Hi, everyone.

I'm Em, and welcome to Verbal Diorama, episode 316, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know, and movies you don't. That thought she'd killed Freddie off, but the fans are clamouring for more. So evil never dies, right? Welcome to Verbal Diorama. Whether you're a brand-new listener to this podcast, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you for finding this podcast, thank you for listening to this podcast, and thank you for choosing to be here with this podcast. As always, I'm so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Wes Craven's new nightmare. And just a big thank you, if you are a regular returning listener, for coming back to this podcast and choosing to continue to listen to and support this podcast. Because by listening, you are actively supporting this podcast. I'm so very grateful. Thank you for your support. It genuinely means so Much to an indie podcaster who does literally everything by herself and therefore 316 episodes of doing everything by herself as the traditional spooky season on verbal diorama sucks. Launched with the Devil's Advocate, it launched for real last week with Candyman and this movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, or just New Nightmare. I decided that I wanted to do this movie last October for many reasons, but mostly to give this movie its dues. Freddy Krueger, of course, started life in 1984 as a terrifying child murderer, but ended his Route 6 appearances as a comedic character, quipping to his victims and getting his own plushy toys and appearing on lunchboxes. There was always something deeply unnerving about putting Kruger on a pedestal, and no one thought it more than his creator, Wes Craven. Here's the trailer for Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Actress Heather Langenkamp, the final girl in the first Nightmare on Elm street, has been living her life away from the horror series and now has a husband in the special effects industry and a young son, Dylan. Ten years after the release of the first movie, Heather starts getting nightmares featuring Freddy Krueger and mysterious phone calls are reciting Freddy's iconic lines. Earthquakes are ravaging the neighborhood. And as to the nightmare in which her husband's fingers are cut, she notices they're cut for real. Robert Shaye, the producer and founder of New Line Cinema, invites Heather to the New Line offices to tell her that Wes Craven has been writing a new script and that Freddy is going to return. And he wants Heather to return too. But life is starting to imitate art. Let's run through the cast of this movie. We have Heather Langenkamp as Heather Langenkamp and Nancy Thompson. Robert Englund as Robert Englund, Miko Hughes as Dylan Porter, John Saxon as John Saxon and Donald Thompson Tracy Middendorf as Julie, David Newsome as Chase Porter, Fran Bennett as Dr. Christine Hefner Wes Craven as Wes Craven, Robert Shaye as Robert Shaye and Freddy Krueger as himself. Wes Craven's New Nightmare was written and directed by Wes Craven. A Nightmare on Elm street was a huge success for New Line Cinema, the brainchild of Wes Craven, a slasher that brought scares as well as gory special effects based on the real stories of immigrants who had experienced the killing fields in Cambodia and had literally nightmared themselves to death. If you want a more in depth history on A Nightmare on Elm Street, I did episode 275 on it last October. And in many ways this is why I'm back again doing this. But unlike my usual rules to do all of the sequels, I'm choosing to bypass them and go straight from one to seven. Because while the first movie is the best, this one is the smartest and most interesting. But it isn't the movie that most millennials think of. When they think of meta horror, they think of the movie Wes Craven did next. Scream and Scream defined a generation of horror lovers wanting slasher gore with the intelligence to wink to the genre's cliches. Scream was a blockbuster unlike any other horror movie had been. And even today, its multitude of sequels still will never match the original. Screams, scares, humor and meta commentary lovingly mocking a toy, a genre. Most directors are lucky to get one franchise to their names, let alone one genre defining horror franchise. Craven has two. Greedy bugger back to A Nightmare on Elm street, though. The original came out in 1984 and was blessed slash cursed with five sequels before we got to New Nightmare. So let's just go into those sequels briefly. Wes Craven didn't want to direct a sequel and he didn't have any ongoing financial or contractual participation in sequels. And so Bob Shaye in New Line Cinema went ahead with the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy's Revenge, without Craven's participation. Freddy's Revenge is often cited as an unintentionally gay horror movie, with the movie's homoerotic subtext being denied by the writer David Chaskin for years. And it seriously affected the main actor, Mark Patton, who was himself a young closeted gay man at the time. In the 2010 documentary film Never Sleep the Elm Street Legacy, Chasking finally admitted that the gay themes were intentional, something he had denied up