On Remakes

Oh No They Didn’t posted this image of a promotional toy for the reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s the closest look horror fans have gotten at what Jackie Earle Haley will look like as Freddy Krueger.

There’s only one reason I’m not protesting in the streets over this reboot: Haley made all of my Rorschach dreams come true in Watchmen. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt not the movie.

But there is and always will be only one true Freddy. Robert Englund’s performance is what got me into horror movies (after I recovered from the years of trauma that resulted from seeing The Dream Warriors when I was six). And the first film in the Nightmare franchise was so perfect there’s no possible way the reboot can improve upon it.  If they were proposing a reboot from The Dream Master on, it would make more sense. The latter part of the series had buckets of wasted potential.

I’m not a purist who’s against all remakes. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite movies of all time. The recent remake of My Bloody Valentine was, save the rushed ending, a solid film. The Friday the 13th remake was enjoyable up until the halfway mark, where the writers seemed to have called it a day.

The trouble is in rebooting a classic without either a) staying very true to the original material or b) adding a completely unique spin to it. Rob Zombie tried to combine the two methods in Halloween and it felt awkward. The Black Christmas remake was an abomination of epic proportions. It stripped away everything compelling about the original and substituted in cliches and squick. Someone should publicly apologize for that film.