When I was a kid just seeing the posters and cover boxes for the first two Nightmare on Elm Street movies was enough to scare the absolute crap out of me. My cousin rented both of them one Easter weekend and my mom let me watch them in the very misguided hope that if I saw them I would realize they were just movies and not be scared any more. Sadly it went the other way and I spent years being absolutely terrified of Freddy Kruger.  I went to see all the subsequent movies and generally came out more freaked out than I was before, the sole comfort I had to cling to was that Robert Englund, in addition to playing Freddy, had been Willie the friendly visitor on V and come on, Willie wouldn’t hurt me right? That didn’t do much for the nightmares though.

See I think that there is an inherent brilliance to the Nightmare on Elm Street concept. You could maybe get jumpy after Halloween or Friday the 13th but by and large, huge supernatural psychopaths don’t carve people up while wearing interesting masks. The threat and the scares stay at the theater when you leave but everyone has to sleep, everyone dreams and everyone has nightmares. That those nightmares are populated and informed by things you see and experience that scare you, Freddy Kruger, fictional child killer, can absolutely show up and terrorize you long after the credits have rolled. It is the horror gift that keeps on giving.

Sadly as the series progressed the films devolved into little more than comedies with vague horror elements as Freddy became more of a vaudeville routine and less of a scary killer. The first movie was scary and creative and subsequent efforts diminished greatly as time went on. After seven movies, a cross over film with Jason from Friday the 13th and a horror anthology TV show, the  powers that  be (Platinum Dunes) decided it was time for a remake.

Rather than the reboot doing a unique story like the Friday the 13th remake, which was kind of an amalgam of the first three movies but with it’s own characters and storyline, A Nightmare on Elm Street follows the same basic story as the original hitting most of the same story beats. This means going back to the original tone and putting the emphasis on scares rather than seeing Freddy do a gory soft shoe routine. This also means using some similar shots and gags from the original but all are done effectively and don’t feel at all like hokey rehashes or simple fan service.

True to the original, the story follows a group of teens who all find themselves having the same nightmares about a mysterious burnt man in a fedora and striped sweater who terrorizes them with a glove with knife blades on the fingers. They don’t really start comparing notes until one of them kills himself while screaming ‘You’re not real!’ At his funeral, one of the teens notices that she is in the background of one of his childhood pictures but has no memory of meeting him prior to high school. Parents are evasive and are obviously hiding something even as more teens die. It becomes up to Nancy, the one returning character aside from Freddy, and love interest Quentin to confront their parents about what they did to gardener Fred Kruger and why and how to stop the boogieman in their dreams from killing them because if he kills you there, you die in real life.

The set up is pretty much the same as the original movie but the remake tweaks some things to keep you on your toes and keep it from feeling like a rehash. The addition of the ‘was Freddy really guilty’ subplot was inspired and adds an extra dimension to the story. It also adds more personal intimacy for the characters with regard to the killings. In the original, Freddy was killing the children because A: he had been a serial killer of children and B: because he was taking revenge on the parents who burned him alive by killing their children. Here Freddy is after the now teen children themselves. This adds significant weight to the story and ratchets up the creepiness quite a lot.

The performances, by and large, also do their part to add to overall creepiness. Jackie Earl Haley (Little Children, Watchmen) takes over from Englund as Freddy and delivers a terrific performance and makes Freddy very scary and menacing. With only a couple of notable exceptions, the cheesy one-liners the series became plagued with are gone in favor of unsettling taunts and you get the sense that he is really out to hurt these kids. He doesn’t just kill them for revenge but he wants them to suffer. This is refreshing after a few movies worth of the character sounding like he is a warm up act for the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. This is to take nothing away from Englund’s previous turns as Freddy, particularly in the first and third entries, but Haley delivers a different Freddy with a different tone and it works very well with the somewhat reworked  material.

