'A Nightmare on Elm Street' (2010)
It’s finally time to watch the film that traumatized my teenage crush, Rooney Mara.
If Only It Was All a Dream
When I was 17 years old and “not gay,” I was obsessed with Rooney Mara in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” So obsessed that I had a print interview with her ripped from a magazine and taped to the wall directly next to my bed. I read that interview a lot, as you can imagine. In it, she mentioned having a bad experience shooting “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” the remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher classic. For over a decade, I have had said remake jangling around in my subconscious. I hadn’t seen it; this was all I knew of it. Now, I am a film critic specializing in horror and that movie is brand new — along with most of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” compendium — to Max streaming. I figured it was time to bring things full-circle.
“A Nightmare on Elm Street,” produced by Michael Bay and directed by music video auteur Samuel Bayer, is, tragically, everything Mara promised. The effects are forgettable, the scares predictable. The script, by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, is riddled with of-its-era clichés and leadened by a galling take on childhood sexual abuse. Aside from some fun visual callbacks, it’s also a dubious remake: Though the basic beats are the same, this film’s plot ends up straying wildly from the original.
After a handsome classmate (Kellan Lutz) slashes his own throat in a dream-battle against a maniac with knives for hands, friends Kris (Katie Cassidy) and Nancy (Mara) try to convince the boys they’re into that something terrible is afoot. Jesse (Thomas Dekker), Kris’s bad-boy ex, is an adamant nonbeliever, but he changes his tune after Kris is butchered in front of him. With Jesse in jail, Nancy and her lovelorn friend, Quentin (Kyle Gallner), try to get to the bottom of things and stay awake. Per one sleep science book Quentin reads, if they’re not careful, they’ll reach such a profound state of sleep deprivation that they’ll become prone to “micronaps” — i.e. waking dreams — and eventually slip into permanent comas.
Pseudoscience aside, this remake’s most egregious plot difference has to do with Freddy’s origin story. As they try to understand what’s happening to them, Nancy and Quentin uncover a conspiracy led by their parents, who killed Freddy, mob-style, once upon a time. They reportedly did this because their children said that Fred Krueger, the amiable gardener at their preschool, was molesting them. The parents hoped their children would simply grow to forget him and the trauma, and try to gaslight them into forgetting again for a good half of the film.
Once the jig is up, a central tension of the plot becomes whether or not Krueger was, in fact, a child molester, or if he’s exacting revenge on the children who unwittingly engineered his wrongful death. Spoiler alert: Freddy was a child molester.
It is, to put it lightly, unsettling to watch two teenage characters slowly learn that they were sexually abused as children, particularly in a film with such limited emotional range. The point here is not to reckon with the impact of such information, it is to deliver it with as much shock value as possible. Nancy discovers that she was Freddy’s “favorite” — that he led her to a dark back room of the preschool, abused her, and took pornographic photos of her. As they face off in dreamland, Freddy magicks Nancy into a dress from her toddlerhood and pins her to a bed.
Sure, Freddy was apparently supposed to be a child molester in the original, but there’s no direct link between him and the kids in that film. It’s a classic “children paying for the sins of their parents” 80s slasher plot. The remake, like many films of that time, is far more interested in putting its female lead through hell so that it might justify her eventual victory. This was Mara’s first studio film and thus her first mainstream exposure. She would then go on to act in the infamously brutal rape scene that fuels the plot of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
It’s not that this film is irredeemable. Some parts of it are quite fun, especially if you’re a media-savvy younger millennial eager to take a trip down memory lane. The actors are ripped from “Twilight,” “Heroes,” “Supernatural,” and “Jennifer’s Body.” The fashion is hilariously period-appropriate. Nancy, who wears black and makes a lot of bad art, is persistently not like other girls.
But all of that is hardly enough to justify the clunky plot and horrendous treatment of sensitive subject matter. Yes, horror is meant to deal in taboos, to provoke, to speak the unspeakable. There are artful, entertaining ways to do those things, even if you’re reproducing franchise shlock. A good horror film could cause you to sleep with the lights on or to question reality. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” will just make you feel like you need to take a Silkwood shower.
Run time: 95 min.
Not recommended if you: don’t want to watch a mediocre horror movie about child molestation; aren’t conducting your own strange, entirely self-motivated project to finally watch a movie that’s been embedded in your subconscious because of a crush you had 11 years ago.
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