Despite strenuousefforts by everyone to suppress those things that reason can’t accept, to shout“You’re not real!” at the monster stalking them, the fear only builds. It’shard to dismiss those nightmares after several teens die bloody, awful deathswhen they nod into the sleep they had come to dread.
Writer-director WesCraven’s A Nightmare on Elm Streetwas an important contribution to the horror genre/slasher division upon itsrelease in 1984. It became a franchise, starring gruesome Freddy Krueger as thesteel-clawed boogeyman, but the brand was worn down through overexposure andthin scripts. Of course, a Hollywood franchisethat once worked is too valuable a property to let go and every effort will bemade to “reboot” the crashed product. And so the original installment of A Nightmare onElm Street, made for a mere $1.8 million, has been redone with anew cast of able unknowns and a $35 million budget, much of it apparently spenton shape-shifting computer-generated images. Amazingly, the new Nightmare is not bad.
The screenplay revisitsthe original scenario in a contemporary setting of cell phones and Google,stripping away the accretion of bad faith and bad humor introduced by thesequels to recover some particles of the unsettling scariness of Craven’s vision.The story’s adults are duplicitous, hiding something, and the kids are left tofind their way in the dark. Director Samuel Bayer captures his characters’sleep-deprived jitters, especially in the suspenseful moments before they fallinto Krueger’s lurid dream dimension. Cameras swing jarringly, as if themonster hides in every shadow of the film’s dark palette. Acute attention ispaid to creaking sounds of menace; the soundtrack music is pitched in the keyof panic.
The contemporary,ripped-from-the-headlines twist is that in life Krueger wasn’t a child killeras in the original, but a pedophile, preying on the pupils at the preschoolwhere he lived and worked as the janitor. In Craven’s film the parents ofvictimized children burned Krueger alive after a court released him on atechnicality. This time, the parents dispense with the justice systemaltogether. The result in both cases is the same: a cackling, deformed face ofevil with a voice like Clint Eastwood having a very bad day. Freddy wantsrevenge.%uFFFD
