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Freddy-saliva (in the place of ectoplasm), which has supposedly emerged from this very other world that was
contacted by the phone. The uncanny state of somnambulism, which is of course linked to sleep, is thus staged
in its most eerie and shocking way, presenting the boy mysteriously connected to the supernatural force, the
realm of the dead and displaying a behaviour which is dangerous for him as well as for others.
However important technical media such as the telephone and the television set might be in serving Freddy’s
entry into the ‘real’ world, Dylan’s bed figures more prominently in this regard. In the very first sequence,
apparently a remake of Nightmare 1 is being shot on a film set (the scene replays exactly the beginning of
Nightmare 1: Freddy manufacturing his murder weapon), when a special effect, a mechanical Freddy claw, goes
wild and starts attacking the crew. Dylan runs off and sits on a prop bed, only then to immediately disappear
from it when his mother’s view on him is blocked (00:04). Similar to Nightmare 1, these events are
subsequently revealed as taking place in a nightmare of Heather Langenkamp’s when we see her awakening
from it. Moreover, we are immediately placed in her and her husband’s as well as their son’s beds, where all of
them wake up during an earthquake and his parents then rush over to Dylan to shield him with their bodies
(00:05). Thus, already in the very beginning, the bed is introduced as a central motif as well as a place in which
the film’s action is set, at the same time being marked as uncanny: it is where you wake up from nightmares
only to find yourself and/or your loved ones in danger.
In contrast, we see the bed represented as a place of familial togetherness, in another scene, when Heather
Langenkamp reads a fairy tale – the Grimm brothers’ Hansel and Gretel, which will be referenced several times
throughout the picture – to Dylan in his bed, accompanied by another optical medium which, unlike the
television set, receives a positive connotation: a magic lantern displaying rotating, colourful dinosaurs (00:24-
00:25). The fairy tale’s brutality and the mother’s resulting reluctance to finish its reading, point to
inappropriate bedtime stories leaving children scared and unable to go to sleep, and quickly overshadow the
intimate familial situation. Dylan eventually reveals to his mother that ‘the mean old man with the claws’ tries
to come out of his bed and that his plush dinosaur, Rex, ‘keeps him down there,’ in his function of Dylan’s
‘guard’ (00:26-00:27). It thus becomes explicit that the bed again figures as a direct gate into another world,
into Freddy Krueger’s world of nightmares, who, as it turns out, and as Wes Craven himself explains (00:59-
00:61), never was merely a fictive character but is an archetype of evil itself that can be temporarily captured if
shaped into various fictive incorporations such as Freddy Krueger or the wicked witch from the Grimm
brothers’ fairy tales. As Joseph Maddrey pointed out, ‘fictional films, New Nightmare suggests, allow us to cope
with the existence of such monsters.’ 18 It is this primal fear turned into an archetype that is strongly linked to
the bed in New Nightmare; the evil monster hiding under the bed, or emerging from it, cutting through
Heather’s bed sheet (00:49), or crawling out of a hole which appears in Dylan’s bed after his mother has left the
room. In another scene, the archetypal Freddy literally comes out of the closet and subsequently lands on
Heather Langenkamp’s bed to wrestle with her (00:65), reminding us of his dubious sexual connotation
established in Nightmare 1 and preserved throughout the series.
The bed thus turns into a place of horror; Dylan’s bed in the hospital appears as a trap, when he is first encased
inside a latticed bedstead, and later under an oxygen tent, literally wrapped in plastic. It is a recurring theme in
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