A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Beginning in the early 2000s, the horror genre witnessed the boom of the remake. No property was considered too sacred to be given the contemporary treatment. Just ask Gus Van Sant, whose reverence for Alfred Hitchcock's seminal psychological slasher, Psycho, was so great that he felt compelled to produce a literal shot-for-shot rehash, changing only the actors and updating the time period in which the story was set. In fact, no subgenre was exhumed from the grave more vigorously than that of the slasher, particularly the teen slasher. By 2010, three out of the four most iconic monsters in horror had been brought back to the screen for a modern reinterpretation, each with a singular approach. First up in line was Leatherface. For his 2003 remake of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's trailblazing masterpiece, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, screenwriter Scott Kosar retraced the basic outline of his source material while filling it in with new details, none of which paled in comparison to those of the original, and upping the ante on the gore front. In 2007, musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie breathed exhilarating new life into the previously moribund Halloween franchise by reconstructing the backstory and makeup of Michael Myers, turning him from a seemingly impenetrable boogeyman to a terrifyingly authentic product of psychological trauma and consistent abuse. Least inspired of all was Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's remake of Friday the 13th, which recycled elements from the first four installments in service of the most generic cabin-in-the-woods framework. 

That only left one franchise and icon untouched, one that singlehandedly reinvigorated the teen slasher subgenre with an unnervingly imaginative supernatural shakeup. Teenagers were no longer comforted by the ability to run as fast as they could or hide anywhere they saw fit. In this world, their supernatural threat didn't exist in the darkness of the woods or the shadowy corners of a haunted house; he took up residence in their own mind, from which there is no concrete escape. Here was a predator who closed in on his victims at their most defenseless, invading their nightmares as they slept and inflicting fatal physical damage that would transfer into the waking world, Of course I'm talking about the one and only scar-faced, claw-fingered, fedora-and-Christmas-sweater-clad Freddy Krueger. On April 30, 2010, that oversight would be rectified.

Up until that point, the nightmare demon had remained dormant in Hell where he always belonged for seven years. The last time audiences saw him, he was engaging in a bloody battle for supremacy against Jason Voorhees in Ronny Yu's narratively nonsensical but visually colorful and deliriously high-energy crossover, Freddy vs. Jason, concluding with Freddy's severed head winking at the camera in an unspoken promise for a future resurrection. That would now arrive in the form of a franchise restart. 

In deciding which avenue to take to reignite Wes Craven's groundbreaking franchise and reintroduce Krueger to a new generation, screenwriting duo Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer elect Scott Kosar's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake as their template, a smart choice considering Kosar's movie came the closest to matching the gritty authenticity and balls-to-the-wall terror of his classic predecessor without ripping it off outright. Make no mistake, Strick and Heisserer's remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is nowhere within miles of the artistry of the Texas Chainsaw remake, which not only lived up to the original, but in some ways surpassed it. Nor does it come anywhere near the narrative inspiration or boundary-pushing visuality of Craven's 1984 original, which stands as the most creative and one of the most terrifying supernatural slashers ever committed to celluloid. Having said that, what they have produced is nothing to be ashamed of -- a respectable, appropriately somber, fast-paced remake that may not break new ground in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but restores it to its former gory glory. The Freddy Krueger riding a skateboard, dishing out one-liners, turning victims into comic book paper, and flying on a broom handle in the midst of a twister is nowhere to be found here, and that in itself is an achievement.