until that point. Craven would return to the franchise along with Heather Langenkamp in 1987 for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream warriors, with a co screenwriting and co story credit. But the movie would be directed by Chuck Russell, but because Craven had signed away his rights and therefore signed away his rights to any further compensation for sequels or merchandising. Three further sequels, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 The Dream Master, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 The Dream Child and Freddy's The Final Nightmare followed in 1988, 1989 and 1991 respectively. Fred Instead, the Final Nightmare was always intended to be the big finale. The day of release was declared Freddy Krueger Day in Los Angeles and there was even a mock public funeral held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for the final death of the character. But Freddy's Dead also had Freddy at his least serious and menacing, turning his victims into pizza toppings and video game characters with cameos from previous Elm street victim. Now movie star Johnny Depp, credited as Oprah Noodlemantra with the infamous this is your brain on drugs also featured cameos from Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold. Of all people. The end of Freddie really was supposed to be the end, and it was certainly the end of the character's serious horror credibility. As with many horror stories, maintaining genuine scares had become difficult across multiple sequels. And humor seemed to be the way to keep audiences engaged when pure terror was hard to achieve. But everyone knows that no character ever stays truly dead. And plans for another movie in the franchise after Freddy's the Not so Final Nightmare started pretty quickly after that movie became a critical failure. New Line was the house that Freddy built, and it was also the house that used a massive defibrillator on Freddie and didn't stop saying clear till Freddie came back to life. Sort of different to how he was before. It's no secret that Wes Craven wasn't happy with the growing fatigue surrounding the franchise and the comedic angle the character had taken over. The sequels. The Nightmare films were never meant to be seen by children. And yet they started merchandising Freddie quite quickly. With children's toys and costumes available, it's something new Nightmare comments on openly with the character of Heather's son Dylan having his episodes blamed on his mother's horror career and his father's visual effects career. This is a kid who openly visits film sets we see in Nightmares at least, but with two parents working in the industry, it's not outside of the realm of possibility that Dylan has grown up on the movie's versions of the Nightmare on Elm street series sets. It's also no secret that Craven felt like the series had peaked with his own involvements the original and then co writing A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream warriors, which was originally going to be fairly similar to New Nightmare until the studio rejected the idea. They had a cash cow to milk after all. Though Freddy's Dead was panned critically, it was modestly successful at the box office, more so than A Nightmare on El Street 5 the Dream Child had been. While New Line genuinely intended to end the series, recognizing that the franchise had become creatively exhausted, the financial side meant there was still commercial value in the character. Despite the declining quality, they realized they'd killed Freddie too soon. New Line apparently came to realize that ending the franchise with such a poorly received, campy film was a mistake that didn't actually honor the character that had built their studio. They wanted to resurrect Freddy Krueger without actually resurrecting him, and to give Freddy his dues and the fans theirs. They could only call One Man. Ten years after A Nightmare on Elm Street, Bob Shaye called Wes Craven, offering to make one more Freddy film, even though the previous sequel was literally supposed to be the final Nightmare. That meeting was to talk about Wes Craven's new Nightmare, which was originally titled A Nightmare on Elm Street 7 the Ascension and finally Craven was offered a cut of the merchandising and sequels retroactively. Craven would say about the idea of bringing Freddy back again, quote, I always felt that under wonderful circumstances I'd love to get my hands on the franchise one more time. When I realized it would be the 10th anniversary and the seventh film, it was attractive to come back from a position of strength and do it. So we agreed that's Bob Shaye, Sarah Risher, Mike DeLuca, the creative heads at New Line and myself and my producer Marianne Maddelena, that unless we could bring Freddie back in a way that wasn't farcical, like saying it was all a dream and Freddie isn't really dead. We wouldn't do it. If we couldn't do it in some way that was justified, then we wouldn't do it at all. Unquote. With the financial issues sorted, Craven got down to developing his new script, which included references to the previous movies, to the diminishing returns of not only the Nightmare on Elm street series, but horror in