Springwood. Dean has recurring nightmares in which a disturbing man with a burnt face and a clawed glove tries to kill him. Dean hasn't slept for three days to avoid dreaming, but eventually sleep prevails, the boy falls asleep and is killed in his nightmare, dying in reality as well, right in front of Kris's eyes. But the girl also starts dreaming about the Boogeyman and so do her boyfriend Jesse and her best friends Nancy and Quentin. When Kris also dies, dismembered by invisible blades in front of her boyfriend, hysteria breaks out among the inhabitants of Springwood and the memory of Fred Krueger, the city kindergarten's gardener who was executed by the parents of the children he allegedly molested, comes back.
"The Boogeyman isn't dead, he has claws like a crow..." goes the historic rhyme that the souls of Freddy Krueger's youngest victims sing while jumping rope. The Boogeyman isn't dead and will never die! Freddy lives, he has been one of the most influential icons of 1980s horror cinema and even today he populates his victims' nightmares with a vigor that we might not have expected.
With predictable punctuality, "Nightmare" also returns to the screens with a restyling operation that has become a fixed rule of contemporary American horror. Bringing Freddy back to the cinema was Michael Bay, the Midas King, producer of this new "Nightmare" as he was of the new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th", with his production company Platinum Dunes, the true heir of the English Hammer, as it intends to assert the immortality of icons of horror cinema. Only that there were Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy, here Leatherface, Jason, and Freddy.
The path taken by Bay and his collaborators was, however, fraught with threats and dangers, "doing" "Nightmare" means facing a demanding fan audience, it means replacing a charismatic and beloved actor like Robert Englund with someone who can bring back his Freddy, it means comparing oneself with Wes Craven's film, a true masterpiece of horror cinema and still very current today. A risky operation that, however, in the name of the God Money, had to be done, today rather than tomorrow because it is precisely today that the reboot of "Friday the 13th" and the prequel/remake of "Halloween" are capable of grossing only in the United States respectively 65 and 60 million dollars after costing four times less.
When talking about money and production strategies, one always thinks negatively when it comes to film criticism, but in reality, it is not always synonymous with a bad product that which is dictated by the calculator rather than the heart and with "Nightmare" we have a demonstration, because Freddy Krueger's return is bubbly and fun, dark and scary as it was right to demand. In short, with "Nightmare" 2010 we have an excellent new beginning, perfectly in line with the quality products that Platinum Dunes has signed in these years.
A great merit of the reboot of "Nightmare" is to deviate from the original while remaining totally faithful to it. Compared to "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th", here we have a greater connection with Craven's work for the reproduction of narrative dynamics, a characteristic that brings "Nightmare" closer to the idea of a remake. However, at the same time, it manages to carve out a new story, with different characters and an alternative thematic focus. The skeleton, therefore, is the same as the 1984 film, but the flesh and muscles change.
We have a girl tormented by nightmares who dies and her lover is accused of murder and ends up in jail, we then have another girl who tries with her friend/boyfriend to discover the truth about the man who populates their nightmares and fight him. There is a scene where the man of nightmares tries to come out of the wall above the bed and a scene where Freddy's claw emerges from the bath foam aiming at Nancy's private parts. Déjà-vu!
But at the same time, we also have an unprecedented fourth character who starts the body count, the names of the characters change (even Nancy's last name is no longer Thompson but Holbrook) and so do their personalities. Nancy (Rooney Mara) is more fragile and subdued, here she doesn't have a father and her mother (Connie Britton) isn't the alcoholic we all remember; Quentin (Kyle Gallner) isn't the sympathetic rogue named Glen made famous by Johnny Depp, but a serious and smart guy, son of the principal of Springwood High School (played by Clancy Brown) and with an undeclared crush on Nancy. Then there's Freddy, here returned as bad and scary as the first films, played with great skill by the Rorschach of "Watchmen" Jackie Earle Haley, perfectly at ease in the role of the most famous Boogeyman on the big screen. Haley manages to give the character intensity and meanness, his Freddy almost arouses pity when we see him playing tenderly with the children and then burning in the flames, but at the same time, he instills fear for his perversion and his realistic makeup with a highly burnt face, almost feline in appearance and with glassy, immoral eyes.
For the first time in the "Nightmare" saga, there is then an explicit mention of Freddy's pedophilia (alleged?) - some hints were also present in "Freddy vs. Jason" - which here gives the character and the environments in which he moves a greater sense of unhealthiness. Seeing the gardener playing hide and seek with the children, caressing them, taking them with him and knowing that he photographs and abuses them provides a patina of (dis)humanity to the monster, makes him real and possible on the plane of chronicle. The flashbacks and the scenes of Nancy in the "den" of the monster almost make you uncomfortable, make you perceive the drama. The very tense last part of the film then also underlines the physical and unnatural relationship that the tormentor had or always wanted to have with his victims: a Nancy dressed like a little girl and lying on the bed while the slimy Krueger approaches her to possess her. Freddy is no longer the bogeyman who scares children... well, not only. Now he is the realistic embodiment of the one who violates innocence, of extreme immorality and perversion.
Also very good is the work done with the various - many - nightmares that make up the film, a back and forth between the plane of reality and that of the dream that recalls, with a great sense of continuity, the atmospheres that fans of the saga have learned to know and love. Paradoxically, what works less in "Nightmare" 2010 are the scenes more or less faithfully taken from the original. The death of Kris (a Katie Cassidy perhaps a bit too grown up to play a high school student) is modeled on that of Tina in Craven's film, but the copy does not strike as much as the original, does not impress and is resolved in a too hurried way. Also, Freddy's exit from the wall above Nancy's bed - here with a not very convincing computer graphic - only appears to be a simple citation orphelin, as is the brief scene in the bathtub, which, in the end, is completely useless.
The new "Nightmare" therefore convinces; fans will have something to rejoice about and newcomers an excellent starting point to discover the old saga. There are no great artistic merits in the "Nightmare" directed by Samuel Bayer, but managing to continue with faithfulness, affection, and competence to feed the image of an icon like Freddy Krueger is already an important milestone.
Objective achieved!
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