One, Two, L.A.'s Coming For You (also, abolish ICE)

This week, metacinema, extreme discomfort, and a wild serial killer thriller (light spoilers below). Be warned, there's a suicide attempt mentioned in section 3 below.

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Wes Craven's New Nightmare, dir. Wes Craven, 1994.

1. Quaking in our sweaters. New Nightmare situates its story of Freddy’s emergence into the real world—the world populated by the Elm Street franchise’s director and its actors—in a Los Angeles plagued by earthquakes. The movie begins with an earthquake (after a dream sequence, naturally) which is itself an aftershock. And they keep coming (we’re eventually told that there have been five tremors in three weeks). It’s a useful context because the Elm Street films have always offered us a fundamentally unreliable world. Dream and reality always blur together. A Los Angeles of tensed, slipping faults is an unreliable place. A city of rolling earth and cracking walls has much of the pervasive, unpredictable danger, and much of the surreality, of dream-plagued Elm Street.
2. Dream factory. People think of Southern California as “fake,” so it’s an interesting place to explore unreality, an exploration that extends, in New Nightmare, beyond the dream/waking-life border, to the heart of Southern California’s unreal—the cinema. Here, though, the cinema has real world weight. One of the great metacinema horror movies (and a rehearsal for another metacinematic gem—Scream), New Nightmare refuses to distinguish the cinema from reality. This is a film in which actors confuse themselves with their characters, Heather Langenkamp (the actor who plays final girl Nancy in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street ) receives harassing phone calls from a man with a “Freddy voice,” and it is suggested that at least one (maybe all) of the earthquakes are Freddy-related, not in fact slipping tectonic plates. It’s also a movie in which its script itself plays a central role. All the bad phenomena seem to have started when Wes Craven began writing the script—the script for New Nightmare. After a scene in which Heather talks to Wes, we cut to his computer screen on which the precise conversation we've witnessed is written in script form. Near the end of the movie, Heather flips open the script and we read, “…there was no movie. There was only her life.” This is true only in the sense that there’s no meaningful distinction between the two. As dream and reality blur throughout the Elm Street films, cinema and reality blend here as well.
3. Antisocial Freddy Club. New Nightmare, like Scream, toys with the idea that horror exerts an antisocial effect. Heather has an uneasy relationship with fan culture—taken aback by the rabid Freddy fans at her talk show appearance and tormented by harassing phone calls. Even worse, there’s the concern that what’s wrong with Dylan, her son, is exposure to her movies. He has strange episodes, speaks in a weird voice, jumps off the top of a jungle gym, and is ultimately hospitalized. His doctor certainly attributes his troubles with exposure to the Elm Street franchise. And yet the voice on the phone, and Dylan’s torment, ultimately seems not to emerge from horror culture, but from Freddy himself. And the Elm Street movies turn out not to be sources of evil, but useful containers for an ancient evil (whose current form is Freddy). New Nightmare itself is making things safe again, putting Freddy back in the bottle. With the recurring references to Hansel & Gretel in New Nightmare, Craven’s drawing our attention to the links between violent, gruesome fairy tales and horror. Horror, like fairy tales, might reveal and reproduce darker features of the human experience, but it contains and processes these features too.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ The Ugly Stepsister, dir. Emilie Blichfeldt, 2025.

4. Communal Ick. The Ugly Stepsister rewards the big screen moviegoer, though maybe “reward” is the wrong word. It is a comedy, of a sort, and there is some of the communal laughter that can be a pleasant part of the theatrical experience. But more than laughter, there are the sounds people make out of deep discomfort—gasps, groans, exclamations. A story about misogyny and beauty standard-fueled bodily transformation, The Ugly Stepsister is not just about the body—it’s felt in the body too. An ordeal like this one is best experienced in community.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ Angel Dust, dir. by Gakuryū Ishii, 1994.

5. Even more. Angel Dust starts with silent, syringe murders on the Tokyo subway, every week at the same time, on the same line, and proceeds to get even more bizarre. A stylish, mind-bending horror thriller, interested in the social fabric—in cults, brainwashing, and public dread—Angel Dust is a scary, stimulating trip. (It’s on YouTube!)

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

After tragedies in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, it is more clear than ever that ICE has no place in a just or moral nation. Abolish it.