general, and to the fairy tales of old like Hansel and Gretel that became sanitized over time. But mostly he was writing a script about writing a script, and he would have lunch with both Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund to find out how the movies had changed their lives and most importantly, would they be interested in coming back to do something like this? Turns out they both did. He presented his idea to New Line Cinema's CEO Robert Shea and included him in the script, which he liked. This was a brand new, unique take on the horror genre, but not the first attempt at metafictional horror, which is usually cited as 1960s Peeping Tom by Michael Powell about Mark Lewis, a photographer and filmmaker who murders women while recording their deaths with his camera. It was an uncomfortable watch. Powell's camera positions us directly behind Mark and his spectators so that we become his unwilling accomplices. The audience watches Mark watching his films. The film destroyed Powell's career upon release because of the harsh critical reception, only to be later recognized as a masterpiece that anticipated many themes horror cinema would explore decades later. Peeping Tom imagines the relationship between filmmaker, film and audience in ways that wouldn't be fully explored again until films like New Nightmare and later Scream brought meta horror into the mainstream. While New Nightmare was more explicitly about the horror film industry and featured real people playing themselves, Peeping Tom was the first to make the act of watching horror films itself part of the horror. New Nightmare doesn't explicitly belittle the Nightmare on Elm street series. Craven is smart enough to subtly mention Heather Langenkamp hasn't been too affected by the series, as she's moved on to other things as she was only in parts one and three, coincidentally the same ones he himself was involved in. But while the movie version of Heather is written by Craven to be highly strong and damaged by her association with Freddy as soon as his nightmares start, the real life Heather is much more laid back, but her real life issues would actually make it into the movie because we don't actually think about the real life issues that might come from starring in a horror movie. Especially for children and young people who might be more impressionable, horror movies are the movies kids really want to watch because they're not allowed to. Heather Langenkamp was 19 when she first starred as Nancy Thompson, and many people in her life warned her about starring in a horror movie, that she might become typecast or it might affect future acting jobs. And while she didn't do much in the way of movies during the 80s, she did become a household name on TV, starring in Just the 10 of Us, a spin off of the popular sitcom Growing Pains, which aired from 1988 to 1990. It was from the cancellation of Just the Ten of Us that Langenkamp did have her own stalker, who, just like in the movie, harassed her with phone calls and letters. Upset that the sitcom had been taken off air, as if that's the lead actor's fault. Langenkamp gave Craven permission to use her real experience to add a layer of real life horror to the movie version of Heather's life. But this wouldn't be the real Heather. It would be a heightened version, slightly damaged and eager to escape the Nightmare on Elm street specter that had followed her fictional career. It was more fun for Langenkamp to play Heather that way than just to play herself. And she focused on the central conflict. Was Heather really going crazy or was Freddy Krueger really tormenting her in the real world? Langenkamp's husband, real life husband, makeup effects artist David Leroy Anderson, declined to play himself in the movie. He actually proposed to her on the set of Pet Symmetry, which coincidentally starred the young Miko Hughes. One of the reasons Wes Craven specifically gave the movie version of Heather a child was to ask the question, what are horror films doing to our children? Are we damaging their innocent minds? And what does it mean when your young child sees your horror movie work? Miko Hughes career had started with Pet Sematary when he was just three years old. He'd also been in Kindergarten Cop when he was four. So starring in New Nightmare when he was seven was nothing new for him. And he knew who Freddy Krueger was at 7 years old, further highlighting that New Line's merchandising department had worked their magic at promoting the character to children. The production had heard of Hughes, but because of the child's age, they also had to consider twins. They put out an open casting call for children in Nevada and California, all the while hoping to not lose Miko Hughes to another film. But Hughes wowed them in his audition and he got the part. Craven began the complicated task of reuniting franchise cast members, including Langenkamp, Robert Englund as well as smaller roles for John Saxon, Jisoo Garcia, also known as Nick Corey, and Tuesday Night as themselves. He wanted to ask Johnny Depp to return, but he didn't. When they met afterwards, Depp said that he would have done it in a heartbeat. And this would be a new version of Freddie, once