Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

More than any other movie genre, horror tends to benefit most from sensationalist headlines recapping hyperbolic audience reactions from initial screenings. Terrifier 2, which is still playing in theaters at the moment, has reportedly been making viewers faint and vomit at the cinema. Earlier this year, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future was, according to one source, expected to cause walk-outs and panic attacks in moviegoers. When Goodnight Mommy premiered at Venice Film Festival in 2014, it didn’t provoke responses quite as extreme as those other films but by the time it was released in the US over a year later, the Austrian import had nevertheless developed a formidable reputation for itself as a disturbing tour de force in familial horror.

The film begins with twin brothers Lukas and Elias (played by real-life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) racing around playing games outside their home in the countryside. Their mother (played by Susanne Wuest) soon returns from a cosmetic surgery procedure that has left her face and hair covered in creepy bandages. Aside from her off-putting appearance, her demeanor is more strict than usual and her punishments on the boys seem to be more severe too. The changes are drastic enough that the twins become obsessed with the notion that this woman may not be their mom and may instead be some kind of imposter who has taken her place. Determined to learn the truth, Lukas and Elias take drastic measures to find out what is really going on.

Goodnight Mommy is psychological horror in the most pure sense because it chiefly concerns how one idea, no matter how strange or unlikely, can consume our thoughts and our minds. The seeds of doubt beg for water to grow roots and watching the tree blossom as an outside observer can be a terrifying process. By the time the twins realize how far they’ve been taken with this conviction that a stranger could be posing as their mother, it’s already far too late. This certainly isn’t the most violent horror film out there but the context of its bloodshed makes it more squirm-inducing than movies where random bystanders meet grisly ends. We know these three characters so well before the acts of violence begin, which makes it more difficult to sit through.

This is a testament to the steadfast trio of performances at the movie’s heart that draws us further into the excruciating mystery at the center of the story. Wuest and the Schwarzes play characters that have quite a few ugly traits; Mother is often sullen and stern after her arrival home, where the boys are often mischievous and disobedient even before they begin their nefarious investigation. The unsettling material that comes later in the movie doesn’t work unless we already have empathy for these people first and the performers put in the work to give us those emotional stakes. For some, this family may just be too cold-blooded to garner much sympathy but I found their struggle to be as enthralling as it was heartbreaking.

Goodnight Mommy is the fictional feature debut for Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala after a documentary they made together two years prior. The influence of fellow Austrian director Michael Haneke, specifically his psychological thrillers Funny Games and Caché, can be felt throughout Franz and Fiala’s unshakable chiller. Like Haneke, the pair understands that absence of stimulus can be much more frightening than too much. The rural lake house that serves as the film’s primary location is devoid of any decorative sentimentalities on the inside or outside that would seem even vaguely comforting. The set design is stark and utilitarian, with every edge of the interiors being cut with the kind of clinical precision that was presumably used during the inciting surgical event.

This chilly aesthetic also applies to the brilliantly sparing music score by Olga Neuwirth, which allows the terror to build organically in every scene and doesn’t give into easy moments to jolt the audience. The sound design follows suit, giving us enough space between the sonic peaks and valleys to fill our own interpretation to what could be happening behind a door or on the other side of a wall. Some horror movies indulge overly quiet moments to set up a jump scare but Goodnight Mommy follows a different rhythm that may throw American audiences off. Not all European horror films are this patient but the ones that are can be unbearably tense.

It’s no surprise that an international horror movie as effective as this one would generate an American remake but it’s a bit surprising that it wasn’t released with a bit more fanfare behind it. Matt Sobel’s Goodnight Mommy was unceremoniously dumped just last month onto Amazon Prime, a service that’s still working on building up the quality of its original films. Naomi Watts, who, fittingly enough, starred in the US remake of Funny Games, plays the maternal role while Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti play the twin brothers. This new take may work for those who haven’t seen the original but after being so thoroughly taken with it seven years ago, it was hard for me to see the redo as anything but inferior by comparison.

Sobel’s film simultaneously pulls punches where it counts and overplays its hand when it could stand to be more subtle. The thornier subject matter has been cut back so much that it robs the story of its visceral impact and misses the point of what made the original so shocking. The broad strokes of the narrative remain the same but it follows a more Americanized arc that rushes to console us when things get a little too scary. The overbearing music score by Alex Weston supports this notion, telling us exactly how we should feel instead of nudging us into the dark corners to explore. The ending of this new version is meant to leave audiences with the sentiment that “hey, everything might be okay after all!” Comparatively, the final shot from the Austrian original is so eerie that it still haunts me to this day.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

As with many aspects of American culture, the early 1990s proved to be a hangover of sorts for the indulgent excesses of the 1980s and the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series was not immune to this trend. A Nightmare on Elm Street 6, the fifth sequel to 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, premiered in 1991 and promised “Freddy’s Dead” right in the title. New Line Cinema threw out gimmicks like 3D presentation and a mock funeral for Freddy Krueger at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to juice up the box office but our long national Nightmare seemed to be over. The charred boogeyman’s fedora was getting floppy, his sweater more tattered than usual and Freddy needed some new blood. It was time to go back to the street where everything started and to the man who darkly dreamed up this film universe in the first place.

