A Nightmare on Elm Street

Remember the first time you saw the original 1984 version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy, answers the phone and Freddy Krueger’s big fat tongue comes wagging out of the telephone and licks her screaming face? Or when Nancy’s boyfriend, Glen, played by a then-only-sorta-famous Johnny Depp, falls asleep, and his bed swallows him up and shoots him back out in a Yellowstone National Park–style blood-geyser in front of his mother? Or what about Phillip’s death in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, when Freddy slashes Phillip’s wrists and feet, then rips out his tendons and uses them to walk him around the room like a bloody marionette? Ooh-ooh, or how about, also in Dream Warriors, when the Mohawked former-junkie character Taryn dies when Freddy’s hand razors turn into syringes full of heroin and he plunges them into her track marks, which have turned into little hungry human mouths?

I remember all those scenes, and I remember them well. That’s because they were creative and absolutely memorable. All these teenagers died in sinister, inventive, and fucking SCARY ways. Even Spencer’s death inside a Nintendo-style video game with Freddy at the controls, in the craptastic and totally lame Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare—though corny as an ear of corn, little Spencer’s death meant something. And it scared people.

There is NOTHING scary about this 2010 remake—excuse me, “reboot,” oops, I mean “contemporary reimagining”—of the original Wes Craven classic. NUTHHH-THING. I watched it in a full-to-the-brim crowded theater, and not one person gasped, jumped, or even made a single solitary reactionary peep. It’s 95 minutes of total garbage. Director Samuel Bayer should be ashamed of himself. And that’s hard for me to say, because he’s the same Samuel Bayer who once directed a little music video for a band called Nirvana—a video for a little song called “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That video changed everything—much like A Nightmare on Elm Street changed everything for every horror film that followed it in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

No one will ever remember much about Bayer’s garbage version of the film. Not a single new element is introduced to the long-running Elm Street franchise. Not a one. Well, except maybe the new idea that Fred Krueger was once an average, not-scary, run-of-the-mill child molester who worked at a preschool and bad-touched a bunch of students there one year. I mean, c’mon. If you’re gonna reinvent the Krueger character, this bad-bad demon of a man, whose backstory previously painted him as a vengeful child-murderer who killed at least 20, count ’em, 20, children before the parents of Elm Street torched his ass—um, a story that included him as the bastard son of a young woman, a nun, who was accidentally locked in an asylum for the criminally insane, and then repeatedly raped by over 100 maniacs—um, if you’re going “contemporarily reimagine” this part of the story, you should maybe try a little harder.

Everyone in the film should have tried harder. The set design was boring, the death scenes were boring, and all the actors were boring. I felt like I was watching some uninspired crap-hole show on the CW, like Gossip Girl or The Vampire Diaries. All the teens looked like they walked right off that channel. Oh wait, that’s because some of them did—Katie Cassidy, who plays Kris, has also starred in Melrose Place, Supernatural, and, yep, an episode of The Vampire Diaries. Her death scene is a remake of the original film’s very first murder, in which a blond Tina gets sliced up by an invisible unknown and then flies around the room, ending up smeared all over the ceiling in front of her boyfriend. I thought the idea of a “reboot” was to add something fresh—Bayer’s version is beyond stale, like Nightmare Lite, or maybe Diet Nightmare—I mean, at least in the original Tina gets laid before she dies. Kris sleeps in her clothes with her perfect hair, and only cuddles with her boyfriend. Yawn.

I think Bayer’s remake may appeal to teenagers who haven’t seen the original—teens who aren’t bothered by the fact that all the moms in the film are suddenly reality-TV-style MILF-y cougars, teens who might LIKE the fact that the new Krueger, played a by soft-spoken Jackie Earle Haley, doesn’t have a nose and looks a whole lot like a burned outcast from Avatar.

Real horror fans should avoid this movie at all costs and wait for the new documentary, narrated by Heather Langenkamp, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, due out in May. Even a nerdy behind-the-scenes retrospective will be more exciting than this stinky, vapid yawnfest.