A Nightmare on Elm Street: Remake

Domestic: $63,075,011
Foreign: $52,589,026
I hope all of you have had your cups of espresso and cans of red bull, because when you tango with Freddy, you don't wake back up, ever again. The boogey man from elm street made his big screen return in 2010 to an audience that was ready to feel the splatter. This new Freddy took a more serious tone than the comedic Freddy we are all used to. The new Freddy also had a new look, with a fifth blade on his glove, a blue trench coat and facial damage far worse than the first freddy, actually resembling a severe 3rd degree burn patient. Robert Englund portrayed Freddy in the 1984 version and has helped to bring that franchise much success with the subsequent Nightmare movies. This new story carries some of the same plot points as the original, but deviates in its own way.


Freddy's background was updated from a power plant worker turned child murderer to a preschool groundskeeper that was also a child molester. Nancy is still the main character in the film, but instead of there being a Nancy Thompson, there was a Nancy Holbrook who was a waitress. The characters Tina (Nancy's best friend) and Rod (Tina's boyfriend) from the first film are now known as Kris and Jesse. In the first film, Krueger was obsessed with Nancy because he kept failing at killing her. In the remake, Nancy was an abuse victim of Freddy's when she was a child and Freddy considered her his favorite.


There are still plot points in the remake such as Nancy being able to dream about Freddy as well as her friends, and her being the one to pull Freddy from the dream world into the real world and kill him, even though the remake details a more bloody ending for Freddy. Nancy's mom still dies and Nancy gets kidnapped by Freddy.

The new Freddy has received the gritty reboot that many reboot films are getting including the new Spider-Man. In these films, everything has a darker tone to it, and things that may have happened in the past may happen in new and gruesome ways. If there was any film that could use darker tones, Nightmare on Elm Street is it.

There was one other Nightmare film that came close to the darkness and seriousness that the remake contains. Wes Craven's New Nightmare showed Freddy to be less comical and more devastating in his darkness. Craven actually envisioned Freddy to be less funny and more evil. The new Freddy accomplishes that feat. It will be hard to not have Freddy call his victim's "Bitches" while he slices them in half, but if the new Krueger can achieve a darker sadistic level than his predecessor, that I can do without the comedy.