The production company behind this one, Platinum Dunes, has put out seven other horror movies over the past decade, focusing mostly on reboots of successful old franchises. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about what they’re doing, and as the company is headed by poisonous film director Michael Bay, I can’t help but wonder if they’re all true. They take beloved old franchises, attach a relatively inexperienced director of commercials or music videos, and proceed to make homogenized, generic looking bastardizations of classic horror films that people love. It should be noted up front that I’m not much of a fan of the horror genre to begin with. When people complain about the “classics” of the genre being ruined, I roll my eyes a bit. Are these people looking back at films they enjoyed as children with rose-colored glasses, or do they really feel that they hold up as worthwhile works? I’ve seen their remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and while I don’t remember it well, what I do remember isn’t good. The original, while not the great film that genre fans make it out to be, does have a grittiness and disturbing reality that was completely lost in the remake. The Platinum Dunes version felt less like a down and dirty slasher flick and more like the cast of a WB drama cashing a paycheck. I haven’t seen any of their other reboots, but based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre alone, I can say that I understand many of the complaints that people might have about this new A Nightmare on Elm Street existing. In my opinion they’re unfounded. I can’t say that this version of A Nightmare on Elm Street is any great achievement, but it’s at least on par with the so-called classics of the genre, and I feel a better film than the original.
Despite my low expectations and lack of enthusiasm for the horror genre in general, I should say that I was a pretty big Freddy Krueger fan as a kid. I watched all of the original films, I dressed as him for Halloween when I was in the third grade, I had a plastic knifed Freddy glove that was one of my prized possessions; Freddy was just downright cool. When other slasher icons like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers were methodically, silently stalking their prey; Freddy was taunting them, having a good time with his work, giving the whole grizzly business a little OOMPH. While those other guys were slicing up their victims with boring, everyday household items like butcher’s knives and machetes, Freddy had made himself an entire hand of knife fingers that was pretty much the coolest thing that my young mind could conceive of. The glove, the striped sweater, the burned face, it all adds up to an image that is a powerful, iconic part of pop culture. So, this film’s portrayal of the character was going to be a large part of whether or not I viewed it as a success.
Freddy Krueger, if you don’t know his story, was the local town weirdo accused of unclear misdeeds against children. In the first film, it was only explicitly stated that he had murdered some kids, but in this update it makes it more clear that he was abusing the town’s kids sexually as well as violently. This makes sense, as Freddy was always quite the pervert in the original series, but they never seemed to want to go to that potentially controversial place of explicitly stating that his crimes were of a sexual nature. In the original he was said to work in a boiler room, here he is portrayed as the groundskeeper of a pre-school. In both films, fed up, the local parents ambush Krueger, lock him inside of a boiler room, and burn him alive. Then, years later, after he is thought to be gone and forgotten, Freddy starts haunting his murderer’s children in their dreams. Jackie Earle Haley seemed like an absolute no brainer for the part. Not only had he played a similarly violent, cartoonish character in Watchmen, he also made huge waves with a riveting performance as a child molester in Little Children. Put those two things together, and you have a perfect archetype for what a modern Freddy Krueger should be. Despite this, the Haley version of the character concerned me throughout this film. Throughout the first act he was dour, meticulous. He didn’t participate in the same motor mouthed mocking that the original version of the character did, and came off as more of a generic, growling killer guy. His burn makeup looked both horrific and realistic, but it lacked a lot of the personality that Robert Englund’s version of the character had. Freddy was a monster, yes, but he was also a showman. He was the leader of a three-ring circus of terror meant to spectacularly break his victims, not just a rabid dog hacking and slashing his way to revenge. Haley showed more range and emotion in the brief glimpses of Fred Krueger as a living, normal person than he did as the dream master. About halfway through the film I was about ready to give up on the character, but then my fears were calmed.
Freddy’s main nemesis, both in the original Nightmare and this one, is a teenage girl named Nancy. In the original Nancy’s mother was one of the parents who took part in Freddy’s murder, but Nancy herself had never had any dealings with him when he was a normal man. This version of the film updates things a bit, making Nancy (Rooney Mara) a student at the pre-school where Krueger worked. She was his favorite of the students, the one he fixated on most. In the original he seems to have picked Nancy as the target of his revenge rather arbitrarily, terrorizing her and her friends just because. Here he is attacking them because of personal reasons. Nancy and her friends were the kids that he abused, they were the faces of his compulsions, and they are the reasons he was murdered. Freddy is a bit lifeless as he mows through the first couple kids in this film, but all that changes once he gets to Nancy. When these two characters start interacting Freddy turns up the taunts, he toys with his prey, he plays sadistic games. Haley cranks up his performance accordingly. In the second half of the film he really finds his Freddyness, and everything starts to come together. He starts emoting under that burn makeup and the face that once looked a bit lifeless and bland suddenly takes a horrifying turn, as you can see the monster buried under it struggling to bubble to the surface. His body language starts to take on the dramatic, showy nature that I remembered the character for. Freddy starts having fun again, he gets his groove back God dang it! But, while the original portrayal of the character could become a little too comic and a little too entertaining at times, subverting the gravity of the situation, Haley’s portrayal of the character is a more grounded sort of sadism that frights more than it delights, all while still keeping the manic energy of the character in tact. By the end of the film this new version of Freddy had really taken shape, and I got on board with what they were doing.
