"The fans, god bless em, they're clamorring for more. I guess evil never dies, right?""It was a script... it was a dream." The consequence of working in arts and production and being able to turn your dreams into reality is that you can inadvertently do the same with your nightmares. Starts out as something resembling a very strange, funny little industry satire before gradually unfurling itself into a genuinely uncanny piece of horror metafiction where the monster known for infiltrating our fantasies (and gruesomely, viscerally blurring the line between tangible reality and surreal imagination) infiltrates the ultimate collective fantasy in some of the scariest, most delirious setpieces Craven ever conjured up. Miss him so much. Also, never got old seeing my pals Robert Englund and John Saxon just play themselves for a bit.
I'm a huge Wes Craven fan, so I was expecting to like this, but I didn't expect it to unsettle me as much as it did. It's silly in the special way Craven movies are, and often very funny. Lots of the special effects look weird and dated (though they do look more 2002 than 1994, so congrats I guess), and for maybe 90 minutes of the 110 minute runtime I thought this felt like the buildup to a buildup, the first ten minutes of a suggestion of fear stretched out a little too long. but when the final climax starts up, I have to tell you, it scared the hell out of me. In the back of my mind I knew that almost anyone else watching it would probably be unimpressed, that seasoned horror fans may even find it laughable. but my body betrayed my intellect, and I sat wide eyed and unmoving, with serious chills all over that didn't let up until the very end. Maybe it was the sudden shift from low key suspense to blood and screaming, maybe it was the terror in that kid's face as he shrieked (and his role in PET SEMATARY still haunts me), maybe it was the fact that I'd become really involved in what was going on. Or maybe because I spent the movie heartbroken, trying to think of any other horror director who so consistently made room for women to be treated like regular human beings in his films, celebrated as main characters with real personalities and strengths and weaknesses. There's a lot of ~subtext~ here about the pain women face when they're harassed and then told it's in their own minds or they need to calm down or just deal with it, and about Heather not being able to escape her own early role that defined her career and her shift into motherhood, and about fears becoming living things that nobody else can see, about conquering your past in order to move toward your future. The point in this film where everything melts back into the past is so special and I want to talk about it but I sort of don't want to spoil it but really, it pained and impressed me. Anyway, forget logic, forget perfect special effects, forget whatever other nitpicks you can think of. I get that there are probably very few people who see this as a five or even four star film, fine. I can't tell you how it feels to see someone you identify with in a genre film overrun with men, to have a hero that makes you feel a genuine connection, to see yourself in a movie and watch them win, and how you don't realize how rare that is until you experience it. I'm putting it on a shelf with the other genre films that deeply moved me and I have to endure dude after dude dismiss and nitpick them to death. but that isn't the only reason why it's a great movie: I was pleasantly surprised with Craven's own onscreen presence, and I felt his short talk made a pretty good capsule for what I think makes his films work – he tells Heather that (spoiler? whatever?) Freddy is a manifestation of a real evil, that Craven dreamed him and that making the NIGHTMARE series has kept that evil contained, that storytellers are the gatekeepers of hell, that he's a genius and he needs his hero to help him save the world one last time...or something like that. Something that made little sense but was so clever, I bought it. Craven believes it, like he believed in all of his films, and that's what made them scary. His conviction to his craft, his creativity, his boundless passion for doing whatever the hell he wanted to do is what made him special, and made you want to go along for the ride. It didn't have to make sense to you, it made sense to Wes Craven, and when someone gets excited about something they love it's hard not to get swept away with them. You can't be truly scared unless you feel something tender first and then watch it shatter, and that ability to make me feel and think and care is what set him apart. What a devastating loss, a vast empty space that I have very little hope could ever be refilled, a torch that may never be passed on.
