Wes Craven's New Nightmare Review
One of the surreal benefits of horror movies is that their pros double as their cons. You’re aware that you’re essentially making a genre that is unpopular on purpose when the idea of horror is the kind that can be tricky enough to contradict itself to be effective. Before Wes Craven made the first Nightmare on Elm Street he made movies that were almost controversially unpopular like The Last house on the left, if not The Hills Have Eyes (especially given how horror mega-auteur, Alexandre Aja, would go on to remake the former). And yet, tragically enough, Nightmare on Elm street would be panned anyway for being the exact opposite of unpopular when the rest of the 80s would milk it to death. I feel as though Wes Craven saw the implosion of Nightmare on Elm Street’s unintentional descent into the pitfalls of a franchise as the perfect premise of a horror movie in itself, as well as an adequate swan song to not only the legacy that the first movie inspired (for better and for worse) but just what constituted as the sort of classic 80s horror which the 90s would rob of its fun when the severity of the latter decade would introduce us to stuff like Se7en, Interview with a Vampire, Audition, or The Blair Witch Project. That and, of course, a chance for him to return to his roots as a way of extracting what made horror movies effective before adapting them to his limits, and the limits of the same 90s, as he handed Freddy’s torch to Ghostface.