Wes Craven's New Nightmare - Production

Production

Written under the working title of A Nightmare on Elm Street 7: The Ascension, Wes Craven set out to make a deliberately more cerebral film than recent entries to the franchise—which he regarded as cartoonish and not faithful to his original themes. The basic premise of this film originated when Craven first signed on to co-write A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but New Line Cinema rejected it then.

In New Nightmare, Freddy Krueger was portrayed closer to what Craven had imagined; darker and less comical. To correspond with this, the make-up and outfit of the character was different, with one of the most prominent differences being that he now wears a long, black trenchcoat. In addition, the signature glove was redesigned for a more organic look, with the fingers resembling bones and having muscle textures in between. While Robert Englund again plays the character, "Freddy Krueger" is credited as "Himself" in the end credits.

Craven had intended to ask Johnny Depp, whose feature film debut was in A Nightmare on Elm Street, to make an appearance as himself, but Craven was too timid to ask him. Upon running into each other after the film's release, Depp said he would have been happy to do it.

Nick Corri and Tuesday Knight, who co-starred in the original and fourth Nightmare movies respectively, can be briefly seen in the funeral scene. They have no speaking parts.

All of the earthquake sequences in New Nightmare were filmed a month prior to the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles. The real quake struck only weeks before film was completed. Subsequently, a team was sent out to film footage of the actual quake damaged areas of the city. The cast and crew thought that the scenes that were filmed before the real quake struck were a bit overdone, but when viewed after the real quake hit, they were horrified by the realism of it.