In the quiet, uneventful town of Springwood, Ohio, five teenage classmates -- Nancy Holbrook (Rooney Mara), Quentin Smith (Kyle Gallner), Kris Fowles (Katie Cassidy), Jesse Braun (Thomas Dekker), and Dean Russell (Kellan Lutz) -- are grappling with sleep deprivation, the source of which is revealed to be mutual: every night when they attempt to fall asleep, they're targeted and terrorized in their nightmares by a man named Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), a supernatural entity with a burned face, brown fedora, red-and-green-striped sweater, and knife-fingered glove on his right hand. At first, the teens try to convince themselves that Krueger isn't real, merely a figment of their imaginations, and the best way to rid themselves of him is to stop thinking about him. However, the grim reality of their shared ordeal becomes harder to ignore as each of them begins to die violently in their sleep, one by one, at the razored hands of their supposedly imaginary assailant. As Nancy and Quentin get to work researching Krueger, they discover that not only are they all connected to a preschool from their long-forgotten childhood, but their own parents may have unintentionally played a substantial role in putting them in this madman's crosshairs. Driven by a tip from a fellow fallen classmate, Nancy and Quentin resolve to find this preschool and bring Freddy into the real world to confront him head-on, a Herculean task compounded by their increasingly mind-melting fatigue.

One of the initial tactics that instantly separated Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street from the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th was its handling of the opening set piece. Like its aforementioned contemporaries, Nightmare opens with a young woman, Tina Gray, being pursued by the antagonist in his natural habitat: a boiler room. Rather than killing Tina right away, Freddy opts to torment her for a while longer, sneaking up behind her in a viciously effective jump scare that cuts to Tina jolting awake in her bed, revealing the sequence as a nightmare. But there's a twist to alert us this was no ordinary nightmare: her nightgown has been mysteriously slashed. Does she simply need to cut her fingernails like her mother suggests, or is something more out of her control at foot? 

Strick and Heisserer take a more conventional path into their remake, a habit that will persist throughout the majority of their adapted screenplay. Rather than climaxing with a jump scare followed by a seemingly innocuous but foreboding visual, they go for a full-on opening murder to set the tone, keeping in line with the more modern expectation of a 21st-century slasher movie. Unoriginal as the outcome may be, it's not without its own share of inspiration. Opening on a rainy night, the most ominous time of day and weatherly condition, the writers reintroduce a setting from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child: the Springwood Diner. Therein, they succinctly introduce their quintet of key players and establish the relationships between them: Quentin harbors an unrequited crush on Nancy, attending the diner every weekend in a series of failed attempts to invite her on a date; Kris has recently broken up with Jesse and begun dating Dean, inflaming the former with jealousy.

As in the original, Strick and Heisserer utilize their introduction to lay out the surreal situation, making Dean, the primary subject of the scene, Freddy's first onscreen victim. In a seamless, subtle transition from the safety of the real world to the limitless horror of the dream one, director Samuel Bayer, making his directorial debut, creatively uses flashes of green and red lighting, the colors of his villain's sweater, to herald Freddy's arrival. Unsatisfied with Craven's mischievous boo scare, Bayer and his writers cap off their cold open with a brutally bloody, torturously prolonged throat slashing, presenting it as a suicide that blurs the line between two contrasting yet interconnected worlds and pays homage to Rod Lane's bed sheet-hanging from the original. It's a taut, suspenseful, ultimately traumatic sequence that casts a cloud of impending doom over the remainder of the proceedings.

In terms of the plot, Strick and Heisserer adhere faithfully to the essential premise of Craven's inaugural Nightmare on Elm Street -- a group of teenagers living in the same neighborhood are stalked and slashed in their nightmares by the vengeful spirit of a man burned to death by their parents years earlier -- but it's in the details where they assert their influence over the material. For starters, they drastically alter both the personalities and relationships of their protagonists. In the original, Nancy and Glen are already a couple who live across the street from one another; in the remake, Nancy and the renamed Quentin aren't yet dating. Rather, the attraction between them begins as one-sided. Where Tina and Rod were an on-again, off-again couple who used the power of sex to overcome their arguments, Kris and Jesse are freshly broken up, only to soon rediscover their love for each other following the apparent suicide of the former's current boyfriend. 

