A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

There is a huge vogue for 're-imagining' certain horror franchises and using the opportunity to delve into the background of the killer or villain. I am a big slasher movie fan and I ate up the re-makes of Halloween and Friday The 13th but my favorite always was Freddy Krueger which is kind of odd when you consider he was meant to be a child molesting serial killer!

This movie was released around 15 years or so after the last in the Nightmare On Elm Street series, a franchise which had gotten increasingly daft as time went on. Towards the end you increasingly sided with the razor gloved killer rather than his hapless victims. So it was with baited breath that I waited to see how the helmers of this new chapter in the Krueger legacy would crack on. Would they continue the campness and one liners or would they return to the spirit of the first 2 or 3 films and go for scares?

Firstly I was disappointed that they couldn't find any role for Robert Englund as to me, he utterly synonymous with the 'Nightmare' films in particular and horror in general. Although, upon reflection, the filmmakers would have wanted to go for a clean break and that would mean severing ties with Englunds legacy although I still maintain it would have been nice for him to have had some form of role within this movie. Instead they went with Jackie Earle Haley to play the role of Freddy and a host of unknown but attractive teens to play his victims.

The design of Freddy is also quite different than that of any previous incarnation with the emphasis very much on what a realistic burns victim would look like, given that part of his background, as explained in the film, is vengeful parents burned him alive after they suspected him of molesting their kids. Thankfully the fedora and tatty sweater are still present and almost act like some form of comfort blanket to us fans of the original movies.

There some genuinely nice touches here like distorted camera angles and off-key music when the teens dream and there is a good sense of rising panic as they realise they cannot stop themselves from falling asleep nor dreaming. This, added in with the jumps which abound here, and the grim, nightmarish settings adds up to an increasingly unsettling and scary experience and for that the film-makers should be applauded. This is scary and something that the makers of torture porn crap like Saw or Hostel can't appreciate, that you don't necessarily need gore and torture all the time, that you can achieve your goal of scaring your audience by things like clever editing, music and atmosphere. This movie is a worthy addition to my favorite fictional serial killers canon.