New ‘Nightmare’ needs to let Freddy be himself

In 1984,  knife-fingered bogeyman Freddy Krueger stepped out of audience nightmares and onto movie screens in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and became a horror icon.

“Every kid knows who Freddy is. He’s like Santa Claus or King Kong,” said actress Heather Langenkamp in “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” the series’ seventh film.

By the time that line was uttered, just ten years after the original movie came out, it couldn’t have been more true. Dolls, lunchboxes, video games — they all sported some of that ol’ Krueger black magic.

Now the same studio behind horror remakes like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and ‘Friday the 13th” is hoping audiences want to see a brand new Freddy up to some of his same old tricks. The 2010 reboot of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” features Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley taking over the role of Freddy from Robert Englund, the man who made the monster a legend.

“Of this group of monsters from the mid-’80s, he was always the most interesting to me because there was some depth to him that drew me in,” Haley said. “It made me curious what made this guy tick.”

One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you
It's hard not to know the details of Freddy's story, especially his description. Four knives on each hand. Always clad in a red and green striped sweater and wearing a hat, casting his scarred pink face into shadow. His setting is equally creepy — a boiler room rife with steam and pipes perfectly suited to be scraped with knives.

Krueger was a child murderer in life, hunted down by the parents of Springwood, Ohio after he was freed on a technicality. Burned to death and resurrected into the nightmares of town’s children, he began to murder them again.

Slideshow: 10 horror-movie icons Eventually, we met his mother, a nun who became pregnant after being gang-raped by inmates of an insane asylum. In the sixth film we learned he had a daughter taken away from him. And so on; the story grew more convoluted with each film.

The reboot’s director Samuel Bayer agrees. “I'm disregarding whatever the history, the six movies, the seven movies, and I'm starting fresh,” he told IESB.net. “I'm starting with the glove and the sweater and the hat and the legacy of Freddy, the story of Freddy, but I'm reinterpreting it my way and the way that [the studio] sees it.”

Three, four better lock your door
Every lunatic’s got their calling cards — those scary surface conceits that visualize their monstrosity. Jason’s hockey mask, Leatherface’s chainsaw, Freddy's bladed glove.

Seven spectacularly creepy deathsBut other things set him apart. Freddy’s no cipher. He quips, jokes, has a personality. Beyond that he’s explicitly supernatural. Jason and Michael Myers grew invincible as their sequels wore on, but Freddy started out as a magic man. He was always able to prowl his victim’s subconscious and turn them on themselves. Locking the door only matters in the mental sense — there is no way to fight Freddy except by closing him off from the very fears he’s feeding on. The victim is the real weapon he’s wielding.  You can’t escape sleep — like death, it comes for us all eventually.

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Five, six, grab your crucifix
Restarting a horror franchise based on a famous murderer doesn't always work. Witness newfangled version of Jason Voorhees in last summer’s “Friday the 13th” reboot.

Jason seemed an even simpler monster to remake than Freddy — he’s nothing but id. He comes at you until he stabs you dead, the end. Capture his Terminator-in-overalls vibe, set in on a campground, voila, fun times for all.

But the revised Jason now maintains an elaborate series of mines and tunnels and takes prisoners and there’s no camp-counselor-canoodling in sight. The result? Everything that was Jason starts to fall apart.

“Whatever the fans tell you what they want, they're still not going to be satisfied,” producer Brad Fuller told IESB.com. “We try to do our research, and when I say ‘research,’ we watch all the films, try to discern what works for us, and try to bring that to it. Inevitably some of it works and some of it doesn't. ...When we're doing these remakes, we talk about scenes or… images that are important to us and we figure out how we can integrate as many of them as we can.”

So just what will make the fans happy with this “Elm Street” remake? A nod to the fountain of blood spraying from the mattress that ate Johnny Depp? Nancy’s mother pulling vodka bottles from everything she touches?

It's something more enigmatic than those fun yet superficial things that ultimately make Krueger tick.

Seven, eight, gonna stay up late
Everybody knows who Freddy Krueger is because he embodies something surreal and terrible. He’s iconic beyond his glove and Christmas-colored sweater because he taps into the feeling viewers get when the lights are off and their eyes flutter half-shut and familiar rooms turn strange. The shadows move. That lump of dirty laundry in the corner… does it have a face?

In order to capture Freddy’s magic, the remake needs to mobilize that strangeness. Wes Craven did so masterfully in the original when the body bag slid down the hallway, or Freddy’s arms stretched the width of an alleyway, or the stairs beneath Nancy’s feet turned to goo.

Freddy Krueger’s been a part of our cultural lexicon for 26 years now not because of the little girls skipping rope singing their eerie rhyme but because of what they represent as they drift into slow motion. The other worlds where anything can happen, and the monster waiting there that will never let us go.  “This is a campfire tale, and Freddy’s the boogeyman,” Jackie Earle Haley told Entertainment Weekly.

Nine, ten, never sleep again. Or so fans hope.

Jason Adams is a writer in New York.