New Nightmare is certainly the best film in the Nightmare on Elm St. cycle. It is also one of the most inventive horror films around and provides the series with a fittingly conclusive ending. The film is set in our (i.e. the real) world where the actors Robert Englund (who played Freddy) and Heather Langenkamp (who played the original Girl Who Lives in the first film) play themselves regrouping to create one final Nightmare on Elm St. But Freddy Krueger invades the real world and starts wreaking havoc.
It seems that, since he's been driven out of his various nightmare realms, he's left with only ours to torment. It's a brilliant idea and the execution is almost as intoxicating as the concept. There's some stuff about Wes's nightmares spawning the films; that he creates them from his dreams; that he is simply a conduit for them rather than the creator of a story. Thus Freddy becomes a sort of spectral ghost relying on the tales in which he is the star to sustain him. Now that the series of films is drawing to a close, he needs to invade our world in order to stay relevant and to continue to exist. He's a story that's fighting to continue being told so that he does not slip into irrelevance and the realm of forgotten bogeymen and childhood nightmares. It's a wonderful concept for a horror film and more importantly it's a fitting conclusion to a cycle of films that, despite the terribleness of most of them, has become ingrained in the consciousness of the American public. Rather than allowing the series to peter out and fade into obsolescence (as these things so often do) Craven revitalized it at the moment of its conclusion. Fitting and wonderful.
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