So in planning what was supposed to be this week's posts for this thing I write right here, I planned a commentary on the Nightmare on Elm Street films, having watched the comprehensive documentary about them, Never Sleep Again. It's a good cautionary tale about the pitfalls of franchising, neatly illustrating many of the things I described as problems when I used the Saw films as an example. Needless to say, I am not very complimentary in my notes.
And then I decided, since I was already thinking about the Nightmare on Elm Street films, that it might be time to revisit Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which I found sort of dull when I originally saw it a year or two after it came out. And I can't honestly say I did a complete reversal on it.
I planned all of this, and the day before I planned to post the piece based on Never Sleep Again, Wes Craven passed away.
So now...doesn't feel like the time to criticize films he made. Wes Craven made some really important films, and it feels a little unseemly to, now of all times, pick apart stuff he did. So that will be for a later week, after some time has passed. All I'll say right now is that it's a damn shame that nobody since him has seemed to know what to do with the ideas in the first Nightmare film, New Nightmare was a great idea that was hamstrung from reaching its full potential by what were probably commercial considerations, I really need to watch Last House on the Left one of these days, and Scream is one of the few slasher films I really like. R.I.P.
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