A Nightmare on Elm Street is the latest remake from Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes shingle, a specialty horror label whose modus operandi is to take a low-budget cult-classic from the '80s, then have it "re-envisioned" by directors with good eyes for slick editing and camera work, but tin ears for tone, performance, and all those other harder-to-nail elements that masters like Sam Raimi and Wes Craven would bring to the proceedings. The result is a steady stream of forgettable shit: Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th reboots both needed to be dragged to a basement and cleaved, while the only scary thing about 2005's The Amityville Horror was the number of times it found an excuse to have Ryan Reynolds battle a home demon-infestation with his shirt off.
Which brings us to their next offering: A Nightmare on Elm Street. In its corner is Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, who'll don the familiar sweater, hat and fingerblades made famous by Robert Englund, and who has the chops -- no pun intended; actually what the hell, pun fully intended! -- to bring some genuine psychological complexity to the bogeyman role. (His third in a row, it's worth pointing out, to feature a direct link between character and child molestation.)
But will Elm Street fall into the same traps as the subpar Dunes remakes that came before? At a Comic-Con press conference, Haley and director Sam Bayer -- a veteran music video and commercial director best known for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- both stressed that the black humor of the original series would be drained from the remake.
"I think where Sam and I were coming from with it was darker, more serious, less jokey," Haley said. "Hopefully scarier. More intense."
Is there no room for some humor, one journalist asked?
Bayer responded: "If you're looking for a laugh, I don't think it's a funny movie. I personally don't think that if a character is wisecracking and killing you at the same time, that it's very funny. I'm taking this very seriously. I really do look at a movie like The Dark Knight as an inspiration for this, which is, I don't think people dress up in outfits, and fly through the sky, and have cars, and dress up as bats -- but Christopher Nolan made me believe it. And what I'd like to do is to have people believe that this could be real."
And there you have it: Perhaps the most frequently referenced "hip" directorial inspiration since Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight has become something of a cultural touchstone for anyone trying to justify a suffocatingly self-serious approach to fundamentally ridiculous source material.
We asked if Englund shared any advice on the matter during the ceremonial passing of the glove. As it turns out, that moment still hasn't happened: "We were going to hook up at some point in time and were never able to get in the same city at the same time," Haley told Movieline. "We were going to have a dinner. But my manager and my agent for my birthday have gotten me an original Nightmare on Elm Street poster, so I'm going to hunt down Robert and get him to sign it, if he'd be so kind to sign it for me."
We're willing to put a crisp fin on the eventual inscription reading, "Jackie -- Make him yours. Best, Robert."