Tom Dekker (Heroes, the Sara Conner Chronicals) and Kellan Lutz( the Twilight series) deliver just the right amounts of scared tough guy juice and Katie Cassidy(Melrose Place, Taken) is very effective early on trying to figure out what is going on. The real star of the teen set is Kyle Gallner( Veronica Mars, Jennifer’s Body) who seems to be getting into the habit of elevating substandard horror material but really shines with good material. What he has to work with here is pretty good and his performance bears it out. Clancy Brown( Starship Troopers, the Informant!) and Connie Briton(Friday Night Lights, Spin City) both put in respectable turns as the parents who know more than they are letting on but don’t want to believe that the sins of the past may be killing their kids in the present.

The only performance I found particularly questionable comes from Roona Mara( Youth in Revolt) as Nancy not because she was bad per se but because she seemed to lack the proper gravitas of Heather Langenkamp in the original. That might not be fair as had I not seen the original I wouldn’t have a basis for comparison but even leaving the original out of it, there wasn’t much weight behind the performance and Nancy came off a bit weak. Certainly the writing bears a bit of blame here but I think Mara just didn’t quite fit the part. For the most part, however, this doesn’t do much to derail the movie and again her performance isn’t bad as much as just didn’t seem to fit the material and she still managed to pull of being generally terrified so it all still works out.

Of course when you are dealing with a horror movie, the story and the acting isn’t worth much if it fails to scare, although, given the quality of both of those in many horror movies, two out of three certainly wouldn’t be bad. Thankfully A Nightmare on Elm Street delivers the goods here as well.  Obviously ‘scary’ is very subjective, but the film is effective at delivering a good ratio of genuine suspense and cheap startles. One of the things the movie really excels at is setting up moments where you KNOW he’s around, you KNOW he is going to pop up for a startle on screen but the moment draws out long enough that when he does he still gets you. These shots are also pretty creative in terms of fake outs versus real startles and you never know exactly which is going to be which. Part of it is good camera work and part of it is the general sense of unease and creepiness that the film maintains through the whole movie. The viewer is unbalanced as no one is ever really safe and can slide in the dream world without really realizing it. Sometimes it is obvious when it happens and sometimes it isn’t. Once the characters go without sleep long enough for waking micro-naps to start happening, all bets are off.

The overall pacing of the movie also helps with the scary/creepy factor and generally keeps you engaged. While it is front loaded with most of its kills in the first act and leaves investigation, exposition and final confrontation to the second and third, there is always something going on to keep you on your toes. It is a fast and engaging 95 minutes and I never felt bored. The kills themselves are also interesting and I was happy to see a happy medium struck between being creative and not feeling hokey. My main complaint about the Friday the 13th remake was that Jason lacked panache with the kills, creativity giving way to more realism than I was really looking for. Here, the nightmares are creative and interesting without devolving into the ridiculous set pieces the series became known for. Some of the kills are quotes from the original but others are new and interesting. The first one we see in the movie is a grabber and sets the tone for the rest very well.

Conclusion [8 out of 10]

Giving a good grade to a horror movie that isn’t Paranormal Activity seems almost criminal nowadays as they are regarded as low entertainment and almost incapable of ever being good. This is not an altogether unfounded position as often they tend to be rote rehashes and are made with little regard for quality. I think that is too bad because the genre can be very cathartic and visceral when done right. A Nightmare on Elm Street is horror done right. It is fun and creepy and brings new elements to the table that are truly engaging and help to elevate the material. It also takes its place next to Dawn of the Dead as a well done remake. There is a lot that could have gone wrong here and a lot of people thought it was a mistake to remake a classic and to do it without the actor who has brought Freddy to life across eight movies but A Nightmare on Elm Street proves that if you actually give a shit about the material and want to do something right you actually can. This is a remake that takes the time to get it right and does so with talent capable of handling the job. If you hate horror in general and the Nightmare series in particular, I doubt much about this movie is going to change your mind but if you are a fan of the series and the genre then there is a lot to like and you are in for a treat.