The once-subversive twists that elevated Craven's script -- the unexpected, shocking departure of Tina and the parents' complicity in Freddy's unlawful murder -- are naturally resurrected, therefore losing their ability to truly surprise, yet still somehow effective in their execution. The most innovative change pertains to Freddy's backstory and consequent motivation for targeting the teens in their nightmares. In Craven's version, Krueger was a child murderer who abducted multiple children on Elm Street to the power plant where he was employed. After he was released on a technicality (someone failed to sign the search warrant in the right place), the parents of Elm Street gathered together, tracked Krueger down in his boiler room, and set it ablaze, watching him burn to death. Borrowing a discarded idea from Craven himself, Strick and Heisserer cleverly tweak Freddy's backstory to make his pursuit more personal. Instead of having lived his mortal life as a child killer, their version is a child molester who worked as a gardener at Badham Preschool, where the protagonists attended as children. At that stage, they were the apples of Freddy's deranged eye; now, they're the focus of his unquenchable vengeance. 

In the writers' most daring and challenging move, they put forward the suggestion that Freddy was an innocent, warmhearted man wrongfully accused by a gaggle of ungrateful, immature preschoolers. Perhaps the kids banded together and, as a malicious joke, conspired to tell their parents that Freddy's affection for them took a twisted turn into the realm of sexual abuse. Like they say, kids can be cruel, lacking awareness of the potential consequences of their actions. How thrilling an idea would that be? In the original, Freddy is a personification of evil in his life before and after death. As a human, he murdered children; as an entity, he murders the children of the parents who murdered him as the ultimate form of revenge. In the remake, what if he was a normal human being in the flesh? Someone who didn't have children of his own, and so treated the adorable, friendly, nonjudgmental students of his school as though they were. Imagine the depth of his betrayal to find out the children he loved, played hide-and-seek with, and drew with, were actually little monsters whose fabricated story resulted in him being chased, cornered, and burned to death by their righteously infuriated parents. Such an idea would be cause for a potential shift of sympathies. Who is the real villain of this story? The scar-faced, claw-gloved nightmare invader, or the not-so-innocent children who made him that way? This is a twist that would have buttressed the evil that defines Freddy with a still-inexcusable but nonetheless righteous sense of indignation. 

Alas, such a twist seems to have proven too challenging for the writers to follow through with, as in the final reel, they commit the baffling miscalculation of revealing Freddy's guilt, rendering him just as unsympathetic and unidentifiable a monster as he was from conception. Yep, he did commit the crime his victims accused him of, so rather than coming after them in their adolescence in retribution for their lies, it's actually for their truth, which makes him petty in his lack of accountability. 

Bayer and his writers also modify the tone of their Nightmare on Elm Street. Unlike in the original, where the characters begin as vibrant, normal adolescents who have sleepovers and crack up over a bowl of popcorn, the quintet of this remake begins the story already under the thrall of Freddy Krueger, kindling an atmosphere of gloom, despair, and exhaustion from the get-go. It's a tonal shift that leaves little room for a before-and-after contrast, but nonetheless succeeds in placing us behind the weary eyes of its tortured victims whose fear of sleep begins to eat away at their sanity and will to keep fighting. As a mystery, the writers reveal themselves as a tad lazy, evinced by the laughably convenient placement of a crucial piece of evidence that realistically would have been discarded long ago. Nevertheless, they provide enough original ideas to distinguish their script from Craven's so that it may stand on its own four razors. 

The kills are gruesomely impactful but more generic and less memorable than those of the original. Wes Craven envisioned a way to turn an object as seemingly harmless and comforting as a bed sheet into a weapon that not only subjected one character to a painful and drawn-out death, but simultaneously further incriminated him in the death of another. Strick and Heisserer's combined imaginations are nowhere near as imaginative, falling back on the conventional route of stabbings and slashings with bladed weapons. Dean's steak knife is used to slash his throat. Jesse is stabbed through the back by Freddy's glove, the quartet of knives exiting his chest, erasing any implication of guilt-fueled suicide. The goriest and most surreal death of all in the first, that of Glen being dragged into his bed before a fountain of blood erupted onto his ceiling, painting the whole room in red, is entirely left out. In its place, Quentin, likely as a favor for his expanded role, receives a quartet of slashes across his chest, none of which penetrate deeply enough to claim his life. 

