Nightmare Week: How's this for a wet dr... wait

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

2010

Directed by Samuel Bayer

Written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer

Spoilers: high

I'm not sure if A Nightmare On Elm Street—Platinum Dunes' 2010 remake of Wes Craven's 1984 A Nightmare On Elm Street, to be clear—is actually completely terrible (and, if so, if it's the worst film in its entire franchise, a feat fellow Platinum Dunes remake Friday the 13th did not achieve), or if it's merely the one that has the least right to exist.  You see, if this were the only film in its franchise you'd ever seen, I think you could reasonably find it okay-enough as an 00s/10s-style haunting flick, even if "good" might be pushing it, since you should still be able to recognize its joylessness and the absence of any real spark that went into its creation.  (This is as opposed to sparks, as one of its startlingly few stylistic fillips is that our villain's finger knives appear to be dusted with metallic magnesium now, so anytime he lightly brushes anything even modestly hard, explosions come out of them.)

Of course, I have seen Craven's Nightmare, and the other Nightmares, so it's like this: every other Nightmare, regardless of each one's respective quality as a film unto itself, still offers an affirmative reason for you to be watching it instead of simply watching Craven's '84 original again—even Freddy's Dead.  Meanwhile, maybe the bar for an avowed remake is even higher than that: not that the Nightmares ever did this, even at their most decadent, but a sequel can get sometimes get away with very modest iterations on the established formula, banking on the forward momentum of some kind of story (or, in a slasher context, different kills); but if you have the gall to call your movie a replacement, or, at a minimum, a companion piece—especially to a movie universally beloved, as is the case with the '84 film—you're going to need some way to set yourself apart, even if you don't have the hubris to believe you're going to do it better.

It makes you wonder about the nature of the franchise: it achieved some enormous highs, but it's at least equally possible that the series that offered its filmmakers a wide-open canvass for gruesome fantasy was actually, by precisely those means, starkly limited.  For a successful Friday, for instance, all you need is a cast who aren't miserable company and a killer in a hockey mask, together enacting that franchise's ritual pleasures by way of a modicum of craft.  For a successful Nightmare, you have to have imagination and discipline.  Maybe that's not fair, but it's the challenge you take on, whether you want to or not.

Director Samuel Bayer didn't even want.  Around 2010, Bayer's music videos, commercials, and possibly his surname had brought him to the attention of Platinum Dunes' honcho, Michael Bay (he is not—unfortunately?—Bay-er).  Bay kept offering him the job of directing his company's next exploitation of a New Line property, indeed, the New Line property.  Bayer kept refusing, but Bay seduced him with the dark promise of the career boost he'd get from what was bound to be a hit (the latter part was true, since by some sources it was the highest-grossing Nightmare ever in nominal dollars, albeit only the fourth adjusted for inflation).  From the evidence, it looks like the exact opposite happened, and it ruined Bayer's career instead: to this day, it's his only feature film, and his most prominent effort since might well be as an art photographer (he put together, in 2013, an exhibition that was either a feminist statement, fetish porn, or both, revolving around giant-sized reproductions of female nudes, and, jokes aside, it still sounds fully four decades out-of-date).

In any event, you can see why Nightmare '10 was the kind of calling card that people threw in the trash as soon as they were sure he wasn't looking (apparently including his heretofore-ardent admirer, Bay): this is absolutely the work of someone who didn't want to be there and couldn't be bothered to pretend otherwise.  You don't have to search hard to find complaints about the movie's editing, and there are sequences here and there where Bayer and editor Glen Scantlebury have gotten their rhythms all wrong, but there's one cut (or one pair of cuts) that, for me, kind of sums up this movie made with the kind of 2010 technology that really ought to have prevented such things: there's an emotional, plot-pivotal moment where Rooney Mara (whose career this didn't ruin and whom we know now is a pretty great actor, though we don't see much of it here) is screaming at her screen-mom (Connie Britton), and working herself up really hard, with tears collecting in her eyes which she's not letting fall, because she's so angry; we get a reverse angle, then back to the same exact shot, only taken who knows how many minutes (or days) apart, now with no tears, which Bayer's dropped into his montage with no apparent concern that in the other take his actor had actually been acting, and in this one she wasn't.

I mean, that's microscopic, and piddly, and it could happen to anybody (or there are at least imaginable circumstances where it could happen to anybody).  It couldn't sink a movie by itself; but in the midst of a movie that I was already finding more tedious than otherwise, it felt like catching my arm on a nail.  It's barely worth reciting the plot, but let us be diligent: we open... well, we open with an "early 2010s horror" gesture, an impressionistic "true crime" credits sequence collage, and my nostalgia glasses are rose-tinted enough to enjoy these, generally, though this one's wretched; leaving aside the lawyer who insisted that the credits had to be recapitulated in crystal-clear font even though the childish scrawled-chalk credits beneath them were already legible, we also have the world-class awfulness of analog horror images of "the Badham School" (a preschool that will figure prominently into the plot) slammed into each other to spell out "BAD" and "SCHOOL," and come on, have mercy.  Anyway, in Springwood, OH, we find a kitschy diner, and here have gathered—though not all together—our principals.  At one table is Kris (Katie Cassidy), meeting with new boyfriend Dean (Kellan Lutz), who's sleep-deprived for reasons you can readily guess.  At another table is Kris's old boyfriend, Jesse (Thomas Dekker), as well as Quentin (Kyle Gallner) and another lad, who amounts to set decoration; Jesse isn't keen on seeing his ex, so he and his party abruptly leave, Quentin making apologies and awkward small-talk with their waitress, Nancy... I'd have assumed Thompson, but it says "Holbrook" (Mara), whom he has a crush on.  This leaves only Kris and Nancy to bear witness when Dean momentarily falls asleep, then rises, then cuts his own throat.  They can only say it looked like somebody was forcing him, but we've seen exactly who did.  That, of course, was Fred Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), child predator in life, dreamlord in death, out to impose permanent sleep upon each of the above-named teens in turn.

