This morning, pre-coffee, I found myself reflecting on the week’s highly anticipated remake of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Having had a little trouble falling asleep last night, a combination of movie candy induced tummy aches and maybe some minute irrational fear of what lay in my dreams, I had lots of time to piece together my thoughts. And my reflections were not the most flattering for this 21st Century slasher film.
Let me first say that for a remake Samuel Bayer’s NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is actually a pretty decent attempt. It has all the elements that make up a good, old fashioned horror movie—pretty girls, a crazed psycho-killer, a belief-suspending plot. But for every way it sets up the foundation for a quality genre film, it still falls very flat. And not in the “it’s so good, it’s bad” way.
NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET pieces together Freddy Kreuger’s (Jackie Earle Haley) story. Teens living on Elm Street start having nightmares that lead to their deaths, two lucky survivors start to piece together why they are dying and their mysterious connection to each other, and then they take it upon themselves to kill Freddy. Throw in a handful of dream sequences and quirky one-liners, and you have the making of a self-reflexive horror movie. However its biggest deterrent is its pacing.
Quick, tight pacing is the most crucial component to a horror movie. You want to feel as if you are running from the baddie, just like the heroine. Freddy Krueger is an incredibly scary figure, and Haley obviously had fun playing the disturbing dream killer, however I found almost all of his scenes to drag on a lot longer than necessary. It’s crazy to think a movie that lasts only 90 minutes and is chockfull of gruesome murders can feel as if it’s double that length.
What the film did succeed at, however, was its full on rapey feel. The dreams were brought on by Nancy’s (Rooney Mara) repressed childhood memories of an alive Freddy, who was accused and killed because parents believed he was molesting their children. Horror movies often show sexual harassment and assault, but I definitely felt that the rapeyness of Freddy was borderline unnecessary. What’s wrong with a little family friendly rape? Tell me, don’t show me goes a long way when creating exposition. The suggestion that Freddy did it in real life was enough for me to understand he was as horrible in life as in death, however Bayer never shied away from shoving the sexual assault element in audiences’ faces. I focused more on the stereotypical power-diseased men in the movie than anything else.
And that was really getting in the way of my blood, guts, and gore.
