A Nightmare On Elm Street

This is my opinion of the latest movie in this long lived franchise; a remake of the original movie of the same name. If you have seen the original, then you’ll know what happens for the most part, but even so, this post still will no doubt contain spoilers that could possibly ruin the movie for you, or cause permanent rectal pains. If you have a problem with this, please stop reading now, and instead read something else.

Going to see this movie, I had mixed feelings. Was I going to like it for the way it reinvented the series? Or hate it for the way it butchered the original series, fan boy style? When I left the cinema two hours later, I was left still wondering the same thing, and possessing the same mixed feelings.
All those feelings aside though, it turned out to be an okay movie. I didn’t mind, and it’s good that they’re trying to restart such an amazing classic series. However, there were quite a few things that bugged me. So allow me to enlighten you with a brief overview of some of the more annoying aspects for myself personally.

Character names.

Alright, I exaggerate when I say gone. All the original main characters are still there, but the moment the opening credits said “Based on characters by Wes Craven" instead of “Based on the movie by Wes Craven”, I knew something was going to be up. First, there’s this guy:

First to die: “That guy from Twilight”

Apart from being from the Twilight series, this guy is the first character in the movie. His name is Dean, and he is nowhere in the original movie. He is the first to die, and alert everyone to the very immediate danger of the situation. It’s not bad per say, but who he talks to is important. It’s Chris. Actually, it’s Tina from the original movie with a new name and everything. They changed all the names of the characters, possibly due to legal reasons, but it’s enough to really get to me. I wasn’t able to relate them to the original characters because they weren’t the originals. The only two characters who kept their names were Nancy and Freddy (For obvious reasons, of course.). Now this really is just a fan boy bitching, but I liked the original characters, and I might of been able to overlook the name changes, if that was all they changed about some of the characters.

Personality changes.

If you saw the original movies, you’ll remember Rod Lane, the boyfriend of first victim Tina Gray. His character was portrayed as a badass; carried a switch blade on him, wore a leather jacket, and had the lone tough guy act down. When his girlfriend falls into Freddy Krueger’s hands and is tossed around their room, slashed and killed by an invisible foe only present in her dreams, he doesn’t cry. He throws shit around the dark room looking for the guy who did this, only running because he doesn’t want to be taken by the cops for something he didn’t do. In the end, he dies at Krueger’s hand when he is strangled in his sleep. Then the remake happens and we get…Jesse. Here, have a side by side comparison of the two…it’s not the best, but apparently there aren’t many photos of these two on the internets:

Left: Rod Lane, Right: Jesse Braun/Purdy mouth

Jesse is the complete opposite of Rod. How does he react to his EX-girlfriend’s death? He runs away, and curls up against a post until he’s taken by the cops. That’s right; the character has been turned into a pussy.
To top it off, when confronted by Krueger, he does what any guy would apparently do, and curls up in the foetal position and starts screaming. This of course prompts Krueger to ask, “Why are you screaming? I haven’t even cut you yet.” That’s right; this kid, the one who’s meant to be the ‘tough guy’, is screaming his head off when Freddy hasn’t laid a single finger on him. Way to be a hero man.

Freddy revamped.

Anyone mildly aware of A Nightmare On Elm Street would recognize this character, and even know the character Freddy. The man was just sinister, and you can’t help but recognize such an iconic creation; even if it is represented by the embodiment of Scottish humour in The Simpsons.

 
Spot which one is the Simpsons Parody.

But along with a new actor for the role, the creators saw fit to reinvent everything he stood for. And so we are introduced to the first of a few attempts to be realistic in a fantastical horror movie about a man who attacks you in your dreams.

