Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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points of contact with Jason Goes to Hell, and its subsequent financial failure 13
echoes that of its Friday the 13 th counterpart.
During this period of decline, the slasher film began a period of selfreferential
postmodernism, pioneered within the mainstream by Wes Craven,
initially with New Nightmare (1994), his attempt to revive the A Nightmare on Elm
Street series. In this film, Heather Langenkamp, the actor who performed the role of
Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, plays a fictionalised version of herself as she
begins to have nightmares about a Freddy Krueger-type character. In order to save
herself and her son from danger, Heather talks to other cast and crew members from
the original film about their experiences with this mysterious figure, such as Robert
Englund and Johnny Depp, and eventually asking for help from Wes Craven, who
reveals that his idea for the screenplay was directly drawn from his own dreams,
verifying the existence of this threatening figure. Craven here develops a narrative
that acknowledges the fictitiousness of the original series, and attempts to bring
Freddy Krueger into the realm of the ‘real’, heightening the potential horror of the
situation by breaking away one element of artifice, and at the same time drawing
attention to the behind-the-scenes element of filmmaking, exposing the inner
workings of this process.
Although New Nightmare did not prove successful enough to warrant a
sequel 14 , Craven further developed this postmodernist design in Scream (1996; dir.
Craven), which centres on a killer who is apparently obsessed with horror films.
13 According to Muir, The Curse of Michael Myers only brought in $14.7 million at the box office.
(33)
14 “New Nightmare did not perform that poorly on its opening weekend, when it was third at the U.S.
box office behind Pulp Fiction (which opened on the same day as New Nightmare) and The Specialist
[1994; dir. Llosa] (which was in its second week), but it already closed after four weeks, grossing less
than 20M...” (Fuchs; 2010; 82) [Parenthesis in the original, brackets mine]