Film Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

If you are a horror filmmaker, the ultimate opportunity must be to be able craft dreamscapes in which anything can happen and you are limited only by what you can imagine. Think of the possibilities for terrifying and surreal imagery that an imaginative and ambitious horror filmmaker would have open to them in a story like A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's such a shame that, rather than taking advantage of this amazing opportunity, Samuel Bayer and Platinum Dunes productions decided to instead just return to the same boiler room over and over again for this lifeless and dull remake.

The problem with so many modern horror films is that they don't do what they are supposed to do. They don't give the audience suspense or scares. They aren't frightening or unsettling. They aren't even shocking. They are just time-fillers. One of the chief culprits in this trend of bland horror is Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes – the studio to blame for the remakes of Friday the 13^th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hitcher. They have now brought us A Nightmare on Elm Street, a remake of the Wes Craven semi-classic starring the iconic boogeyman Freddy Krueger. It brings back the boogeyman, but none of the scares, originality, or sense of fun has been translated in this slick remake.

The story is simple enough. Nancy (Rooney Mara), Quentin (Kyle Gallner), Kris (Katie Cassidy), and Jesse (Thomas Dekker) begin sharing the same nightmare in which a man in a hat and striped sweater terrorizes them with a glove fixed with razors. They soon realize when this man named Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley, a talented actor dreadfully wasted here) kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. The conflict, then, is to fight the need to sleep, and if they do fall asleep, avoid being killed by Krueger as he takes over their dreams.

This would be a terrific story in which an imaginative filmmaker could create memorable imagery in surreal dream sequences with which to terrify the audience. But this movie is far too lazy to do that, instead giving us jump scare after jump scare with no genuine thrills at any point in the film. This film commits the greatest sin a horror film can commit: it's not scary or fun. In fact, it's boring.

Horror films can provide fantastic and disturbing imagery, explore the darker side of humanity, or simply be a lot of fun. However, many modern horror films do none of these, particularly the most widely seen films. Films with slow-burning suspense and creepiness that make you double check the locks on your doors like The House of the Devil go unseen while films like this win the weekend box office. It hurts horror as a genre, and Platinum Dunes is one of the worst offenders with their consistently lifeless and stale remakes. They depend on the name recognition and hit all the same beats as the original films – there is not one interesting shot in this film that was not cribbed from the original – without justifying their own existence. To be so beholden to the plots and set pieces of the original films arbitrarily limits the ability of the filmmaker to do something compelling and creative, and leads to lazy exercises like this. They have a terrific boogeyman in Haley's Freddy Krueger, and they had the chance to give the audience truly scary images in the limitless possibilities of the dream world, but they waste it all on some jump scares, and twenty-odd jump scares and a bit of blood and gore do not a horror move make.