New Nightmare (1994) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 3

  "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.

• Review by pd187 ★★★★★ 25

  this is the scariest one even tho freddy looks like a dick tracy villain

• Review by sydney ★★★★★ 16

  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…

• Review by KYK ★★★½ 1

  Meta horror is so annoying unless it's Wes

• Review by Ian West ★★★★ 6

  Reality, meet fantasy.

  I adore the first two acts of this movie, culminating in what may be my favorite sequence in this franchise—after the freeway scene when heather runs back to her home where she cinematic king John Saxon starts talking to her… The moment he stops calling her heather and starts calling her Nancyas Freddy finally breaks through and Nosferatu walks out of Dylan’s room is aces, plus the street scene where we now see 1428 elm as the nightmare theme kicks in still gives me best possible movie watching feeling an idiot like me could get. I’m not the biggest fan of the third act but regardless… this is fun and always a pleasure to revisit.

  
  Hard to believe this came out ten years after the OG Nightmare... harder to believe it’s been 27 years since then.

• Review by lola gumball ★★★★ 5

  wes craven really said fuck y’all lame ass sequels here’s how to make a good horror movie

• Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 2

  84

  Wes Craven's ode to the fantasies and nightmares of his career. Scary, silly, deeply moving - the Craven special. Heather/Nancy's dive into Freddy's netherworld dreamscape is one of the greatest moments in 90s horror.

• Review by Nakul ★★★½ 2

  New Nightmare is the best one in the franchise after the original and Dream Warriors. The plot is so meta, blurring lines between reality and fantasy. In previous sequels Freddy became more camp than scary, Wes brought him back to his scary roots here. Tho the movie feels kinda lengthy and without any of the humour of the rest of the series. Heather Langenkamp's performance is surprisingly good unlike her last two in the series.

• Review by Tony the Terror ★★★★★ 9

  There really isn’t a review I could write to do justice to the relationship I have to this movie. It came out when I was like 15 years old so it was that time when I was getting physically close to being able to see R rated movies on my own, but I still technically couldn’t unless I got sneaky and oh say, purchased a previously viewed copy from my local video store, but until that happened I was utterly OBSESSED with this movie and everything about it. The poster. The trailer. The marketing. I ate it allllll up and wanted more. I read the novelization over and over just trying to get it all in until I had access…

• Review by Jacob Knight ★★★★★ 2

  “The more she read, the more she realized what she had in her hands was nothing more or less than her life itself. That everything she had experienced and thought was bound within these pages. There was no movie. There was only...her...life...”

  Regards, Wes.

• Review by laird ★★★★ 2

  Craven's speech in this as himself seems to be calling out the sequels for not taking this shit seriously enough. Maybe he was right to: back under his watch the series course corrects from self parody to self actualization as Craven folds together fairy tales, bogus mythology and something vaguely apocalyptic on top of what essentially seems to be about the truly horrific procceses of creativity, grief, aging, and parenting. It's often silly, but never impotent. We were lucky to have Wes Craven in mainstream horror.

• Review by Brody Brittain ★★★★

  The most Wes Craven that Wes Craven has ever Wes Craven'd