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the Nightmare series that Freddy-fearing children do their best to stay awake as long as possible, while adults
sabotage their efforts. Occasionally, parents even facilitate their children’s death by secretly administering
sleeping pills (for instance, Kristen’s mother gets her killed by this procedure in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 –
The Dream Master 19 ). In contrast, in New Nightmare, it is Heather Langenkamp/Nancy – the exceptional mother
who knows what kind of evil is after her child – who keeps drinking coffee (as opposed to the alcohol Nancy’s
mother is constantly drinking in Nightmare 1, which has a sleep-inducing instead of a stimulating effect) and at
some point strives to keep her son awake, while the nurses in the hospital endanger Dylan by trying to put him
to sleep at all costs. However, considering that sleep is potentially deadly in a world inhabited by Krueger, the
hospital bed quickly loses its comforting function as a space where one can recover and get well again and is
further charged with negative connotations.
Down the Rabbit Hole
During her husband’s funeral in New Nightmare, Heather apparently passes out and experiences a
dream/vision in which the casket falls open due to an earthquake taking place (or possibly being part of
Heather’s subjective experience as well) and she sees Dylan being dragged into a hole in the casket by Freddy.
When she jumps after him and gets him out, her husband’s corpse suddenly comes to life and – as an agent of
Freddy’s – tells her to stay with him, i.e. to die (00:36-00:38). Here, the entrance to Freddy’s realm leads past
the place of the dead father’s eternal sleep (which is what Freddy always aims to give to his victims) and
apparently into the earth below. As mentioned above, children’s literature, especially fairy tales are referenced
in New Nightmare, for instance in the scene after Dylan’s disappearance when his mother discovers that he, reenacting
Hansel and Gretel, left her a trail to follow – one of sleeping pills instead of bread crumbs (01:26-
01:28). After swallowing these, Heather discovers a tunnel in Dylan’s bed, under the covers, similar to the one
in her husband’s casket. She climbs inside it and soon finds herself sliding and then falling until she lands inside
a water basin (01:29). Moreover, Heather’s journey through the hole in the bed to a fantastic as well as eerie
land is reminiscent of another piece of children’s literature, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
In another moment down went Alice after it [the rabbit], never once considering how in the world she
was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped
suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she
found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. 20
Like Carroll’s Alice, Heather climbs into a bed, here figuring as an equivalent to the rabbit hole which then turns
out to contain a long tunnel. Furthermore, she, too, has to digest something to get into the right condition for
that journey, just as Alice often eats or drinks something in Wonderland in order to change her size, for
instance when she eats a cake to become smaller and subsequently find herself in the pool of tears, similar to
Heather’s rough landing in a pool of water. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland as well as its inhabitants often appear
rather nightmarish, disconcerting and uncanny – a quality which is stressed in several of its adaptations, for
instance in Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, and others. 21 Finally, at the end of the narrative, we see Alice wake up,
without her explicitly having falling asleep in the beginning. It is only this later event that reveals her
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