download this issue as a PDF

CRITICAL
‘NEVER SLEEP AGAIN’ – HORRIFIC BEDS IN WES
CRAVEN’S NIGHTMARES
Katharina Rein, Humboldt-University of Berlin
Katharina Rein holds an M.A. in Cultural History and Theory from the Humboldt-University of Berlin, where she
currently works on her PhD dissertation concerning media and magic in the late 19th century. She is employed
as a research and teaching assistant at the Deptartment of Media Studies of the Bauhaus-University of Weimar.
Katharina Rein published several articles on horror film and other topics of cultural history in German and
English as well as a monograph on the horror classic "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) (in German).
Website: http://katharina-rein.blogspot.de/
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I analyse the motif of the bed in regard of its representation in two horror films directed by Wes
Craven: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and New Nightmare (1994). The discussion of scenes in which beds
play a central role in those two features reveals that beds are more and more detached from positive
connotations as spaces of repose and safety, and charged with images of horror and violence instead. Moreover,
beds are depicted as entry points into the realm of dreams, or in this case, nightmares. Thus they are connected
to a mortal danger for their occupants, who are chased and killed in their nightmares by Fred Krueger, a
supernatural phantom of a murdered child molester and killer, haunting the teenagers’ dreams. In the
Nightmare series, dream and reality are often difficult or impossible to tell apart – for the viewers as well as for
the characters themselves. The films thus hint at a problem philosophy has been linking to dreaming for
centuries – the difficulty to distinguish the two states of existence and to decide which of the two is ‘real,’ or
perhaps ‘more real’ than the other. In the Nightmare series, this border is often blurred as the teenagers’
nightmares often appear to be no less ‘real’ than their waking existence, sometimes the former are even more
exciting and adventurous than the latter (especially in the sequels). Finally, especially New Nightmare reflects
on the production of horror films itself, as it, first, revolves around characters involved in film production and,
second, depicts horror plots as (at least sometimes) originating from nightmares.
---
Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 is today regarded as an indisputable classic of the horror genre.
However, compared to other milestones of modern horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 , Halloween 3 or
Friday the 13th 4 , the Nightmare series received relatively little academic attention. The success of the first
14