I'm going to assume that you've also seen Nightmare '84, and henceforth it's almost entirely just that, with some minor changes in setting, character, and structure.  It's even more predictable than it needs to be: for instance, it's annoying Nancy is still named "Nancy," since thanks to the amount of time we spend with Cassidy instead while Mara is shuffled off into the background, if "Nancy" were "D'Arcy" or whatever, then maybe the movie's structural gambit of a false protagonist would've stood some chance of actually playing.  Instead, the names openly telegraph that Kris is doomed to die before the second act's started.

She does so, inevitably, in homage to Tina's unforgettable levitation-assisted demise in Nightmare '84, and it's even more phlegmatic than when Craven did the same thing back in New Nightmare.  The shadow of Craven's self-aggrandizing feature-length critique of the Nightmare sequels, and the shadow of Freddy's Dead, still loom over Nightmare '10, even more now than they did for Freddy vs. Jason, where (for various reasons) it mattered less.  Yet I think you'd expect, if you had not been disabused of it (I had been disabused of it), that a Nightmare remake made in 2010 would exploit the revolution in technology over the previous quarter-century on behalf of the psychedelic scares that any Nightmare movie, despite Craven's wishes, still sort-of promises its audience.  Obviously, since we haven't even wholly cracked how to mix frightening horror with CGI spectacle here in 2024, this could have gone wrong—but it would at least be memorably bad.

Nightmare '10 "does the CGI," but only in fits and starts and usually in service to more subtle ends—Kris's death is vastly worse than Tina's in Nightmare '84 despite being almost exactly the same, but, yippee, it cost a hundred times as much and has seamless compositing—whereas, fair enough, Freddy's spirit straining at a wall over sleeping Nancy must count as the "memorably bad" I asked for, especially in how much worse it looks than what it's stealing from, a movie then twenty-six years old, and not just effects-wise, but in its staging, composition, and color.  (Jeff Cutter's cinematography would put it in the top third of horror movies in the 2020s, a bar so low that mole men pass over it, unawares, on their way to work, but it's usually serviceable-to-good.)  But these nightmare sequences aren't even really tapping into "how dreaming is really experienced," as Craven had it—when they are, it's because they're quoting Craven, badly—and they're lacking any other inspiration (and Nancy barely gets any).  One notices, too, that when Quentin passes out at a bookstore, and we see his laptop's also entered "sleep mode," the movie practically says aloud, "no, no, this could be deemed 'stupid,' like Freddy's Dead, so whatever idea we had we're preemptively abandoning."  In terms of gore, it's fairly tepid, hence one reason why Kris's death isn't in Tina's league; when the time comes to homage Glen's likewise-unforgettable Nightmare '84 death, now using Nancy (who obviously doesn't die), we have an idea that almost comes off, and perhaps would've, if Mara had spent the rest of the movie slathered in grue, Carrie White-style, after she fell through a floor that's become a lake of blood.  Of course, she's cleaned up by—not even "by the next shot," since it's not even real fake blood.

Conceptually, these vignettes fare only slightly better: most of the "concepts," such as they are, are untethered nonsense like "it's snowing in Nancy's bedroom now, despite neither snow nor winter having any meaning to Nancy or Freddy"—this occurs immediately subsequent to the "homage" to the scene of Nancy Thompson's vaginal menacing in the bath back in Nightmare '84, which, going by some footage in the behind-the-scenes featurettes, had to have Mara's legs added in post, with computers, because Bayer fucked up the some of the most iconic blocking in horror history, and it wasn't "good" that it was here in the first place—whereas Freddy pointing out that brain activity continues after circulatory death is a deeply scary notion only ever established by dialogue, rather than actually used.  I could be moved to say I "enjoy," insofar as Nightmare '10 provides so little to enjoy, the idea of Nancy bouncing back and forth between sleeping and waking in computer-assisted match dissolves when she starts "micronapping" in a pharmacy that keeps reasserting itself as Freddy's boiler room.  However, it's unclear why Freddy has an industrial-scaled boiler room in this one.