again played by Robert Englund, but also less comical than the previous iterations. The entity manifests itself as Kruger, now free from the shackles of the previous movies. Craven would change the character's look, giving him a long trench coat and a green hat. The signature glove was redesigned to look more like the glove on the first Nightmare on Elm street poster. An actual hand rather than a glove with muscles and bony fingers. Freddie's makeup looked more like ripped skin compared to the burned look fans had been used to. There was a lot in the original script for Englund that never actually got filmed, including a scene of where Englund himself has a nightmare of himself trapped in the role of Freddy, with Englund trapped in a spider's web being cocooned by a giant black widow. And on the underbelly of the black widow are red and green stripes, the same as Freddy's sweater. It was never shot due to the production running out of money. It also helps to explain where the character of Robert Englund disappears to. Englund would always say that this movie was his favorite sequel of the entire franchise because of how smart and self aware it is. Craven's appearance too was remarkably different to the original script. In one of the early drafts of A Nightmare on Elm street, the Ascension, Wes Craven was supposed to arrive in a van driven by the character Pluto from the Hills have Eyes. Craven would have been on the run from Freddy Krueger with his only chance of escape to write the script for the new Nightmare movie, even going as far as cutting off his own eyelids to stay awake. In the final cut of the film, Craven still plays himself, but instead of living out of a van and going insane and cutting off his own eyelids, he lives relatively comfortably in his mansion in the Hollywood Hills, which is apparently not his real mansion. But whoever's mansion it is, it's a very nice mansion. One way that Freddy manifests himself into the real world is the earthquakes, which usually happen after the nightmares. Here in the uk, we don't know really what earthquakes feel like. We do have them, but they're usually undetectable. I remember we had one locally in 2008. It was the middle of the night. It was apparently a 5.2 on the Richter scale, and I remember it and I remember how scary it was, but I honestly can't imagine living in a quake zone. But as this is a movie where fiction and reality blend, maybe there was some sort of evil entity that decided to also ensure earthquakes happened in the real world. And on 17 January 1994, the Northridge earthquake hit the greater Los Angeles area. 57 people died and more than 9,000 were injured. The earthquake happened just before the end of filming and immediately New Line wanted to utilize some of the disaster scenes, arguably not in good taste because lives had been lost and the financial burden to the city was massive. But they still put together a unit with a double for Heather Langenkamp to drive around various places in the city where you can clearly see building and road damage. It adds to the realism of a movie that's supposed to be based in the real world. We even visit the real New Line Cinema offices, which were on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles and featuring cameos from Bob Shaye and Sara Risher as themselves, with Shaye's office filled with Freddie memorabilia. And when production began in late October 1993, the filming schedule was on time and without issues. And then the earthquakes happened. Several crew members lost their homes too, and it set the production back two days. The freeway sequence, which in the original script had Freddy show up in a car with claws called the Freddie Mobile to kidnap Dylan, was scrapped again due to financial reasons. Instead, the scene would show Dylan sleepwalking across the busy road. The production had to close down portions of the freeway east of LA. Over 100 cars were used in the scene and the scene took almost a week to film. A crane 30ft off the ground was used to pluck Dylan off the road to accomplish the look of real jeopardy for a seven year old boy. They used blue screen, front projection, matte composition and morphing to make the sequence look as real as possible. The whole sequence took two to three months to create visual effects. Director William Mesa would say that Miko Hughes was very good at taking direction. Langenkamp, along with Hughes and Englund, spent the last several weeks of the shooting on an elaborate set constructed to represent Freddy's Netherworld. Production designer Cynthia Charette and her team of craftspeople and decorators worked for over two months with carpenters and plasterers to create the eerie 100 foot set that represented the history of hell. Starting with Dante's Inferno and the writings of the Roman poet Virgil. Charette created a room with seven openings, each leading into a lower, more vile part of the underworld. To create the grim surroundings of The Netherworld, seven different wall textures resembling stone, earth and mortar were made from mould. These moulds were layered on top of one another and then sections were stripped away to give a look of deterioration and rotting over the centuries. A