A Nightmare on Elm Street

I didn’t think it would be so bad. I’m not among those that automatically take a hostile stand against every remake and therefore my opinion is by no means a protest against the “rape” of an old horror classic. Even though the original Nightmare is one of my most favourite horror films ever, I still gave the remake a chance, hoping it would turn out to be decent. It wasn’t. I haven’t seen something so sterile for a long time (I’m speaking about movies with a bigger budget and not low-budget stuff), every attempt to scare and build an atmosphere ends in fiasco. Try to imagine how many times the characters say what they say, how many times a scene is shot the way is shot only because they count on the viewer knowing what film this is the remake of. That’s not the way you do it. (27/09/2010)

Everything is wrong... Almost. Except for the lovely Rooney Mara. I was initially very happy about the casting of Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy Krueger, but I had no idea that the boilermaker in the striped sweater could have been played by absolutely anyone (except perhaps Jiří Krytinář), because he looks like Imhotep crossed with Voldemort, i.e., like a mask under which everything is lost. But along with that, the black humor, the eerie atmosphere and the fear of anyone or anything was lost in Nightmare. To be honest, I was actually quite taken with Jablonsky's music, which I'll probably listen to on its own, but that's about all the film had to offer me. (15/04/2013)

A beautiful example of how Hollywood producers imagine the ideal modern remake of a film hit from the eighties. Just hire a music video director (who never shot any feature-length movie), put together a bunch of ideas from the original series, cast some attractive model actors, throw in some cheap jump scares (because you can’t make a horror movie without them today), add ostensibly expensive visuals and wrap the rest in ‘really gorgeous’ modern digital effects, and you immediately get a picture that’s tuned to today’s audience. And the fact there’s no soul? That it is dull and vacuous? That all the substance is diluted into the feeblest rehash? Doesn’t matter; there will always be jaded young crowds who don’t know the original to make for happy viewers! (19/09/2020)