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.