A Nightmare on Elm Street

With "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the character of Freddy Krueger, director Wes Craven created not only a classic of the horror genre in 1984, but also an icon of 80s and 90s pop culture. After six sequels, a TV series and a shared screen appearance with slasher buddy Jason Vorhees from the "Friday the 13th," films, the "Nightmare" franchise is one of the most successful series of the subject. Now producer Michael Bay, who has successfully remade such classics as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th," with his company Platinum Dunes, has teamed up with commercial and music video director Samuel Bayer, who makes his feature debut here, to bring Wes Craven's cult film into the new millennium as well.

The story is virtually identical to that of the 1984 original, save for a few minor details: not only do Nancy, Kris, Quentin, Jesse and Dean have in common that they all live on Elm Street. The teenagers are also linked by gruesome nightmares that haunt them night after night. In them, they are always chased by a creepy man with a horribly disfigured face, a knife glove and a red and green striped sweater. When one of their friends is brutally murdered, the surviving teens of Elm Street realize they are only safe if they stay awake. And so it is now a matter of fighting against fatigue and to get on the trail of the mystery, why they are haunted by the dream killer, the cruel Freddy Krueger.

The biggest change from the previous "Nightmare" films is, of course, that no longer Robert Englund in the role of Freddy Krueger to see. For fans of the series an absolute bad news, but the character Krueger is almost inseparable from the actor. But Jackie Earle Haley, who most recently thrilled as Rorschach in "Watchmen", masters the difficult task of following in Englund's footsteps quite brilliantly - even if his burn make-up, which is a little too concerned with authenticity, comes too much at the expense of the fantastic element of the story. But does a good leading actor automatically make the film a successful remake?

Isn't a remake actually only meaningful and also to be considered successful if it reinterprets an already existing material, modernizes it and thus makes something of its own out of it? Basically, Samuel Bayer's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" already tries to do that, in that the familiar story has been recognizably altered for connoisseurs of the original. But unfortunately, this has not been done for the better. Rather, this film, like so many contemporary horror films, commits the mistake of trying to explain too much. Because when it is explained down to the smallest detail, any creepiness, no matter how well established, almost completely disappears. Moreover, the sometimes already quite decent shock effects are completely watered down with sledgehammer sound effects. Subtle horror, which can work not only in the short term, but also in the long term much more intense, is for the makers of the 2010 "Nightmare on Elm Street" apparently a foreign word.

It becomes really annoying, however, when some scenes from the original that have become cult moments are taken over 1:1, but apparently only to show the fans of Wes Craven's masterpiece that the makers of the remake also know the original. This is most evident, for example, in the scene where Nancy sees her dead friend in a body bag in the school hallway. In the original a great and really scary scene, here just an almost embarrassing and extremely cheap shock effect.

Detached from the original, this Michael Bay production also has its moments and certainly satisfies the rather youthful target audience, who know the 1984 original at most because Johnny Depp had his first cinema appearance here, on the whole. But from an artistic standpoint, this purely commercial and unfortunately completely unoriginal (which just can't be said of Wes Craven's film) work represents another major disappointment in the horror genre.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp