Nightmare Retrospective | A Nightmare On Elm Street

Nightmare Retrospective | #9 | A Nightmare On Elm Street

Remakes were all the rage in the mid 2000's, and both Halloween and Friday the 13th had received mediocre updates in the latter half of the decade. It was only a matter of time before A Nightmare On Elm Street joined the ranks, and by the beginning of 2010 it had officially become one of the unfortunate franchises that were remade by a big studio for profit. It's tough to begin talking about where this remake went wrong, because there's just so much that's bad about it. It's not like Freddy's Dead where the entire film is packed to the brim with poor decisions from start to finish; some of the ideas on display here are legitimately interesting, but they're executed terribly, and trapped inside of a film that's more of a cold, cynical product that's only trying to remind you of how cool and scary the franchise is without actually being either of those things itself. I watched this movie last night and I had to pause it halfway through becuase I was so bored that I just wanted to sleep - and that is exactly the opposite of the reaction I should be having to any Nightmare On Elm Street movie.

The most obvious way in which this remake fumbles is in the character of Freddy himself. This is the first film in the series that doesn't star Robert Englund as the dream slasher, and his absence is sorely felt. This new Freddy Krueger tries to be edgier and more sadistic than the original, but he's entirely toothless; his new design looks laughably awful, and the way actor Jackie Earle Haley's voice is constantly pitched down is impossible to take seriously. Haley really does try, and I don't want to say this is entirely on him as much of the issues are related to costuming, makeup, editing and direction, but he really can't fill the shoes of Robert Englund here.

This re-imagining of Freddy goes deeper than just the look and performance; the context is changed as well. The story starts fresh with Freddy's backstory, but brings the subtext of the original film into the forefront; Freddy is a full on child molester in this iteration, and he is hunting his former victims after their parents killed him in a fire. This was a very controversial choice, but I don't actually think it's inherently bad; the subtext is there, and a darker, deeper look at the Freddy Krueger story could have been an excellent opportunity to explore the ways in which children process trauma and the ways in which their parents can fail them. It could explore the way society prefers to cover up these horrors instead of face them, which is what the original story of Freddy was always about. To the film's credit, it does attempt to explore this to some degree - but it's very poorly done.

For starters, the way in which a lot of this is shown is rather exploitative towards the end. There's a prolonged almost-rape scene where Freddy finally captures the protagonist - Nancy, played this time by Rooney Mara - in her dream, and pins her on a bed and begins to force himself onto her, taunting her with cringey one liners. It's a profoundly uncomfortable scene and it could have been done without so much exploitation. To make matters worse, it's ultimately concluded by Nancy's boyfriend rescuing her, a storytelling decision that provides the film's climax and takes away the empowering arc of Nancy in the original film.

Even beyond scene like that, though, the way the plot is revealed is ridiculous, and the film seems to hone in on all the wrong things. In the original, it's never really questioned whether or not Freddy was a bad person - he's literally butchering teenagers, there's no real moral grey area there. In the remake, to contrast, there's a string of plot twists that just make things needlessly complicated. In the beginning, none of the characters remember their past encounters with Freddy, who was a gardener at the preschool they attended together. Their parents discovered the truth and formed a lynch mob that ended up burning Freddy alive in an abandoned building. They then somehow - most likely through drugs and therapy but it's not really explained - caused their children to forget the experience entirely, not wanting them to have to remember such a horrible thing. Soon after the teens discover the truth, the plot begins to toy with the idea that perhaps Freddy Krueger was innocent, and that they lied and made up stories and got an innocent man killed in the process. Of course, if he was such an innocent man, he probably wouldn't be hunting them down one by one in his afterlife, and murdering them in brutal, cruel ways, but nobody seems to think about that, until they eventually find his secret cave in which he has several Polaroid pictures of a naked five year old Nancy stashed away, revealing that he was definitely guilty after all and the previous plot twist had been a waste of time.

It is profoundly insulting how badly these themes are handled. This is some incredibly heavy and triggering subject matter, and I don't think the film intended to be so careless with it - it wouldn't surprise me if there was a version of the script somewhere that actually did these themes justice - but these types of subjects require an empathetic touch that this film just rarely has. The scene where Nancy finds the pictures of herself in Freddy's hidden room is a rare example of this; the film never shows the pictures (almost definitely for legal reasons) and instead lingers on her face, her emotions and her pain. It's about her and her trauma, and her struggle to come to terms with her past, not about the horrible things themselves. The rest of the film just isn't like this. We rarely get to see really emotional reactions from the protagonist; the reveals are just sort of told to them and we never really get the chance to get inside of their heads. As you can imagine, this also makes for some incredibly bland characterization.

Perhaps the only other time they do show personality is when they believe that Freddy had actually been innocent. One of the protagonists, a boy named Quinton, is particularly incensed as he jumps to the conclusion that Freddy was innocent. This whole arc really screams of victim-blaming; suggesting that these sorts of accusations are rarely true and usually falsified. It's not out of the realm of reality to suggest that false accusations of this sort happen, but if we really want to talk about it, we need a layer of sensitivity to all of the parties involved in order to make real progress, and that is absolutely not what is happening here. Then, with this reveal being reversed, it comes off more that the blame is not on them for lying and their parents for killing an innocent person, but on the parents for not going through the proper authorities - the problem here, of course, is not that the parents forced their children to abandon their memories without consent, and left them out to dry when their trauma came back to haunt them, but that their response to the revelation that their children were being molested wasn't specifically to call the police.

This is contradictory to the spirit of the original, in which the police and the law system are largely portrayed as ineffectual; just another cog of the society that cares more about covering up horrific things rather than dealing with them. Nancy's father in the original is a chief of police who refuses to listen to his daughter and jumps to conclusions in order to force the case to be cut and dry like he'd want it to be. The courts let Freddy Krueger, an obvious child killer, to walk free on a pure technicality. Clearly, the situation was nasty for everyone involved, but the police and the justice system only made things worse, and turning to them for help was not going to do anything. None of the adults or institutions surrounding them had any interest in truly helping the teenagers, so they were effectively on their own. It was all part of what made the original so engaging.

All of this terrible execution of incredibly heavy subject matter is trapped inside of one of the most bland, soulless slasher films I've ever seen. The camera is saturated with sickly green hues reminiscent of Saw, the soundtrack contains lots of fake atmosphere and loud noises, there's an over-reliance on jump scares, and almost every memorable scene is just a worse version of a scene previously used in the series. It's like a greatest hits collection where everything is remastered at the lowest possible quality. In the original, the characters were disbelieved by everyone they tried to reach out to, and this was made more believable by the presence of more logical explanations that the characters would rather believe. Freddy kills Tina, but Rod was in the same room, so clearly he did it. Freddy then kills Rod, but makes it look like he hung himself in prison. So on and so forth. In the remake, everyone reacts with denial and often outright hostility when the characters try and argue that something else is going on, but it doesn't make sense because the deaths happen in such obvious ways. A character is stabbed through the chest in a dream, causing a hole to appear where his heart should be in real life, but it's labeled as him dying in his sleep. It's absurd and ridiculous and the way in which the film tries to play it all so straightforward makes it even worse.

I don't think this is the most poorly made film in the franchise - that would be Freddy's Dead - but it's by far the hardest to watch, not just because of the heavy subject matter and awful execution but also because it's so ungodly boring. There's none of the charm and passion of the original films, just passionless directing and corporate greed. To date, this is the final entry in the franchise, and while I do hope one day it gets the Halloween treatment for a chance to go out on a note better than this, I can also understand why audience interest has tanked for over a decade now when this was the last taste in everyone's mouth of this once important and brilliant franchise.