With new A Nightmare on Elm Street movies reportedly being developed at both Paramount and Warner Bros., Freddy Krueger is once again lurking around the edges of Hollywood. While we wait to see what the future holds for Wes Craven’s iconic creation, Jackie Earle Haley has been looking back at his own time wearing the fedora and razor glove. Haley played Freddy Krueger in the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, taking over the role from Robert Englund, who had portrayed Freddy throughout the original film series. The remake was a financial success, but it was met with a largely negative critical response and remains one of the more divisive entries in the franchise.
During an appearance on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast, Haley discussed the challenges of taking on Freddy, the darker approach to the character, his makeup, and an intriguing idea that was part of the character’s early development. With thanks to our friends at Bloody Disgusting for the transcription of Haley’s comments, here’s what the actor had to say about the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger was never going to be an easy assignment. Englund had played the character in eight movies (and episodes of a TV series) by the time the 2010 reboot came along, and Freddy had become inseparable from the actor’s performance. Haley knew he was stepping into a role that already had a massive fanbase behind it.
“That one was scary for another reason because you know you’re going to take sh-t no matter what. You hope and pray that … it had been a while. It was definitely … they were going in for a higher-end thing with the production. I think they had a good budget. And Sam Bayer had a great sense of … [he’s] a really good DP. He wasn’t the DP, but as a director, he knew to get really cool shots and stuff.”
The reboot was directed by Samuel Bayer, making his feature directorial debut after a career primarily spent directing music videos. Rather than attempting to recreate the increasingly comedic Freddy of the later sequels, Bayer and Haley wanted to push the character back toward something darker and more frightening.
Freddy’s personality changed considerably throughout the original A Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The villain who terrified Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven’s 1984 original eventually became a wisecracking, pun-spouting horror icon. The 2010 movie attempted to move in the opposite direction.
“Talking with Sam, it was just, it really seemed that they wanted to [go back to the roots of a scary Freddy], of a dark Freddy. So I just really tried to own the sense of, ‘All right, let’s take this guy…,’ and I think that’s how Freddy started out in that first one. They darkened him up a little bit more. I think it would have been cool had they not quite done that.”
Haley’s Freddy was less interested in cracking jokes than Englund’s later version. But there was another interesting idea behind this version of Freddy: the possibility that he might not have been guilty of the crimes that led to his death.
One of the most unusual aspects of the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street is the suggestion that Freddy may have been wrongfully accused of sexually abusing children before he was murdered by the parents of Springwood. The movie eventually confirms that Freddy really was guilty, but Haley revealed that there was a version of the story in which the character could have been innocent.
“There is a version where this guy could have been innocent, but they made him guilty. But that also was, I think, Wes Craven’s initial version of this, that’s who that character was. And he had to lighten that up when he made him. So these guys felt like, ‘Well, we can put that … let’s put that in there.’”
The 2010 reboot also gave Freddy a substantially different look. The makeup was more severe and realistic than the version Englund wore in the original movies, emphasizing the idea that Freddy was a badly burned corpse rather than a supernatural version of one. Haley believes that aspect of the film has found an audience over time.
“I thought they did a great job [with the makeup]. I think the movie’s caught on a little bit more with the younger people who aren’t so attached to the first one. But you’ve got people that just hate it, but there’s a lot of people that love it just because it looks more realistic. It looks like this guy got burned. I think that was the whole idea, is to try to give a lot of what the first movie was, but put a modern adaptation to it.”
That last point gets to the basic approach of the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street. The filmmakers weren’t trying to continue the original series, they were attempting to take Craven’s basic premise and update it for a new generation. Whether that worked is, of course, another question.
Haley starred as Freddy Krueger in the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street, with the main cast also including:
Kyra Krumins played young Nancy, Julianna Damm played young Kris, Bayden Coyer played young Jesse, and Max Holt played young Dean.
The film follows Nancy, Quentin, Kris, Jesse, and Dean, a group of neighborhood friends who begin sharing nightmares about a horribly disfigured man wearing a tattered sweater and a glove equipped with knives. The only way to escape Freddy in the dream world is to wake up. But when the teenagers begin dying violently, they realize that their nightmares have real-world consequences. If Freddy can kill them in their dreams, staying awake may be their only chance to survive.
Directed by Samuel Bayer and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in April 2010. The movie was a financial success, but reviews were overwhelmingly negative. It currently holds a 14% positive critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
More than 15 years later, however, Haley says he has noticed the movie finding an audience among younger viewers who aren’t as emotionally attached to Craven’s original. That doesn’t mean the 2010 reboot has suddenly become universally beloved. (Far from it.) But it is a reminder that horror movies can sometimes find a second life with viewers who encounter them without expectations.
And now, with new A Nightmare on Elm Street projects reportedly in development at Paramount and Warner Bros., Freddy Krueger’s next chapter could end up taking the character in yet another direction. For now, there is no officially announced release date for either project.
What do you think of Jackie Earle Haley’s take on Freddy Krueger? Share your thoughts on the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street by leaving a comment below.