New Nightmare Dispenses With The Jokes

Posted by sean in Movies on September 28th, 2009

The producers of A Nightmare On Elm Street have long promised that their take on Freddy would lose the campy humor of previous films.  And, if this new trailer is any indication, they’re delivering on that promise.

Jackie Earl Haley continues his trend of scaring the pants off me, having already portrayed a pitch-perfect Rorschach in the hugely disappointing Watchmen movie, a disturbed child molester in Little Children, and an unstable mental patient in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming thriller Shutter Island.  In addition to being “darker, more serious, less jokey” than earlier incarnations, Haley’s Krueger is different in that the film seems to cast some doubt around whether he is actually a child molester, or an innocent man wrongly accused.  The film follows the group of children, now aged eighteen (and presumably very hot) who accused Krueger, as he returns from beyond the grave to wreak his revenge.

So far, I’m on the fence about this one.  On one hand, if you have to do a remake, you might as well make it a new interpretation of the subject matter.  Chris Nolan turned the Batman franchise from a series of decidedly silly – and increasingly terrible – campfests into a dark, serious story that’s more crime fiction than comic book.  But will the same tone-change work for Nightmare?  The only problem I can really see is that the concept of Freddy Krueger, at its core, doesn’t lend itself too well to serious film.  When you strip away Freddy grinning at the camera and delivering one-liners like, “I got my power glove,” you’re left with a story about a guy with metal claws who can only kill you in your dreams.  It’s like Wolverine set to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”.

Hey, come to think of it, that sounds pretty sweet.