The Lobster Dance

After reading yesterday’s article, I found Wes Craven’s A New Nightmare on Netflix. I had actually seen some of it on TV in college, but never ended up watching the whole thing. This meta horror, as the author of “Choosing Monsters Over Women” writes, pre-dates the meta horror in Scream, which takes place in the late 90s with a group of teens who have seen 70s and 80s slasher movies.

In New Nightmare, Heather Lagencamp, the actress who played Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Dream Warriors, plays herself, with Wes Craven, Robert Englund, and Rob Saxon also playing themselves. Nancy and Wes have both been having nightmares about Freddy Krueger. Wes has been writing a screenplay and explains that Freddy is actually some ancient evil that gets trapped in narratives, which have to be kept alive to trap the monster. (If that’s not some franchise meta, I don’t know what is.) Nancy, however, isn’t just dreaming about Freddy—he is terrorizing and trying to murder her family.

What I think the film does well is showing fans rooting for the monster instead of the heroine, as well how parents often unfairly blamed for their children’s behavior and media intake. Heather is judged for choosing to star in a horror film in her youth that doctors now claim is the root of her child’s sleep deprivation or mental illness; Heather, however, has been very careful to not let Dylan watch her films. The movie isn’t the problem, though–in reality, Heather and Dylan are being stalked by Freddy. The other characters, with the exception of Craven himself, treat the pair as if they are experiencing folie à deux.

“Supernatural, sleep deprivation, or mental illness?” also plays a role in the horror of the original film, but here it’s taken to another level. The idea of having to protect a child when it’s unclear whether you’re both dealing with the supernatural or experiencing mental illness and no one believes you is horrifying. In light of this, I’m glad there are narratives like Alice Isn’t Dead where people with mental illness can battle the supernatural instead of being the source of horror.

New Nightmare didn’t exactly blow my mind, but I like how it sets the stage for Wes Craven to experiment with horror and meta in the Scream series as well as how he uses the film to examine fans who root for the villains and monsters.

Contains screaming/creepy kids, earthquakes, tongue animatronics, medical horror, car accidents, funeral hijinks, claws, being haunted by a child molester, snakes, gore.