The casting of Freddy Krueger was guaranteed to be the most daunting task for Bayer, as the icon had been hitherto immortalized for nearly 20 years by the inimitable (and Oscar-snubbed) Robert Englund. Who could possibly hope to match his blend of merciless cruelty and sharp-tonged humor that placed Freddy in a villainous league all his own, distinguished from his masked, silent, personality-deficient brethren? Who would be foolish enough to even try? Well, being a remake, it was incumbent on Bayer to tip his fedora to Englund while finding a fresh-faced actor to fill his notably large shoes. He hit the jackpot with Jackie Earle Haley, selected for his performance as Rorschach in Watchmen. In sliding on the razor-fingered gardener glove, brown fedora, and Christmas-striped sweater, Haley sheds the horror icon of the goofy, wisecracking, movie-referencing, double entendre-spewing humor that devolved him into a caricature of his former self and returns him to his (mostly) straight-faced, vengeful roots. True to his predecessor, who always used his power of speech to aid his methods of torment, Haley uses a sadistic laugh to convey Freddy's wickedness and boundless power over his victims. His voice is husky and resonant, deepened further by digital enhancement to imbue him with a "supernatural quality."

To pay homage to the actor who created Krueger, Haley keeps his mischievous exterior intact, but in offering his own interpretation on the character, he suffuses him with flashes of self-righteous acrimony that occasionally surface from beneath. As much joy as it brings him to torment these teens in the inescapable hell of their own minds, where his power goes unlimited, Freddy would rather still be alive in the real world with his flesh unblemished, and he despises them for subjecting him to such an agonizing death and reducing him to this disfigured monster whose entire existence is now fueled by vengeful murder. Haley relishes toying with his victims and embraces the pedophiliac temperament that put him in this predicament in the first place. 

Freddy's trademark costume has been faithfully recreated with few remarkable additions or alterations. His sweater is slightly tattered and the finger-knives which sprout up from his glove thicker. Prosthetic makeup is intermingled with CGI to more accurately reflect the skin of burn victims after it heals. Haley's face is painted whitish, while CGI dots his cheeks with red blotches. The skin surrounding his eyes is stretched tightly back, creating an almost cat-like resemblance. The screech of Freddy's knives as he drags them tauntingly across a metal wall, emitting sparks in the process, sounds less organic and wince-inducing, conspicuously digitized to sound more palatable.

Rooney Mara offers an original, somewhat gothic interpretation of Nancy Thompson (re-surnamed Holbrook), one of the most badass, resourceful, self-sufficient, creative final women in the history of horror. While Heather Langenkamp played her protagonist as an initially ebullient, carefree teenager, dating the hot jock across the street, hardened into a well-read survivalist who summons the courage to confront Krueger on his home turf, Mara paints a Nancy less socially successful but just as audacious, observant, and intelligent. As opposed to her predecessor, Mara's Nancy works part-time as a waitress at the Springwood Diner and possesses a talent for drawing, using a sketchbook to visualize the dissonant images seen in her nightmares and distract her from the need to sleep. Mara plays her as timid, antisocial, reserved, and taciturn, speaking her lines in a soft, whispery, breathy voice to project insecurity and mounting fear. As Nancy becomes cognizant of the limitations of her adversary and his influence on nearly her entire life, Mara does Langenkamp proud, developing a fearlessness and ferocity to combat her vulnerability. 

In making her third contribution to the family of slasher horror remakes, following Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls, Katie Cassidy compensates for the predictable outcome of her character by investing Kris with a host of final woman qualities: compassion, curiosity, vulnerability, and abject terror. She physically manifests the effects of true fear, jolting up from a nightmare hyperventilating, tears streaming from her eyes. In a short amount of time, Cassidy presents a sympathetic character with the intelligence and poignancy to carry an entire movie. 