I thought the other actors in the film did a perfectly fine job as well. If you go back and watch the 1984 version of the film, you’ll notice that Heather Langenkamp shows off some really, really bad acting in the lead role. Any time she’s asked to cry or show an emotion other than screaming it just becomes squeamishly uncomfortable. There are no such problems with Mara here, she is perfectly adequate in the role and is asked to shoulder a lot less of the screen time than the original Nancy was, while simultaneously getting a more rounded, fully realized version of the character to live in. Early on there is a kid named Dean (Kellan Lutz) that turned me off. Lutz came off as one of the dimmer bulbs I had seen on the big screen in a while, and I was dreading the proposition of watching him deliver dialogue through the rest of the film, but Freddy thankfully eviscerates him in a timely enough fashion to where he wasn’t able to drag down the film for me. Katie Cassidy plays the role of the female who Freddy comes after that isn’t Nancy, and isn’t really asked to do much more than be pretty and look scared; but she pulls both off with aplomb. Kyle Gallner plays the updated version of the Johnny Depp role from the original, and does a good job in a part that is a bit beefier than what Depp got. While Depp mostly just had to look stupid and fall asleep when he wasn’t supposed to, Gallner’s Quentin takes a much more active role in the battle against Freddy and becomes almost as big a character as Nancy. A lot of what he has to pull off is looking drugged out and on the verge of a breakdown, and while many actors can get pretty hammy trying to project such things, I bought him in his role at every moment.
This review is starting to sound a bit like I’m gushing, and I don’t want to give the impression that I was over the moon for this one. There were a lot of general problems, the most glaring of which being the overuse of imagery from the original version of the film. I understand that the Nightmare series is a seminal, iconic part of horror movie cannon. I’m not suggesting that you should jettison what made it memorable and successful, but if you’re going to use material that already exists rather than crafting your own story and characters, you should throw me more of a curveball with the material than they did here. A large number of the kills in this one happen in the same way and in the same order as in the original. Huge moments are lifted right out of that first film and dropped into this one unchanged. The boiler room imagery, the knife hand scraping on the metal, the floor turning into goo as you try to run, the glove coming up between the girl’s legs in the bathtub, it’s all stuff that we’ve already seen in the first film. The image of Freddy trying to stretch out through the wall above Nancy’s bed is lifted from the original film, but in the original the effect looked realistic and creepy; here, 16 years of technical advancement later, it looked computer generated, cartoony, and stupid. That speaks to a huge problem with modern filmmaking right there. As a filmmaker, if you were handed the character of Freddy Krueger and the world of Elm Street to play around with, wouldn’t the best part be letting your imagination run wild with all the potential possibilities of the material? Wouldn’t you want to play out some of the concepts and ideas that you’ve had in your head for decades growing up as a fan of the series? Did director Samuel Bayer or either of the screenwriters even grow up as fans of the character? It doesn’t seem like it if they were content to just systematically deliver retreads of what we got in the first film. And if they’re not fans of the source material, then why on Earth wouldn’t you get somebody who was to work on something like this?
A bit can be said about the structure of the plot, and how it could have been improved to make the film more effective, as well. We’re dropped, first scene of the film, right into a nightmare. The first thing we get is Freddy’s first kill. He appears in all his glory, flashes around his knife hand, and starts bumping off teenagers before we even get to know them. Have the notions of building tension and suspense been completely forgotten by this current generation of filmmakers? Instead of jumping right into people getting murdered, let us get to know the people first. Maybe then we might actually care. The story could have unfolded much more slowly, and consequently been much more effective. Start with the characters exhibiting subtle signs of sleep deprivation. Give us little false flashes of scary images. Introduce the notion that the kids may all be haunted by the same affliction, and milk some tension out of the fact that they’re all hiding it from each other rather than rallying the troops and working together. The first kill should have capped off the first act of the film, not the first ten minutes. A little bit of delayed gratification and classic story structure could go a long way toward making the death scenes inherent in films like this scarier, make them mean more, make the whole experience more satisfying. Instead of being scary, modern horror films have just become thrilling. You’re not getting anything much from these movies that you couldn’t be getting in the action genre, and that’s a sad fact that points to a lost art form.
