Freddy Krueger Summoned A Real Earthquake In Scariest True Story Nightmare

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare has become a celebrated cult classic, but it was considered a flop at the time of release. It had the smallest box office return of any movie featuring Freddy Krueger and was panned by critics, with much of the criticism being levied at its focus on earthquakes instead of Freddy.

It was re-evaluated after Scream created the meta-horror trend, with fans pointing to its commentary on the role of horror and its real-world connections and declaring it a masterpiece of the emerging subgenre. 

The earthquake in New Nightmare serves as the harbinger of a dark entity manifesting as Freddy Krueger, emerging to torment the cast and crew of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It centers on Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the original movie, as Freddy haunts her and her family. The haunting begins as she’s starting work on a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie and it becomes clear that her haunting is being directed by Wes Craven’s script for that film inside the film. 

The natural disaster was always part of the script for New Nightmare, but in January 1994, as it was being shot the Northridge earthquake occurred. While small earthquakes are common in California, the 1994 disaster was catastrophic, killing 54 people and injuring thousands more. It also caused billions of dollars worth of damage with some estimates reaching as high as $50 billion. 

Scenes in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare involving the characters reacting to the earthquakes had to be shot on sets, but much of the film features real damage in establishing shots and aftermath scenes. The wreckage of real buildings and streets ravaged by the disaster peppered throughout the movie gives the fictional disaster an uncanny real feeling. It blurs the boundary between our reality and the film’s reality as its characters are experiencing the same thing. 

Some of the most interesting shots in New Nightmare are the shots featuring Northridge earthquake damage. While news footage of such disasters is easy to find, seeing the aftermath shot on high-quality cameras with cinematic sensibilities is much more rare. It makes the movie visually fascinating and adds a sense of pervasive dread, heightened by the knowledge that the damage is real. 

In New Nightmare Freddy Krueger isn’t the vengeful spirit of a child murderer, he’s an embodiment of fear itself. By connecting that character to a source of real horror, an actual massive earthquake, Wes Craven’s story about using fiction to control that fear is given more power. While Freddy isn’t real, the Northridge disaster demonstrates that the terror he represents is.