Kyle Gallner is given the most radically rewritten role as Quentin. Technically, his character is modeled on Glen Lantz, Nancy's boyfriend played by Johnny Depp in his debut role that inexplicably set him on the path to movie-stardom. From start to finish, Quentin and Glen couldn't be more diametrically opposed. As played by Depp, Glen was a high school heartthrob: a handsome, fatally naive jock increasingly frustrated by his girlfriend's refusal to put out and unwilling to humor her in what he perceived as a delusion of bringing an imaginary monster into the real world. Quentin, on the other hand, is more of a nerd. He does have friends to hang out with on weekends and shares some of Glen's athleticism via competing in his school's swim team, but he's also too hopelessly shy to confess his feelings for the girl he's been crushing on the last couple years. With a tousle of curly hair and hangdog eyes, Quentin isn't particularly handsome, but while Glen denied his shared experience with his friends, refusing to so much as heed Nancy's advice to refrain from falling asleep, Quentin buries himself in research, assisting Nancy on her journey for answers as to who Freddy is, why he's pursuing them, and what they have to do to defeat him. Only at one point, following a half-truth confession from Nancy's mother, Gwen (Connie Britton), does he experience a brief bout of self-deluded denial. 

In his extended supporting role, Gallner projects fatigue with his nearly lifeless eyes and despondent tone of voice, indicating a kid whose sanity is coming apart at the seams from lack of sleep. On the flip side, Gallner is prone to passionate outbursts of justifiable resentment, frustration, and powerlessness that approach the edge of whininess, evinced when Quentin confronts his father and learns the truth about Freddy's motivation. 

Kellan Lutz makes the most of his single pre-credits sequence. To embody the despondency of his sleep-deprived character, Lutz matched Dean's survival tactic by actually forcing himself to stay awake for a few days prior to filming, exhibiting an unhealthy but commendable degree of role commitment. His bloodshot eyes, straining to refrain from closing, invoke immediate sympathy. Lutz and Thomas Dekker essentially share the role of Rod Lane: Dean and Jesse are dating or have dated Kris (the equivalent of Tina); Dean's murder both centers around his neck and is presented as a suicide; Jesse witnesses Kris' murder at the hands of an invisible assailant, gets framed for her murder, and is subsequently killed himself in prison. Dekker picks up the role following Lutz' early departure beautifully, beginning Jesse's arc as mocking over Quentin's insecurity to ask out Nancy and frustrated by the sight of his ex-girlfriend moving on with a new guy. Despite their separation, Jesse remains protective over Kris, comforting her at Dean's funeral and quick to snap at Nancy for trying to validate Kris' insane-sounding concern. Most impressively is that, once Jesse experiences Freddy's power firsthand and realizes he can longer deny the irrationality of it, Dekker proves unafraid to make himself vulnerable. As Jesse finds himself in a literal nightmare that he can no longer wake from, Dekker's lips quiver with resigned hopelessness, he collapses to the floor, curled up in a defensive ball, his entire body shivering with panic.

In a cameo as a posthumous video blogger talking into a camera to deliver exposition, Aaron Yoo makes the bold choice not to phone in his performance, using his quivering voice and weary eyes to convey helplessness, desperation, disorientation, and extreme exhaustion. As the sole authority figures, Connie Britton and Clancy Brown portray parental concern and protective denial. However, Britton is robbed of the complexity and interiority of her 1984 counterpart, who used alcohol to drown her loneliness over her divorce and possible conflicted guilt over having taken the life of another human being, even one as dastardly and undeserving of life as a child murderer. By contrast, Gwen Holbrook is relegated to the one-note role of a perpetually concerned, loving single mother.

