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Although they all deal with the same horrors surrounding sleep and nightmares, neither the original Nightmare
nor any of the sequels in between, stresses the motif of the bed as much as New Nightmare does. We frequently
see the characters in their beds, whose function as a gate into Freddy’s world is now emphasized and made
more explicit. While in Nightmare 1, Nancy enters various basements to access Freddy’s realm, in New
Nightmare, the way there is almost always through beds, preferably those her son Dylan sleeps in.
Furthermore, this film introduces a new kind of dream-connected dread: sleepwalking. A motive very popular
in gothic novels and Romantic narratives, it is represented here as dangerous and uncanny. It is Heather’s son
Dylan whose eerie somnambulistic experiences culminate in his crossing a heavily trafficked motorway in his
sleep (01:21-01:22). Sometimes, the boy seems to be possessed by Krueger in his sleepwalking episodes, when
he speaks with a deep and husky voice (01:10) or attaches kitchen knives to his fingers in imitation of Freddy’s
glove, with which he attacks his mother (00:50). He even watches Nightmare 1 while sleepwalking, which is
broadcast on a television set come to life, turning itself on without being plugged in (00:37-00:39, 01:25). In his
essay ‘Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,’ Noël Carroll argues that
horror films ‘may release some part of the tensions that would otherwise erupt in nightmares’ and thus fulfil a
valve function that prevents psychological tensions. 17 Carroll thus provides another link between the bed as the
place of nightmares and horror film, introducing the idea that both might perform a similar function for the
human psyche, whereas watching horror films might prevent one from having nightmares. Thus, it might be
argued, it is a mistake of Heather’s to not let her son watch Nightmare 1, which might have catalysed his fears
before they turned into nightmares. By suppressing her past, she, moreover repeats the behaviour of Nancy’s
parents in Nightmare 1, who are reluctant to tell their children about their murderous raid on Krueger, even
when Nancy asks about him and names him as her friends’ murderer (00:44-00:45). Starring in Nightmare 1,
thus appears as a kind of trauma of Heather’s (also following her in the shape of the stalker who pretends to be
Freddy) which she strives to conceal from her son but indirectly traumatises him through her silence instead –
just as the parents in Nightmare 1 let their children come to harm by not telling them about Krueger.
Dylan also screams and seems to have fits in his sleep, apparently resulting from terrible nightmares in which
he is chased by Freddy. In 00:21 he repeatedly says ‘Never sleep again,’ the last line of the characteristic
nursery rhyme established in the first Nightmare and recurring as a signifier of Freddy Krueger’s presence
throughout the series. Moreover, Dylan also – typically for a somnambulist – apparently gets frightened or in
some way shocked when he is awoken from his sleepwalking by his mother and starts screaming each time this
happens (00:38, 00:51). During the telephone scene, a homage to the famous scene from Nightmare 1, the child
even seems to be mysteriously connected to the telephone out of which Freddy’s tongue emerges, when the
same vesicating saliva emerges from his mouth and from the telephone at the same time. Even before that, the
technical medium merges with a spiritualistic one when Dylan writes the words ‘answer the phone,’ puzzled
together from single letters Heather received from her terrorizing stalker, right before the phone rings. When
she picks it up, Heather finds that it is Freddy – or her stalker pretending to be him, if he indeed exists – on the
phone. Here, telephone and child turn into spiritualistic media, the former establishing contact to another
world instead of another phone set, and the latter mimicking the phone’s supernatural behaviour by spitting
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