollywood filmmaking. Freddy masks, costumes, gloves and affectionate fan signs are all seen on the talk show stage. Memorabilia from the Elm Street line, including reference books, action figures and paintings are seen in executive Bob Shaye’s office, and fans like the creepy limo driver pop up everywhere and startle poor Heather in the tradition of Freddy himself.

Craven pointedly contrasts the fanaticism of some fans with the blasé attitude of those who make the films and profit from them.

“That thing puts bread on our table,” Chase reminds Heather when she petulantly objects to Freddy’s new razor glove. 

“The fans, god bless ‘em, they’re clamoring for more,” Bob Shaye laughs, realizing that he has a money-making bonanza in this particular franchise.

Indeed, the very fact that the tenth anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street is a plot point in the film speaks to both fan devotion and executive greed.  Amusingly, Craven bites the hand that feed him here.  At the same time that he makes another horror sequel for New Line and Shaye, he criticizes the company for literally running Freddy into the ground.  

Freddy has returned to the real world not just because of repression, but because his mythos has become overly familiar, too watered down by mainstream concerns to be scary anymore. 

Even as New Nightmare slams past sequels, it is loaded with references visual and verbal to past entries in the Elm Street film cycle.  It is a movie about transformation and alternate reality bleeding in to ours, so by the movie’s climax Heather’s world has turned into the world of the 1984 film.  John Saxon is suddenly her father, her blond babysitter dies like blond Tina died, and so on. Heather's hair even goes gray again, and she finds herself inadvertently repeating dialogue from the original film such as “whatever you do, don’t fall asleep” and “screw your pass!”

The first Nightmare on Elm Street is not the only series entry referenced here. 

Dr. Heffner, the disbelieving professional, echoes Dr. Elizabeth Simms in Dream Warriors (1987), who felt that Freddy wasn’t real but rather a byproduct of “rampant” adolescent sexuality.  

The roadside death of a male protagonist, Chase, is reminiscent of Alice’s boyfriend Dan and his death in The Dream Child (1989), down to the inclusion of a pick-up truck in the sequence.  Another repetition from the fifth film is the subplot that a child can serve as a vessel of evil, one which Freddy can operate. 

 Finally, Heather’s comment to Dylan that people can only enter other people’s dreams in the movies represents a sly put-down of the premise of Dream Warriors.

By re-interpreting these standards of the Nightmare on Elm Street film series, New Nightmare transcends the familiar mythos and actually becomes oddly unpredictable.  Viewers believe they know all the twists, but all the twists are, themselves, twisted and given new meaning (and thus power) in their revision.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare contains many intricate realities.  For instance, the audience here is watching a horror movie concerning an actress planning to play herself in a horror movie. Fictional and real worlds overlap, and this is buttressed by the presence of Nick Corri, Robert Englund, Sara Risher, Craven and others, all playing themselves in the drama.  

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare also succeeds on a primal, childhood level. It plays on fears of the dark, monsters, “what’s under the bed,” anxieties about hospitals, and more.  It also deftly blends humor with the fear of losing a child, that which is most valuable and innocent in the world. 

So credit Wes Craven for doing something here that many thought was impossible on Freddy K's tenth birthday.

He breathed new life into an old monster, and an old form too.