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Nightmare prompted five sequels from various directors, followed by New Nightmare 5 , Freddy vs. Jason 6 , and a
remake in 2010 (starring Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger - the first of the Nightmare franchise in which
Krueger is not portrayed by Robert Englund). 7 An incredible amount of various Nightmare-connected
merchandising ranging from Freddy’s razor-blade glove for Halloween costumes, to cereals and board as well
as computer games, testifies to the cult status it enjoys even today, almost thirty years after the original feature.
Isabel Cristina Pinedo classifies the pictures of the Nightmare on Elm Street series as postmodern – a category
which, according to her, displays the following five characteristics:
1. Horror constitutes a violent disruption of the everyday world.
2. Horror transgresses and violates boundaries.
3. Horror throws into question the validity of rationality.
4. Postmodern horror repudiates narrative closure.
5. Horror produces a bounded experience of fear. 8
Although the five sequels from the period between 1985 and 1991 lose many of the elements established in the
original feature and stress or introduce others 9 , all films of the Nightmare series have the elements named
above in common. Furthermore, they introduce and shape an iconic villain, composed of the characteristics of
various Gothic and modern horror monsters, and recognizable by his appearance: the garden glove with razors
attached to its fingers, his red-and-green-striped sweater, a shabby hat (although in New Nightmare, Freddy’s
appearance is awkwardly new and stainless) and scarred face. On an acoustic level, Krueger is accompanied by
a characteristic tune as well as a nursery rhyme about him, often sung by girls dressed in white, who are
skipping rope or hopscotching.
By featuring heroes and heroines whose only way to fight the supernatural killer is to neglect sound judgement
in order to accept the premise that they can be killed by someone in their nightmares, the series also questions
ideals of rationality. Further, as has been often noted by others, the series plays with sexual taboos by hinting at
(or sometimes bluntly stating) Krueger’s paedophilia, at the same time demarcating him as a dominant father
figure to his victims. As I have argued in detail elsewhere 10 , part of the Nightmares’ success results from various
forms of disruptions reflected and deployed in the pictures, in particular the disruption of the discriminability
of dream and reality. This topic touches upon a primordial ontological insecurity, frequently addressed in the
history of philosophy from Plato to Zhuanghzi to René Descartes. Associated with this theme is the motif of the
bed, whose representation in the two Nightmares directed by Wes Craven in 1984 and 1994 I am going to
analyse in this paper. For this purpose, I will first consider scenes in which beds play a central role in A
Nightmare on Elm Street, where the bed is turned into a symbol of horror and is established as a possible portal
into the world of deadly nightmares. In the second section, I will turn to New Nightmare, where beds constitute
an even more central motif as their function as an entry point to a different reality is focussed and emphasized.
I will thus show how these two films address various fears connected to beds and sleep, for which the bed
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