Working in conjunction with cinematographer Jeff Cutter, Bayer uses a combination of practical effects and CGI to reference some of the most legendarily unforgettable shots from the original Nightmare on Elm Street while smartly altering their destination. He pays respect to the movie that inspired him, but isn't slavishly beholden to it. When Nancy begins to fall asleep in her bathtub, Freddy's bladed fingers emerge from the water between her legs. Only this time, she doesn't get pulled below the water and find herself at the bottom of a pool. The shape of Freddy protrudes from the wall behind Nancy's bed while she sleeps, this time his knives puncturing through the wallpaper. Kris' body levitates above her bed and is slashed across her chest, but it's executed in a faster and more torturous manner. Instead of being slashed then dragged up her wall and across the ceiling, Kris is thrown repeatedly like a plaything against the walls and ceiling before four gigantic slashes miraculously appear from her shoulders to the bottom of her stomach.

One of the most creative and seamless utilizations of CGI occurs in Kris' history class as she dozes off from her teacher's droning. Once she realizes she's entered into an alternate reality, she closes her eyes and whispers to herself repeatedly to wake up, and her classmates suddenly explode into ashes as her brightly lit classroom transforms in the blink of an eye into one from a dim, deserted preschool. The floor of Nancy's upstairs hallway turns into quick-blood, submerging her and setting Freddy up to repeat an iconic one-liner from The Dream Master (where its usage was far more apropos to the character to whom it was spoken). A snow-capped bedroom transitions to the outside of Badham Preschool imperceptibly in a manner that evokes the randomness and illogic of dreams. A ceiling distends then explodes with blood in slow motion as Nancy falls through it and onto a bed below, her clothes suddenly switched out for a schoolgirl uniform. Freddy's boiler room suddenly morphs into the living room of Nancy's home at the turn of her head. As Jesse walks down the long hallway of a prison, when he turns his head around, a wall is directly behind him, the guard escorting him having disappeared. One by one, the lights turn off, and when they return, he's surrounded by the hellfire tones of orange and yellow of the boiler room. 

Recognizing the value of Craven's artful presentation of Krueger in the original, Cutter adopts the technique employed by Craven's cinematographer, Jacques Haitkin, to film Haley in wide shot silhouettes, all the better to preserve Freddy's mystery and otherworldly menace. Even in certain close-up shots, such as when Freddy pounces on Kris in her attic, his face is shadowed by the darkness. His knifed glove is foregrounded by close-ups to accentuate his predatory nature, such as his introduction where he stalks Dean from behind in the kitchen of the diner.

Strick and Heisserer incorporate the concept of micro-naps -- dreaming while you're awake -- into their script to increase the psychological turmoil inflicted on their characters, providing editor Glen Scantlebury with several opportunities to play with the unpredictability thereof. While Nancy searches for Quentin in a pharmacy, the aisle vacillates back and forth between itself and Freddy's boiler room as an overhead light flickers. Shots of Freddy scraping his finger knives against a metal wall are intercut with shots of items falling off the shelf, immersing us in Nancy's fractured reality, visualizing the liminal space between the real world and nightmare. Bayer relies a little too much on jump scares to punctuate scenes of characters walking slowly through isolated settings: Freddy turning his head around to face Quentin in a library; his face popping into the frame as Kris straightens her flashlight in her dark attic; slicing Dean's hand once the camera pans left; materializing in the middle of the street; deceiving Quentin into thinking he just slashed Nancy across the face; opening Quentin's passenger door and throwing Nancy out of the car. 

The best display of editing virtuosity materializes when Nancy hides in a closet as Freddy comes downstairs, the disappearance of the front doorknob preventing her escape. Scantlebury cuts between Nancy's eyes as they peer through the slats of the door and POV shots of her empty living room, building a sense of dreadful anticipation before Freddy's charred face emerges from the wall of blackness in the foreground to literally say "Boo." He can kill her any time he pleases, and that in and of itself grants him immense pleasure.

