Wes Craven’s New Nightmare introduced a new villain to the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, but what made the Entity different from original series baddie Freddy Krueger? A few years before he turned screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s spec script Scary Movie into the meta-slasher blockbuster Scream, director/horror cinema legend Wes Craven took his first critically-acclaimed swing at self-referential scares with 1994’s New Nightmare. A self-aware sequel to the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, the movie addressed audience complaints that Freddy had become corny and un-scary by having Freddy himself cut a bloody swathe through the people who made his movies.
Only it's not technically Freddy doing the killings at all, as the movie's witty, mind-bending premise was one whose plot machinations required the creation of the Entity, a villain distinct from Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger. Despite being played by Robert Englund and wielding a razor glove, the villain of New Nightmare is technically the Entity, and not the Freddy seen in the previous movies.
New Nightmare's premise takes place in "reality," and sees an ancient demonic being referred to only as "the Entity" taking on the form of mankind's literal worst nightmare of the current era, which in the case of the early 90s, was Freddy Krueger. The idea behind New Nightmare is that the Entity’s power had been contained within the fictional Nightmare On Elm Street universe while the series was still in production, but after it wrapped up, the Entity is free to cross over into reality via Nancy actress Heather Langenkamp and her (fictional) son Dylan.
Despite the Entity taking the form of Freddy Krueger for this epoch of history since the Springwood slasher is such a culturally resonant monster, there are several notable differences between the two. The changes come in the form of the Entity’s appearance and attitude, and Craven cannily uses both to critique the cartoon-ier, less-scary Freddy of later Nightmare sequels. In terms of physical appearance, the Entity eschews Freddy’s homemade razor claws in favor of an organic glove that even includes a thumb blade, and its waxy skin is cracked instead of burned. The latter is an effective change that makes the character less potentially offensive and more genuinely otherworldly, and one the critically-reviled Nightmare On Elm Street remake foolishly opted to reverse.
The Entity is also more muscular than Freddy as viewers know him and mostly avoids indulging in goofy, punning wisecracks to make him a more genuinely scary threat. In one of the easiest differences for casual viewers to spot, the Entity has an inverted color scheme on his trademark jumper and - for some unknowable reason - leather pants. He can also come into the real world, unlike the fictional Freddy, blurring the line of what is reality or fantasy and rendering the threat of New Nightmare more uncomfortably resonant than its franchise predecessors.