Scary movies! A Nightmare on Elm Street

In 2010, the 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street was re-imagined and remade. Why? To completely drain the life and interest out of a horror movie classic. I'm not even saying that the original was a great movie. But it was a great horror movie. It had a spooky premise--if you go to sleep and dream, you can die in your dreams. It had a great villan--Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger of the first couple of movies, before he turned into a campy version of himself. It had teenaged victims--including the unbelievably yummy Johnny Depp. It was also a fairly low budget, grainy little movie, which added to its overall spookiness. And the original handled that "Is the character dreaming or is this real?" surreality very well.

The remake is bad. Truly, truly bad. I'm not sure why big studios keep remaking these low budget horror classics with huge slick budgets, because it completely sucks the soul out of the films. This version of Freddie Krueger has no personality, no sense of humor, and no charm, as strange as a word as that might be to use for Freddie. The remade Krueger's makeup pretty much renders him non-emotional, and he ends up being just a wooden villan with no personality. The dream sequences, and the idea of dreams and reality mixing and melding, are handled so badly in this version that the low budget original looks like Citizen Kane in comparison. Every scare in the remake is predictable and not scary, the acting is bad, the effects aren't convincing. . . I could go on and on.

I hated the remake of Halloween as well, not to mention all of the other "re-visioning" of horror classics that were originally made for twelve bucks. Here's a novel idea: How about we create and write new and fresh horror movies, and leave the classics alone? Because these kinds of movies really only scare you the first time.