water dripping system was also installed to give the sets a damp, dank appearance. But speaking of Dante's Inferno, let's segue into the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode. And if you're new here and you don't know what that is, it's where I try and link the movie that I'm featuring with Keanu Reeves. This movie has visuals based on Dante's Inferno, also partially based on Dante's Inferno, the Devil's Advocate from two episodes ago, which also starred Keanu Reeves. In 1991, Freddie died and New Line Cinema said Freddy is dead for real. And so for fans, another movie would have probably seemed a little bit confusing, especially a movie that came out only three years after Freddy's death. And so New Nightmare faced a unique marketing challenge because it was both a Nightmare on Elm street sequel and also something completely different. And the marketing had the task of communicating the metafictional concept without confusing audiences who might be expecting a traditional Nightmare on Elm street movie. The movie was marketed as Wes Craven's New Nightmare, putting the creator's name front and center to signal that this was a return to the original creator's vision, not another campy sequel. But by not having the Nightmare on Elm street name in the title, most people didn't actually click that this was anything to do with Freddy Krueger. And this might go some way to explain what happened when the movie was released, because New Nightmare is the only Nightmare on Elm street film to be released in the traditional horror month of October, and it was released on 14th October 1994, the same week as Pulp Fiction. And Pulp Fiction's overwhelming success was blamed somewhat for New Nightmare's slightly lesser success. Despite New Nightmare opening third at the domestic box office, it struggled to find an audience and would only stay in the top 10 for three weeks. And so that 12 hit of pulp Fiction coming out the same week, and also audiences not really being sure what Wes Craven's New Nightmare was supposed to be, the movie struggled financially at the box office. Now, it's worth noting here that after Scream came out, Wes Craven's New Nightmare became successful on dvd. Fans returned to it. People's love for Scream opened the door for how to watch Wes Craven's New Nightmare, how to get the most out of it, and how to appreciate it and a lot of the love for Wes Craven's New Nightmare has come in the decades after Scream. But despite being resurrected by the original creator, starring its original stars and literally reinventing the horror genre, New Nightmare is the lowest grossing movie in the entire Nightmare on Elm street franchise, grossing $18 million domestically and $1.7 million internationally, giving it a total of $19.7 million worldwide on its $8 million budget. New nightmare truly was a movie that came out way before its time because, as I said, it is now considered one of the fan favorites of the franchise. But critically is where New Nightmare did resurrect the series because it got some of the best reviews since the original movie in 1984 with a 77% of Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus of Wes Craven's new nightmare adds an unexpectedly satisfying, not to mention intelligent, meta layer to a horror franchise that had long since lost its way. Retrospectively, it's also seen as a highlight in the series and as a prelude to Scream. New Nightmare received four nominations at the 1995 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards for Best Studio Big Budget Film, best Actress for Heather Langenkamp, Best Supporting Actor for Miko Hughes and Best Screenplay. It won two awards, Best Actress and Best Screenplay. Langenkamp was also inducted into the Fangoria hall of Fame that year. It was also nominated for Best film at the 10 Independent Spirit Awards. Now, of course, sequels wise. Freddy Krueger would return in Freddy vs. Jason in 2003 and again in the reboot in 2010. The rights to the A Nightmare on Elm street franchise and Freddy Krueger reverted to Wes Craven's estate in 2019. New Line Cinema is still keen to bring Freddie back in some way, but rights are complicated. Craven's estate would still need to find a US Distributor and make a deal with New Line for the international release, as they retain the international rights. Craven's estate has taken pitches for a New Nightmare movie, but Robert Englund, who's been playing the character in live action for 40 years now, apart from that one Jackie Earle Haley performance, has said he's too old to return to the iconic character, but that he'd love to return in a cameo. Wes Craven took what New Nightmare did, or attempted to do at the very least, and two years later collaborated with Kevin Williamson on Scream, which took the metafictional idea and enhanced it. Craven would always say that Scream improved upon the ideas established by New Nightmare. Dylan's New Nightmare, a fan film starring Miko Hughes reprising his role as Dylan porter, is on YouTube and is actually well worth the watch. I actually really enjoyed it. It's only about half an hour long and when it finished I actually wanted it to go on for longer than it did. Miko Hughes is great. There's