This is where we concede Nightmare '10 almost has one new idea, which was a bad idea, or at least a very difficult one in the context of Freddy Krueger, The Well-Defined Horror Icon, and because it chickens out of that idea, it makes me angrier with the movie than when it wasn't pretending it was doing anything besides copying Craven's film beat-for-beat-but-worse.  But, to begin, we have our new Freddy: Robert Englund had aged out by this point (it's kind of amazing we got his magisterial Freddy vs. Jason performance out of the then-56 year-old!), and when it came time for Bay and Bayer to find his replacement, the Internet basically cast Haley for them, which made so much sense it's almost overdetermined; "played a child molester" plus "played Rorschach" does, I happily admit, sum up to a pretty obvious "Freddy Krueger," and not something to avoid, solely for being obvious.  But just "being good in Watchmen" is suggestive on its own: that's another movie that, on paper, should be completely pointless if you're already familiar with its source material, but thanks to its performances, doesn't feel that way while you're watching it.  (It occurs to me you could do the same math with Patrick Wilson, though he'd have been a better Donald Thompson.  What?  Oh.)

Well, I don't think it ruined Haley's career, but it seems to have been his last major "lead," even if he's largely blameless: it's not much of a performance, but, thanks to the constraints, there's no way it was ever going to be—it's broadly analogous, of course, to Englund's own first go at Freddy, which is good, not iconic; Haley's also imprisoned in makeup that, I'll say, I like, swerving out of David Miller's/Kevin Yagher's "flayed man" visualization and into "genuinely burned to death," literally melted.  (It's irritating that they felt the need to punch it up with a piece of CGI hanging flesh, an unnecessary budget item if you ever saw one.)  Even so, Haley's not bad, not with all the curdled hatred he manages for Freddy, especially early on.  (Now, I don't know what happened during production, but it sure feels like somebody was getting notes, because by the end of the movie Freddy is throwing out stupid quips at an almost Dream Child-level of abandon, despite this being entirely alien to Haley's intentions of delivering his earlier "Funny" Freddy lines dripping with disease.  For example, I kind of love the beat with Kris's dog—"I was just petting him," croaky and almost resenting that the act gave him the fodder for a bad joke—and it's difficult to square that with the script ultimately forcing Dream Master callbacks onto him, like "how's this for a wet dream," in a movie that's palpably terrified of being anything like Dream Master, and in a scene where Freddy is threatening a... girl.)

But then, there's the big new idea that writers Eric Heisserer and Wesley Strick had, and as it presents itself, it's barely more than just "let's rationalize the Krueger backstory," which could be a nice-to-have, I guess, but—as I've pointed out every time—runs afoul of the franchise's consistent problem, which is that every attempt to give Freddy backstory is terrible, starting with Wes Craven's, because the point isn't whether Freddy Krueger is "a child molester" or "a child murderer," or who killed him, or why, or who his mommy was; the point is that he's a sexually-motivated child murderer who lives inside your nightmares.  And even if their version is a little more resistant to nitpickery than Craven's, it's still not actually rationalized: lynching a guy by burning him alive plays better in Peoria, or Springwood, when that guy's an adjudicated child murderer than when arsonists kill an apparently random guy (while destroying somebody's property), and it's also easier when a member of the conspiracy is a cop (Nightmare '10 somehow has fewer elements than the original: this Nancy appears to have been conceived parthenogenetically, and even her mom vanishes out of this one's story, except to service a standard "nihilistic reversal" stinger); I'm just snarking now, but it's also implausible, in these United States, for it to have never occurred to one of these dozen-or-more people that you can't sue the preschool's insurer if you murder their child molesting employee.  Not snarking now, it's extraordinarily implausible that our five core kids and the numerous others mentioned, all of them, "repressed" their memories.

But that's where we land, Fred Krueger being marginally more explicitly presented as a child molester, something made extremely plain in Nightmares 1 through vs. Jason, so I wouldn't call it particularly bold, though it wants you to think it's doing something bold, as it rests its story on the concept of Freddy the falsely-accused child molester.  This is tremendously interesting, and could never, ever work: you can't get to a recognizable "Freddy Krueger" without the self-gratifying evil that lies beyond his vengeance.  Maybe Haley was trying to get a bead on this fabulistic tale of outsized consequences for the childish error of telling paranoid adults what it seemed like they wanted to hear, such as I assume the writers originally had in mind; but the screenplay they wrote doesn't actually support him in that, and that fable was industrially impossible anyway.  So the best and the worst thing about the movie is the exact same thing: it spends half an hour actually striving towards having a personality of its own, bearing a portentous message about pedo-panic insanity with the worst possible messenger, and then wrenches it right back onto its Nightmare rails anyway, so that it's just a pile of nothing.  Of course Freddy diddled you, you just, oops, forgot; so while "Freddy kills children who, in their naivete, falsely accused him of rape" is mean as shit, well, that's horror's prerogative, and I can almost appreciate that it's actually meaner still, with its decent-hearted heroes seeking redemption for what they think they did, only to be betrayed by their own good intentions.  But the movie's too by-the-numbers to do anything with that.  It's a faded copy, one that ultimately descends to mindless mimicry, the kind where Nancy declares "That's because you're in my world now, bitch."  That's because, in other Nightmare movies—though not this one, not once—Freddy used to call people "bitch."

Score: 4/10

Reviews in this series:

A Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven, 1984)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)