1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare represented the iconic horror director’s return to the series after his pitch for what would become A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 was rejected by the studio. Similarly, the idea of taking this world and making it metacinematic is one that Craven first brainstormed when A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was being conceived but it, too, was also shut down at the time. Apparently 10 years after that initial Nightmare was the right time to get Craven back to the franchise and dream a little bigger. New Nightmare is different enough on the surface from the previous entries in the saga, taking place outside the cinematic universe they created and stepping out of the big screen as Last Action Hero did the year previous. While the film’s metatextual touches were ahead of their time, they’re grafted onto a story with the fedora-furnished Freddy that’s truly old hat.

The movie sets up the movie-within-the-movie premise quite well, echoing the opening shots of the 1984 original and then pulling back to show Wes Craven (playing himself) directing how Freddy’s claws should move for the shot they’re trying to get on-set. He calls “cut” and Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) is shown to be on the shoot along with her husband Chase (David Newsom), who is overseeing special effects on the film. While working with the mechanical claw, Chase and his SFX crew are brutally dispatched by Freddy’s animatronic claw, which moves around with a murderous mind of its own like an even more deranged version of Thing from The Addams Family. But as is far too often the case in New Nightmare, this scene is revealed to be one of Heather’s many bad dreams.

We then see what Heather’s waking moments are like as an alumni from the Nightmare franchise, where she gets prank calls from creeps imitating Freddy and where limo drivers recognize her from that scary movie with the guy who has knives for fingers. Heather goes to the offices of New Line Cinema, where recurring Nightmare producer Robert Shaye (also playing himself) attempts to sell her on reprising the role of Nancy Thompson from the first film for a new sequel. Now that her son Dylan (Miko Hughes) is at an especially impressionable age, she doesn’t feel the time is right to come back to the horror movie scene but Freddy doesn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer. A series of murders and eerie happenings suggest that his evil presence has somehow manifested into the real world and Wes makes it clear to Heather that the only way to put an end to it is to star in a Nightmare movie that will end Freddy for good.

The main issue that hampers New Nightmare is its reluctance to fully commit to the premise that it sets up for itself. This idea of trying to get Langenkamp back for a fictitious sequel should be a fun way to pull back the curtain and see how New Line feels about the series responsible for so much of their success. But Shaye is only in one scene and beyond the opening dream sequence, Craven doesn’t pop up again until much too late in the film. The “how the sausage is made” Hollywood insider material largely takes a backseat to Heather and her family issues, particularly with an increasingly disturbed Dylan. The movie falls into a redundant pattern of depicting Dylan in peril one scene and then Heather having a gory nightmare in the next until it begins to feel like we’re on a blood-soaked treadmill.

Of course there are a smattering of cameos from Robert Englund to John Saxon that pop up as the film world and the real world start to collide. Likewise, there are major and minor callbacks to the original film and its sequels; I particularly enjoyed a hospital-set scene that somehow weaved in the “screw you pass!” line Nancy uttered 10 years prior. But New Nightmare spends too much of its paunchy 112-minute runtime as a “next generation” Nightmare movie instead of an entry that exists outside the franchise’s traditional canon. Freddy gets a makeover that obscures his striped sweater with a slicker and makes his facial burns more polished in comparison to his disfigured face from the other movies. Englund still gives a good performance as Freddy but I don’t find his look as menacing as it is in other Nightmare entries. The makeup and prosthetics were too fussed-over for my liking, calling to mind the cackling Mighty Morphin Power Rangers baddie Ivan Ooze.

While New Nightmare isn’t entirely successful in what it’s trying to achieve, it set Craven up beautifully for his next film: the postmodern slasher Scream. In hindsight, that film’s self-aware characters and their investigation of prevalent horror tropes have their genesis with this Nightmare entry that first attempted to close the gap between our world and the cinematic realm. With a fifth Scream sequel due out next March, it’s possible that franchise will eventually have more chapters than the Nightmare series but whether it’s Ghostface or Freddy who is scaring up audiences throughout the decades, filmmakers like Craven will no doubt find new ways to scare us for generations to come.