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Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay for NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (no “A” in the title, it should be noted) is as faithful to the original as one could hope for. In fact, in some cases it’s so damn similar, that the age-old “Why even remake it?!” question is often unavoidable. There are a few new wrinkles, so to speak, but oftentimes there’s just the feeling that the writers didn’t want to screw with what worked the first time out. Naturally, this is welcome news to fans who don’t want their beloved boogey man Freddy changing his stripes too much, but it also doesn’t make for a very thrilling reading experience. I imagine the movie will be a fair addition to the NIGHTMARE canon, but not unlike the new FRIDAY THE 13th flick, it’s not even trying to reinvent the wheel.
WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW
The script opens with a rather unexceptional set-piece, a high-school party, where we meet a few of the main characters. There’s Kris, the pretty good girl; Quentin, slightly geeky; Jesse, Kris’ bland ex-boyfriend; Dean, a confident jock. There’s a bunch of other minor characters, but those four are focused on the most in the early going. Oh, and also a quiet girl named Nancy, whom we don’t really get to know until later. After everyone goes to sleep (playing Wii takes it out of you), one of them is dragged up the stairs by an invisible force, slashed, and thrown off a balcony. Only Kris sees this, however, and I thought the sequence would have been much more epic and bizarre if everyone had witnessed the event, but obviously that would spoil any mystery involving what exactly killed the poor kid. (Well, it’s a mystery for anyone who has never heard of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, or is in this movie.)
Kris is the lead character initially, and of course she goes about wondering what the hell happened to her friend. She also begins to spot a creepy little girl hanging around – always a sure sign something spooky is afoot. Soon, one of the screenplay’s favorite motifs begins: the research sequence. I’m telling you, this script has so many damn scenes of people looking online, reading books, studying files, opening boxes, and peering around corners that you’d think you were reading NANCY DREW after a while. (And really, I know it looks good on the screen, but how many people – tech-savvy teens especially – pour over stacks of books in a library anymore?) There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the tried-and-true “research sequence” but I’m just wondering if this movie goes slightly overboard with it…
Anyway, the parents of the teens start acting suspicious of all this researching and question-asking, and it’s eventually uncovered that all of our kids have great big gaps in their early memories, a time period when they were face-to-face with a seemingly gentle gardener named Fred Krueger. Of course, we know what happened back then – Freddy was “accused” of molesting the children, and the parents burned him alive. But was Freddy really guilty of the crimes? The question new to this version is whether or not Freddy really was an awful person back in his fleshier days. Either way, he’s back in their lives with a vengeance.
As I mentioned right off the bat, this new script moves along almost exactly like the first one. There are even sequences completely lifted from the original, and similar to the Wes Craven film, this tale has no problem killing off main characters throughout its running time. (Or page count, as it were.) Nancy, very much a minor character in the first act, eventually becomes the protagonist. She’s not a mousy wallflower either, but a tough, take-charge badass (although the increasingly freaky scenario dictates that she become that). Quentin, who becomes her comrade, doesn’t really jump off the page, and not much is made in the way of creating chemistry between them. Maybe its all the damn researching they’re doing. Of course, casting could change all that, perhaps they’ll make a terrific screen couple.
Freddy himself is a relatively quiet character, choosing instead to let his actions speak. There’s certainly no bad nightclub shtick here; Freddy means business. He whips out the occasional pun or two (“I want you to spill your guts”) but you’ve got to have a little of that, he is still Freddy after all. But a little Freddy jokery goes a long way, and this script knows at least that much. Usually, he just wants to scare the crap out of you.
The thing with reading a script is, you’re never sure how it will translate, especially something as purely visual as a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movie. So it goes, the dream sequences in this one don’t really come to life in my imagination. There’s some standard creepy moments (Talking dolls! Porcelain children!), but the scenes themselves aren’t much to write home about. And naturally, there’s many points in the narrative where our characters have fallen asleep and neither they, nor we, know it until the reality they’re in is invaded by Freddy (or some other nightmarish visual). There’s loads of these, and no NIGHTMARE movie would be the same without them. You can expect that whenever a character rubs their eyes wearily, it means they’re in dreamland.
At the end of the day, I get the feeling that NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET will be a mostly welcome trip back to Springwood for fans of the series, and a pretty exciting introduction to the world for newbies. The pressure is easily on director Samuel Bayer’s shoulders, as he’s been given a script that paves the way for something potentially mesmerizing. It’s a template is all, a serviceable one, and if Bayer can elevate it with a keen visual style and give us something haunting (which is really what it should be), then we may be getting a real treat next April.
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