Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) Review

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Nightmare on Elm Street has always been my favorite horror series. I hear this fairly often, and so I went in with a great deal of caution when I saw the 2010 remake. My main concern was Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy. I’ve always loved all things Freddy, even the poorly received television series Freddy’s Nightmares. Robert Englund…oh how I love him. Let me say that again. I love him. I’ve always a creepy little crush on Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger. So Jackie Earle Haley? Rorschach? The kid from Bad News Bears?

Ugh, I just don’t know.

My first obstacle: having to overlook the crowd of 18 year olds I was surrounded by. The girl in front of me screamed constantly, even though the guy next to me, who was chugging cough syrup (at one point he dropped the bottle and it shattered) kept telling her to shut up every time.

In any case, let’s get to my review. It stands up solid as a horror movie. It’s much darker than the originals, mainly because Haley plays Krueger in a much different fashion than Englund. Englund pulled off that sarcastic, maniacal nightmare killer, but Haley’s was much more sadistic. They did his make-up in a way I found looking sort of inhuman, which I suppose makes sense. But the main difference was that they pulled no punches about Freddy Krueger being a pedophile. The original 1984 version doesn’t even touch that. In fact, I hardly remember anything in the originals until 5, in which they lightly touch on the fact that he MAY have been a pedophile. But again, there was still an element of fun in the originals, and this one lacked that entirely. This remake fools the audience for quite some time into feeling bad for Freddy, and I felt like I was betraying my horror roots. Freddy Krueger is not a sympathetic character. Not in any way, shape, or form, although Englund’s Freddy certainly had a likable quality to him. The 2010 remake unfortunately might be forgettable. Englund’s Krueger had such charm that made him memorable.

I didn’t enjoy other small plot changes, like micronaps. Micronaps are, essentially, when the body is starved of sleep, so the brain forces sleep and the person doesn’t realize they’re asleep. Remember A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child? So in that one, the main character is pregnant, and Freddy is able to come in through the fetus’s dreams. Yeah, the 2010 basically rips this idea off. It felt cheap, and forced. Same effect, less imagination.

From this fan’s perspective it was worth seeing. I give it a B- rating. While it loses points for micronaps, it maintains a decent rating for its perspective on the story. It is what it is. It lacked the charisma of the originals, it lacked what made them GOOD. That’s the risk you take when you remake a movie that earned 6 sequels – 7 if you count Freddy v. Jason. It’s impossible not to compare the two. I feel that if you weren’t a fan of the originals, like if you’d never seen them (more to the crowd of 18 year olds I saw this with), then you’d like this one just fine.