Hanging Out With The Dream King

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I ended up watching all the Nightmare on Elm Street films again recently in preparation for my piece on the series for MSNBC. I'd seen them all before - save Freddy's Dead, which I realized two things midway through watching: 1) I'd never seen it before, and 2) it's one of the worst movies I have ever suffered through, oh my god it's so so awful - but not in awhile. Save Wes Craven's bookends to the series which I try to watch at least every couple of years, because they're both terrific. And I didn't bother re-watching Freddy Vs. Jason... I guess it just didn't seem like it fit into the series proper. But I find FVJ fun, admittedly in a really hacky way.

Anyway I'm glad I revisited the films in time to see the 2010 reboot, because I felt like I understood what the strengths of Freddy and his films has been, as well as the weaknesses... and man has the series has relished rolling around in its weaknesses. But what's worked for Freddy when he is functioning as a figure of dread has remained pretty consistent. I'm gonna quote what I arrived at in my MSNBC piece here:

"Everybody knows who Freddy Krueger is because he embodies something surreal and terrible. He’s iconic beyond his glove and Christmas-colored sweater because he taps into the feeling viewers get when the lights are off and their eyes flutter half-shut and familiar rooms turn strange. The shadows move. That lump of dirty laundry in the corner… does it have a face?

In order to capture Freddy’s magic, the remake needs to mobilize that strangeness. Wes Craven did so masterfully in the original when the body bag slid down the hallway, or Freddy’s arms stretched the width of an alleyway, or the stairs beneath Nancy’s feet turned to goo.

Freddy Krueger’s been a part of our cultural lexicon for 26 years now not because of the little girls skipping rope singing their eerie rhyme but because of what they represent as they drift into slow motion. The other worlds where anything can happen, and the monster waiting there that will never let us go."

So how does the 2010 film fare in these respects? (SPOILERS AHEAD) I guess I'm gonna call it a draw. And seeing as how terrible I found their Friday the 13th to be and that that franchise-slaughtering film was the last taste Platinum Dunes had given me, well then I'd say it's a minor miracle I'm not raging out on this movie.

I will step back from the faint praise I'm moving towards for a moment here though to admit that by the definition I just quoted myself of giving, of Freddy being about a tap into strangeness, well I think this new film failed there sorta miserably, and that's obviously my main complaint. And it's the bit that I just kind of can't wrap my head around. Why, with technology being so cheap and as advanced as it is today, was the one thing missing from this film any over-sized imagination to the dreams? I don't mean that I want the comic-book dream or the video-game dream from the more cartoonish parts of the original series, not by any means. What I mean is that every kid's dream looked exactly the same, and by exactly the same I mean like the filthy grungy dungeons of Platinum Dunes' Texas Chainsaw house or the mines in their Friday the 13th. Why does everything have to look the same with these guys?

The couple moments when the director Samuel Bayer dipped into any surreal imagery at all were to use the exact same surreal images Wes Craven used in the original movie. The stairs turning to goo and the body-bag being dragged down the school hallway. I never got around to watching any of Bayer's commercials, which were supposedly really interesting visually, but judging by the nonexistent stamp of individuality he put on this film here I can't imagine he had a single thing to really add to the franchise beyond being a hired gun. Has he never seen a film by Tarsem? I kept wondering what sort of crazy fucked-up dream imagery we could've gotten from a director with an actual voice here. If they do make a sequel I hope they either allow Bayer some room for expression - if he's got some! I couldn't much tell from this movie - or they hire a director who does have something to add. Because this was pretty by-the-books here.

And yet I didn't hate the film either. In fact I left the movie with a smile on my face. For one, not to get too spoilery, but that's a great final surprise that I saw coming from a mile away and yet really dug anyway. It was handled in a way just off-kilter enough and just sudden enough and with just enough creativity that it pushed you out the door with a boost. But for another, once the film settled down and realized that, "Hey! Whaddya know? Nancy's actually our main character and not all of her friends," once it settled on Nancy and Freddy were the focus, as they should be, I thought things started moving along into an agreeable vibe.

I found Rooney Mara serviceable enough, although I wish she could've gotten more of a character arc (not that that's her fault). Even though nobody's ever gonna hand Heather Langencamp any Best Actress statues she at least had a rounded-out girl to play with her Nancy, one that we watched change pretty dramatically as the film rolled along. 2010's Nancy doesn't change enough to fully register as someone we should invest in, and I do blame the majority of that on the structure of the screenplay, with the focus being on several other characters for the first 30-40 minutes of the film. But I was rooting for this Nancy by the end all the same. I think the scene with the discovery of the Polaroids did it, and yeah, that's some possibly questionable manipulation going on, but I really thought it worked all the same.

One reason for that's got to be her main main Quentin, tagging along for the ride - I actually thought they did a great job with his character, and Kyle Gallner is just so gosh-darn likable. Granted Quentin's got an enormous capability for over and over and over again surviving seemingly fatal slash-wounds. But every horror movie's got one of those characters and I'm glad he was this movie's Deputy Dewey.

I guess that leaves Freddy, huh? It's weird that I find myself with not a whole lot to say about Freddy. Like Nancy he's just sorta there in the background for the first half of the film. He pops out, slashes somebody, and then recedes into the shadows again. Once he and Nancy became central to the film and Haley got to really go there then he, and the film, springs to life. I'd love to see him in a movie that really appreciated Freddy's gifts though. He can make of the dreamworld whatever he wants to and he keeps painting it like the inside of a rusty metal rest-stop toilet? There's not one image here that even approaches the elongation of Robert Englund's arms across the alleyway in Wes Craven's original film.


Something simple yet terrifyingly spectacular that burns itself into your subconscious. Something that feels torn from our own nightmares.

But it could've been worse. I would go see a sequel to this movie, even one made by the same exact people. In hopes that they feel less constrained by setting things up and freer to open up Freddy's world of dreams. It's such a fun toy-set to play with. Make something bright, make something splash.
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