A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, haven’t we done this before? Like, eight times if you include 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. The newly rebooted A Nightmare on Elm Street is like so many cult favorites from the 1980s that have been hollowed out by the millennial treatment.

This time around, the story has been slightly shifted. Instead of being a multiple-child murderer, Fred Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is a suspected pedophile set on fire by the parents of a group of nursery school classmates. Now teenagers, Nancy (Rooney Mara), Quentin (Kyle Gallner), Kris (Katie Cassidy), Jesse (Thomas Dekker), and Dean (Kellan Lutz) are being haunted and killed off by the maniac in their sleep. Through creative use of a non-Google search engine and a few Red Bull-and-Ritalin-fueled hours at a bookstore, Nancy and Quentin suss out the whole back-story and must deduce how to pull Freddy out of their dreams (but not necessarily into their car).

Even if there is no red-and-green-striped convertible to speak of in this version, at least it’s clear that music video director Samuel Beyer actually saw Wes Craven’s 1984 original before helming this remake. Several scenes–including one in which Freddy’s claws emerge between the legs of a bathing teenager–are recreated almost shot-for-shot.

But Beyer chooses to make those shots way more intense from the outset. Where Craven’s film started off small, quiet, and almost idyllic (save for a few pesky nightmares), this version jumps in with screechy violins blazing. A main character is already sleep-deprived, paranoid, and soon dead in the very first scene. The amplified gothic music (not the subtle run of piano notes we remember) and loud thuds only get boring from there. When he starts out at a 10, where could Beyer have possibly gone from there?

Where the new A Nightmare on Elm Street didn’t go was into the full dreamscape. The advent of computer-generated technology could have meant a psychedelic, truly terrifying ride that would not have been possible in the low-budget corn-syrup-and-food-coloring world of the 1980s. But the makeup used for Freddy’s burned face looks much the same as it did back then, only more stringy and less gooey. When CG is used–to create a river of blood that Nancy attempts to cross–it ends up looking fake and not in the least grotesque. Beyer’s video for The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is a more disturbing spectacle…and not just because of Billy Corgan’s teeth.

Writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer are smart to have re-written Kruger as a child molester, something that was implied but never explicitly stated in the original film. The scripting team laces many of Freddy’s frequent wisecracks with blue, inappropriate humor. (“Your mouth says no but your body says yes.”) And Haley fully embodies the “To Catch a Predator” spirit. Unfortunately, the computer-modulated voice he uses to deliver those lines is more Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich (in Craven’s newer classic, Scream) than Robert Englund. I had to hold back giggles when he asked Nancy if she wanted to play a game.

Still, Haley’s overtly sexual tone was a welcome addition to this otherwise chaste affair. The bedroom scenes in the film involve innocent, fully clothed cuddling a la Twilight rather than unsupervised teenagers doing what they will. It’s a shame since the potent sexual energy that underpins most teenage slasher pics is part of what makes them so scary. Even Craven acknowledged that fact when he made “don’t have sex” a cardinal rule for survival in Scream.

All the kids do know how to scream, at least. Mara, a less emo Kristen Stewart, has got blood curdling down to a science. Meanwhile Gallner, who also made appearances in Jennifer’s Body and A Haunting in Connecticut, is becoming a horror-genre fixture. Again, though, I found myself comparing them to their original counterparts, played by Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp, and found them lacking in both fresh-faced innocence and legitimate acting skills.

A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t a bad film. It’s just not a particularly innovative one. To dust off an icon like Freddy Krueger (kids still don his burnt Fedora every Halloween), it really needed to be. Otherwise, it ends up feeling just as soulless as the knife-gloved one himself.

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