Dylan’s New Nightmare
It’s been a hard life for Dylan Porter, growing up in the land of dreams in whose shadow lurks a nightmare, his father, Chase, a Hollywood special effects artist who died when he was young, his mother, Heather, an actress whose close association with a particular role in an ongoing horror series took its toll, Dylan having been effectively alone since her breakdown and admission to the Burbank Psychiatric Hospital.
An aspiring actor himself, regardless of how familiar the grind of auditions and rejections becomes, for Dylan it has become his recurring nightmare, exacerbated when a casting director sat across from him behind a table of bad headshots becomes distracted by the past, realising who Dylan is and all that his past entails, a spiral into another nightmare of the man in the jersey and hat with the razor glove…
Described as a Nightmare on Elm Street Fan Film, Dylan’s New Nightmare is written and directed by Cecil Laird, based upon the characters and situations created by Wes Craven, not only Freddy Krueger but most specifically the events of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the meta-horror which served as the seventh in the series and also a commentary on the impact of the previous in the industry and on those involved in their production.
Already an experienced film actor when he first appeared as Dylan in 1994 having made his feature debut in Pet Sematary in 1989, Miko Hughes reprises the role as an adult, trying to come to terms with the past and focus on the present with the help of Doctor Sarah Silbe (Friday the 13th Part VI‘s Cynthia Kania) while haunted by “the Entity” (Dave McRae), something he prefers not to discuss but which Silbe pushes him to express so long as it fits within her billed hours.
The opening audition scene for Hatchet V: Crawley’s Revenge balancing comedy, horror and character as it plays its sick joke on a man willingly wading into a swamp, Dylan’s New Nightmare struggles as it moves past that into the brightly lit therapy session, Silbe considering Dylan’s exposure to “cheap horror movies” at a young age and his resulting childhood delusions and resultant trauma, but with too little time beyond that to develop or resolve the ideas it feels an unfinished premise just beginning to explore waters deep and dark.
Where Dylan’s New Nightmare does succeed is in the atmosphere of the dream sequences, particularly the transitions between nightmare and waking and the lingering holdovers which remain, and the production values and performances, built around Hughes but with McRae an effective substitute who enjoys delivering a bad joke with every bloody kill as much as Robert Englund, and in the soundtrack which channels eighties chick rawk courtesy of the suitably named Nancy and the Nightmares.
Dylan’s New Nightmare is currently available on YouTube