no Robert Englund as Freddie, but Freddie does make an appearance and is as disturbing as you would expect him to be. As I mentioned, there's also a four hour documentary on the entire A Nightmare on Elm street film series called Never Sleep Again which came out in 2010. Unfortunately, I did not have four hours spare to watch that documentary. However, I have heard it's a very good documentary so if you come across it, it is well worth your time. The early 80s slasher boom would quickly fade as diminishing returns affected the Halloween Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm street series. With the decade finishing on a slasher slump, the 90s still gave us classics like Child's Play and Candyman, both previous episodes of this podcast. But the franchises struggled and critics and fans were bemoaning the death of the franchise slasher. This is where Wes Craven said hold my beer. Just like the fans in New Nightmare who gather in a chat show audience for England's appearance, this Kruger to chant his name and scream how much they love him. We too secretly wanted to see more of this horrifying and fascinating character. Freddy Krueger, despite his child murdering past, is adored and revered by horror fans. Freddy is synonymous with this franchise, as is Robert Englund playing him. But Freddy was the monster of the 80s, the evil child killer. It makes sense that the entity would take his form and the most frightening version of that form. In New Nightmare, Craven isn't simply aware of the tropes and trappings of the franchise. This is literally a movie about the people who made the movie. There are layered callbacks to specific moments in the original film, but much more than that, it's so centered on the pop culture status that Freddie has amassed in that 10 year time period. He set the standard for a tired franchise that had killed its villain. Don't bring him back, just resurrect the idea in a smart, self aware way. New Nightmare was ahead of its time in so many ways and remains one of the more memorable outings in the series for everyone. If anything, Craven just sharpened his skills for Scream, which took everything New Nightmare attempted and improved on it. New Nightmare can be a little convoluted sometimes, but Scream was a simple small town being terrorized by a mass the killer who done it. New Nightmare needed some knowledge of the series to completely understand it, but Scream just needed a basic knowledge of horror tropes. Scream deconstructed the slasher tropes, and then Cabin in the woods came along and dissected it. Craven would say in later interviews that New Nightmare was full of experiments that some worked and some didn't, but Scream ultimately improved on the ideas that New Nightmare started. New Nightmare makes subtle and not so subtle nods to previous movies, including a fantastic opening scene paying homage to the intro of the 1984 original showing Freddy creating his knifed glove, which turns out to be a nightmare, but also to fairy tales in general, namely Hansel and Gretel, fairy tales that have also been modernized and sanitized over time, where the villains have become less menacing than the original stories and the children now always seem to live at the end. Dark fairy tales were used as warning tools for children, but are now just bedtime stories. Heather reads Dylan, Hansel and Gretel, and Dylan leaves sleeping pills for his mother to follow him, just like Hansel and Gretel, leaving breadcrumbs. Freddy also meets his untimely end in a furnace, just like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, and Craven cleverly compares the sanitization of fairy tales over time to the sanitization of Freddy over the previous decade. This is a movie that speaks of the dangers scary movies pose to children, and how stopping children from watching movies like this actually makes them want to watch them more. Also commenting on our tendency to criticise media consumption as the cause of any psychological or behavioral problems children are having. The first Nightmare on Elm street was a group of parents misguided attempt to protect their children, which then put a target on those children. Heather tries to protect Dylan, which just makes the entity in the guise of Freddy want to go for Dylan even more, kidnapping him into his realm, and the only way Heather can save him is to once again become Nancy. Heather is governed by her fear and anxiety throughout the movie, as well as the grief and trauma she goes through with its lack of kills. There's only four, only four, she says. More of a focus on the psychological and lack of gore. New Nightmare is firmly rooted in the real world, and maybe that wasn't what Nightmare on Elm street fans wanted in the mid-90s. To me, this is the most fascinating of all the Nightmare on Elm street movies. This was the one I saw first before any others, and it was instantly memorable. The scene where Freddy's animatronic claw goes around killing people on a film set might just be a bad dream, but it cements this movie as something different. Me now. I would have loved to have seen more of Robert Shea and New Line Cinema and more about how they actually feel about bringing Freddie back