Charles Bernstein's ethereal Nightmare on Elm Street theme is reserved strictly for the post-opening title card, and the jump rope nursery rhyme, "One, Two, Freddy's Coming for You," is reproduced in the background of a nightmare and flashback. Beyond that, composer Steve Jablonsky contributes an original score composed of melancholy violin strings and what sounds like a choir of children chanting in unison to produce a tune that's at once poignant, foreboding, slow, dreamlike, and melodic. Following the aforementioned closet jump scare, Jablonsky accompanies Nancy's run upstairs with propulsive, pulse-pounding synth music to heighten the tension of the chase, vaguely recalling Hans Zimmer's riveting score for The Ring. 

In keeping with the majority of their remake, Strick and Heisserer devise a climactic confrontation and concluding jump scare that are more conventional and less empowering and intellectually stimulating than those penned by Craven. In the original climax, Nancy, realizing the only way to potentially defeat Freddy is to bring him out into the real world, booby-traps her home and puts herself to sleep to locate her adversary in his place of death. Now it is she who is hunting him. After successfully pulling him out of her nightmare, Nancy humiliates Freddy, knocking him down with a sledgehammer, lighting him on fire, defying him to catch her. Because he's already been killed once, it may be impossible to do it again, but at the very least, Nancy can stand up to him, hurt him, cut him down to size, prove that she's no longer afraid of him. It's not that she doesn't ask for help from her jock boyfriend and police lieutenant father, both of whom disappoint her, but she doesn't need it. She goes toe to toe with Freddy and accomplishes all that she does by herself, without the aid of male intervention. Finally, she commits the most daring feat that Freddy could never have seen coming: very calmly, she turns her back on him, demanding the return of her mother and friends, insisting he's nothing more than a nightmare, sucking him dry of his power. The outcomes of both adversaries are left head-scratchingly ambiguous, but the path to getting there is exhilarating and emotionally gratifying. 

In the remake, Strick and Heisserer turn their backs on the element of female empowerment that suffused Craven's climax, reducing Nancy to a physically paralyzed damsel in distress whose life depends on a last-second act of male heroism. Following this deus ex machina, Bayer choreographs a taut, violent showdown between Freddy, Nancy, and Quentin in which the characters take turns stabbing at each other and get tossed around to minimally damaging effect. Quentin takes the most beatings of all, stabbed in the shoulder, spun around and hurled against a mirror, smacked in the face, but proves impressively resilient. Freddy's temporary defeat is generically satisfying, Strick and Heisserer clearly influenced more by his beheading by Lori Campbell in Freddy vs. Jason than Nancy's more intellectual combat in the original climax. Instead of turning her back on Freddy, Nancy utters a familiar crowd-pleasing pronouncement ("It hurts, doesn't it? That's 'cause you're in my world now, bitch!") before slashing his throat with a detached paper cutter blade. Adhering to the horror climax playbook, Nancy sets the preschool on fire, leading to the no-longer-needed services of ambulances, police, and firefighters. 

Recognizing the absurdity of a simple throat-slash bringing Freddy back to death, Bayer and his writers stage one final set piece that leaves the door open for a sequel. The ending of the original Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the most bizarre and open-ended in horror, leaving the fates of every major character undetermined. Are Nancy's friends really alive? Is Nancy awake or dreaming? Is Marge killed twice? It's frustrating in its refusal to answer any of the questions it raises, but its surreality is in keeping with everything that came before. To appeal to the less intellectually inclined and more gore-thirsty horror fans of today, the filmmakers swap out the thought-provoking ambiguity of the original ending for a shocking murder that's abrupt, gory, ear-piercing, and conclusive, updating the iconic second to last shot of the original with the aid of blood and lack of a rubber doll stand-in. It's a viscerally horrifying, impeccably timed parting shock that makes explicitly clear which world we're in, who is alive and who isn't, and what will likely befall the traumatized survivor left standing (and screaming).

6.2/10