Bill Bria
In 2024, our culture generally enjoys a tacit (emphasis on that word) understanding that when it comes to art (to borrow a phrase), there will be different strokes for different folks. As broad and pithy as that colloquialism is, it actually represents a good deal of cultural progress. As recently as 30-odd years ago, being a staunch fan of an entire genre of media was looked upon as suspect at best, and deviant at worst. As the still-evolving practice of psychiatry made its way through American culture during the first half of the 20th century, psychiatrists such as Fredric Wertham began to broadly analyze the effects of the arts and media on culture at large, and, in Wertham’s case, blaming the media for warping the minds of consumers, especially children. The horror genre was an early and frequent target, if for no better reason than, on paper, it seems like an oxymoronic thing to be a fan of: after all, if such sensations as pain, trauma, madness et al are generally undesirable, why willingly indulge in a genre where such things make up the fabric?
It wasn’t until the 1990s when being a fan of genre began to change from something niche and hidden to something expressed more openly; not coincidentally, this was when technology started to allow fans to communicate with like minds, realizing on a larger scale that they weren’t alone in their tastes. As things like science-fiction, anime, video games and others gained popularity, horror still tended to be the most stigmatized thanks to the violence inherent within the genre. In 1994, two films — Brainscan and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare — reflected the way horror fans and filmmakers (who are usually fans, anyway) viewed the genre, advocating for the genre itself as not just healthy art to enjoy but as something that has historically functioned as a necessary, vital, and universal outlet for expression.
New Nightmare, made just two years before Craven took a look at the effects of horror movies on society in a far broader fashion with Scream, sees the writer-director wrestling with the monster he literally and figuratively created: the character of Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund). In the decade between this film and the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Krueger (along with his future sparring partner, Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees) had, for better or worse, come to be the poster boy for horror films, his popularity reaching beyond a niche fandom into the very fabric of the popular culture. Craven was both deeply aware of the reasons for this, as well as a little incredulous that the character and the films had taken such a sharp turn into the cartoonish. As such, New Nightmare is part course correction to the Nightmare franchise, part meta response to the films’ impact, and part impassioned argument that horror movies are the perfect receptacle for all the ideas and emotions that so-called polite society doesn’t want to face or admit to.
With the star of the first and third movies, Heather Langenkamp, playing a version of herself as the film’s protagonist, Craven, his leading lady, Englund and others use New Nightmare as a way of not just reclaiming the Freddy character but taking on the responsibility of literally and figuratively unleashing him on the world. Here, Freddy is an ancient evil that has decided to use the persona of the fictional dream demon in order to break into the real world, and Craven’s argument (in the film’s subtext as well as, with his on-screen cameo, in the movie itself) is that storytellers traditionally have the ability to keep such a force of evil and trauma from spreading unencumbered through the world. The antagonists, then, become those who dismiss the veracity of such an evil force and fiction’s ability to combat it; either the well-meaning people surrounding Heather who don’t believe her warnings, or Dr. Christine Heffner (Fran Bennett), a physician who sanctimoniously believes that the mere fact that Langenkamp has appeared in horror movies is having a damaging psychological effect on her son, Dylan (Miko Hughes). Dr. Heffner was pointedly named after former MPAA chief Richard Heffner by Craven, and while little Dylan certainly isn’t portrayed as a horror fan, Craven takes care to demonstrate how Dylan’s interest in exposing himself to his mother’s films aren’t where the real harm lies. Instead, the threat lies in the ways overbearing authority figures like Heffner seek to rob Dylan of his own agency and Heather of her own parental choices.
Responding to overbearing authority figures was likely also on director John Flynn’s mind when making Brainscan. It tells the story of a teenage boy, Michael (Edward Furlong), who is enticed to play a new CD-ROM game known as Brainscan, which supposedly provides the player with the ultimate experience of terror by casting them as a psychopathic murderer. As it turns out, the game and its host, an entity known as Trickster (T. Ryder Smith), is using hypnotic suggestion in order to have Michael actually commit murders in and around his neighborhood. When Brainscan was initially released, it was lumped in with a cadre of other thrillers that were responding to the encroaching phenomenon of cyberspace (The Lawnmower Man, The Net, etc), and the premise itself seems to be a thinly-veiled metaphor for violence in video games, something which was becoming quite the cause célèbre in the early ‘90s.
However, Brainscan’s focus isn’t on technology and video games so much as Michael’s desire to indulge in the horror genre. At every turn, Michael is portrayed as a horror fan; not only does he have posters for horror films covering his walls and issues of Fangoria magazine strewn everywhere, but his personal computer assistant is named “Igor” and he runs an extracurricular horror club at his school where he and others watch horror movies. One of the posters in his room is for Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, the very Nightmare sequel that inspired Craven to pitch New Nightmare. As Brainscan screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker recalls in an interview on the film’s Blu-Ray release, his initial script for the movie only featured a voice on the telephone taunting Michael; the Trickster character was added by an uncredited rewriter, and was a clear attempt to both comment on Freddy as well as hopefully make Trickster a new horror icon.
Although Flynn didn’t have the same history with making (and defending) horror films as Craven had, his films (such as The Outfit and Rolling Thunder) touch upon the morality of violence, and thus where Brainscan could’ve been a cautionary tale of indulging in horror where Michael is as much perpetrator as victim, the film ends up treating his character and horror fandom with respect. It’s a huge difference from 1980’s Fade to Black and even the similarly-themed 976-Evil (which, ironically, was directed by Englund), where the horror fans are tragic victims of circumstance which are partially of their own making.
In stark, curious contrast to the finale of Hideo Nakata’s Ring (and its 2002 Gore Verbinski remake), the resolutions to both Brainscan and New Nightmare involve their protagonists passing on the gift of horror to others. Whether it’s the Brainscan video game or the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, the perpetuation of horror media is seen as not just something positive, but essential to keeping the literal and metaphorical wolves from the door. Even though today the pendulum of fandom has nearly swung in the opposite direction, with fans becoming far too entitled and expecting respect based on the art they champion, horror is still a genre that is looked upon with suspicion. When an op-ed pops up just about every year touting the idea that horror films are good now (implying that they haven’t been before), one can tell that the genre still has a long way to go before being fully understood as the respectable art that it is.
Perhaps Brainscan and New Nightmare have the right idea: instead of ghettoizing and stigmatizing them, we need to spread these stories as far and as wide as possible. After all, the only real source of damaging psychological trauma isn’t horror films or their fans; as the saying goes, it’s fear itself. Horror is a release valve, a mirror to society, a necessary look at the dark spaces we all need to address in each other and ourselves. To the uninitiated: be not afraid.
“Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” is streaming on Netflix. “Brainscan” is available for digital rental or purchase.