in this way. And maybe then commenting on how strange it is the Wes Craven script is exactly what they're saying in real life. I'd have liked more real life Heather, Robert Englund, Robert Shea and Wes Craven than Dylan. I understand why Dylan is there to have the conflict they need to give to Heather, but the premise deserves more meta than it actually gives us. Just like the last episode on Candyman, as soon as you stop telling the stories, the Urban Legends need them to survive. New nightmare is 100% an appreciation for the mind and storytelling ability of the late Wes Craven. A master of horror in so many ways, he knew about the effects of censorship on art and so he honored the classic and it led to a movie being a trailblazer for how horror would evolve. Wes Craven said that Scream was a movie for people who watch horror movies and New Nightmare was a movie for people who make horror movies. Scream may be credited for refreshing the slasher, but we all know New Nightmare is Wes Craven's real life meta horror masterpiece. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Wes Craven's New Nightmare and thank you for your continued support of this podcast. If you want to get involved and you want to help this podcast grow and reach more people, you could leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast. You can find me and follow me across social media. I'm at verbaldiorama, where you can like post, comment on posts, share posts. It all helps with the visibility of this podcast and you can also tell your friends and family, especially if they are a huge Freddy Krueger fan, but maybe not so much the children. If you like this episode on Wes Craven's New Nightmare, you may also enjoy the episodes that I have done. Back in the day. Episode 64 was on screen. That was a very early episode of this podcast, and then episode 275 on the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. Please let me know if you do listen to those episodes what you think of those episodes, and hopefully you will enjoy them as much as you enjoyed this one. So the next episode of the podcast, we're kind of stepping back from the real genuine horror scares to something that is a little bit more aimed at children. In fact, it is definitely aimed at children because it's on Disney plus and it is a Disney movie and it's a Disney movie that a lot of parents put on at Halloween because kids really love the movie. I remember absolutely adoring this movie when it first came out. I would watch it all the time. It's only really as an adult that I can actually see that maybe this movie isn't the greatest Halloween movie ever made, but back when I was a kid I absolutely loved the movie Hocus Pocus and I find Hocus Pocus so interesting when we talk about the history and legacy of movies in that when Hocus Pocus came out it was not a hit at all, but over the years it's become a genuine Halloween classic that people do put on every year. It recently had a sequel which is not as good, but the original retains a lot of that really campy, classic Halloween fun. And unlike Wes Craven's new nightmare, it is very suitable for children. And so I wanted to give you all this spooky season for October on Verbal Diorama a mix of stuff for Halloween. So you've got your scary movies and you've also got something that is very suitable for children. Please join me next week for the history and legacy of Hocus Pocus. Now, if you enjoy what I do for this podcast or you simply just want to support an indie podcaster who does literally everything on her own, if you have some spare change, you can financially contribute to the upkeep of this podcast. If you have the means to, you're under no obligation because this podcast is free and it always will be. However, if you do want to help, I would be incredibly grateful. You can make a one off donation@verbaldiorama.com tips or you can subscribe to the patreon@verbaldiorama.com patreon and all money made goes back into this podcast by paying for things like software subscriptions, website hosting or new equipment. Because unfortunately podcasting is not free. I am very grateful to the people who do regularly support this podcast. Simon, Laurel, Derek, Kat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Ian, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Dave, Stuart, Nicholas so Kev, Heather, Danny, Stu, Brett, Philip M. Xenos, Sean, Rhino, Philip K, Adam, Elaine, Kyle, Aaron, and Connor. If you want to get in touch, you can email verbaldiorama@gmail.com you can also go to the website verbaldiorama.com and fill out the little contact form that's on there. You can say hi. You can give feedback, you can give suggestions, and every single episode of Verbal Diorama is also available on the website too if you would like to listen that way. Alternatively, your podcast app is probably your best bet, but they are all available on the website as well. And if you've listened to an episode recently and you'd like to get in touch, or you'd like to ask a question, or you'd like to know something, as always, please feel free to give me a message on email or alternatively, if you follow me on social media, you can give me a DM as well. And finally,

Bye.