Freddy Krueger, embodiment of evil in the Elm Street universe (And the Friday The 13th universe if Freddy vs. Jason remains canon in the reinvention of the franchises), originally had quite the back story as a child murderer. Though intended to be a child molester¹ by original writer Wes Craven, it was felt to be a bit too strong for audiences of the time (it was the 1980s after all), and he was brought back to being a serial murderer of anyone young.
Much like that friend of yours who bleached their hair and it looked particular terrible at the time but you grew to love it, the idea of Freddy Krueger became one with that of a child murderer to the point that there are people who, if the discussion of “evil pedophiles and child murderers” comes up, will mention they’ve heard of one murderer called Freddy Krueger².

Those in charge of writing the new version decided to go back to the idea of him being a child molester though, and made it so he was targeting those teenagers who were responsible for getting him caught when they were little. I understand that giving him more of a motive than “I love the rush from killing kids” is much scarier as is the idea of a child molester in modern society, but if they move to turn this into a remake franchise, they don’t really have any room to move. Once the motive is gone, it’s going to be a lot harder to make him move to other things. With the original series, once he got one set of children, he’d move on to another. In this movie, these kids were unique. Once he’s eliminated all the kids he touched that turned him in, it’s a lot harder to believe that he just up and decided to start murdering everyone, at least for me anyway.

As far as his appearance goes, they’ve decided to change that as well. Gone is the iconic, almost cartoonish burns that characterized him and in it’s place, a walking corpse. Brad Fuller (one of the producers) is quoted as aiming to try and make Freddy look as close to a real burn victim without being disgusting as possible, and he succeeded in that right. However, I did not find the character scary in itself. In fact, the realism took away from what made the character so macabre and evil.

Dude, what happened to your face?

At least they decided to keep the razor fingers. If they replaced them then I’d of had something to truly be pissed about.

Facts

That wasn’t the only thing that was changed in the name of realism. One of the things that startled me most in the originals (before they got silly) was not knowing when the victim had fallen asleep. They’d close their eyes for a second, and you’d think it was them just being tired, but it turns out they’d nodded off, but only been woken up again in the dream. In the remake, they’d decided to use micro sleeps too, but also wanted to fully explain the process. So while in the original we get 5 seconds of dialogue explaining how “we can control our own dreams once we realize it is a dream”, in this one we get minutes of boring dialogue explaining how “parts of the brain shut down, causing micro sleeps”, and essentially ruining the whole mystery surrounding Freddy by explaining how he could attack people when they still seemed awake.
I know this seems like a minor thing, but as a fan this sort of thing really bothers me. Would the magician you just saw have been nearly as amazing if you knew exactly how he did his tricks? Exactly.

Backstory

Speaking of removing the mystery³, I want to touch on the amount of back story present in this movie. Now, first up I believe I’ve been explaining what was in the original. Well, in the original, there was limited back story beyond a brief explanation as to that Krueger was a child killer and the parents burned him alive. Now in the new movie, you have flash backs to the past, and you see everything from Krueger at his “he loves the kids” period to “Oh no we have caught him and seen him for the evil creature he is", and a detailed scene of his death, which was also different from the original story. He was originally arrested by the police but got off on a technicality, and because of that the parents revolted and hunted him down, where as this version has the parents opt straight for hunting him instead of calling the police.

Conclusion

Now, these things by themselves could of been tolerable. However as a self proclaimed fan boy of the Nightmare On Elm Street series, the collective just serves to bug me completely. I am not saying the movie was bad; it made me jump quite a few times (to my brother’s amusement) where no other horror movie has in quite a while. However, much like reading the book before seeing the movie based on it, you notice little things which seem to no matter what, ruin the experience for you.

If you have seen the new movie, the old movie, or preferably both, I’d like to hear what you think of it all via my conveniently placed comments box (Protip: It’s right below this article).

1. Kiddie Fiddler, Kiddie Cruncher, Priest, I could go on but the list is endless and to be honest, kind of tasteless. Michael Jackson”.
2. These people also think he’s real, though I do try to inform them he isn’t…usually.
3. Man, I am seriously loving how each section just seems to naturally segue into the next. I am the king of writing flukes.

Tagged as: freddy, horror movies