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adventures in Wonderland to have been a dream – a narrative device which is often applied in the Nightmare
series as well, and which causes the ontological uncertainty it confronts us with:
‘He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’
Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’
‘Why, about YOU!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.
‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’
‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.
‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously.
‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’
‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!’ 22
In this essay, I have shown how the bed is given a new interpretation in Wes Craven’s horror films, A Nightmare
on Elm Street, and New Nightmare, where it is detached from positive connotations as a place of repose and
safety and charged with images of horror and violence. As the entry point into the realm of dreams, or in this
case, nightmares, it is connected to a mortal danger for its occupants, who are chased and killed in their
nightmares by Fred Krueger. Moreover, he can even use the bed to exit the world of dreams and enter reality,
while at the same time, the dreamers can learn to willingly enter his world (and even to bring him out of it).
The bed thus also turns into the starting point of an adventure, during which the dreamers can defeat the killer,
or possibly turn into his victims. While the idea of the bed functioning as a gateway into Krueger’s land of
horrors is only hinted at in Nightmare 1, New Nightmare elaborates on it, literally revealing a tunnel under the
bedcovers, thus in a way aligning Nightmare with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the Nightmare series,
dream and reality are often difficult or impossible to tell apart – for the viewers as well as for the characters
inside the diegesis. 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). New Nightmare in particular reflects on the production
of horror films themselves, as it, first, revolves around characters involved in film production and, second,
depicts horror plots as (at least sometimes) originating from nightmares.
References / Notes
1 Dir. by Wes Craven, New Line Cinema (1984)
2 Dir. by Tobe Hooper, Vortex (1974)
3 Dir. by John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures and Falcon International Productions (1978)
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