Let’s Be Real Here

Last night I saw “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” the remake. Horrible. Abject misery. You seriously can’t make a horror film much worse than this. Some of you may know I’m actually not a huge fan of the original, either; like so much of Wes Craven’s work, it’s an interesting idea that never finds meaningful characters (I hear a few of the sequels are better). Still, seeing this new crock of nonsense that Platinum Dunes served up makes me go easy on the old bird. After all, they had an original idea, there are some very inventive sequences, and they had enough eye for talent to cast Johnny Depp and Robert Englund. And Freddy was scary, he was instantly iconic and deeply troubling. It was far from a perfect movie, and in my opinion not a classic, but a respectable horror film at least.

This new version is just a disaster. They handed the directorial reins to Samuel Bayer, a very talented music video director who needs to stick with his day job. Bayer has a great deal of fun with the visual effects, and some of the things he pulls off are obviously the work of a steady hand, but I wonder if he so much as looked at his actors while they were on set, because they’re all lost. Directing is, among many other things, about managing tone, and the tone is a train wreck in “Elm Street.” Sappy music drops in when the moment is already corny without it, the actors over-emote even in the close ups, and the pacing allows no time to build suspense. Also, there has to be some kind of award for the worst dialog I’ve heard in a movie in quite some time. Say what you will about Dunes’ re-dos of “Friday the 13th” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” at least they troubled to put words in their characters’ mouths. “They’re just dreams, they’re not real” one character tells another. The second looks back at the first meaningfully, then retorts, “These dreams, they’re real.” What’s weird about that passage in the movie is that the characters emphasize the words “dream” and “real” almost identically, and they occur in roughly the same places in the sentence, making it sound like they’re parroting each other back and forth without realizing it. It’s not just me, either, I saw this thing at the Chinese Theater and the entire audience laughed out loud. They also laughed at a passage where one of the lead characters tries to bargain with a pharmacist for a refill of medication, although I doubt they could have explained why. I can. The problem was editing: this kid should start out calm and get angrier as the pharmacist refuses him, but instead his close-ups jump emotionally all over the place, and there’s no sign of him thinking or switching tactics. They must not have shot enough coverage, and they had to dig into whatever they had.

Devil his due, though, the one good idea they had was “micronaps.” I have no idea if it’s a real thing, but the movie claims that extreme sleep deprivation leads to the brain dreaming awake in 1-2 second spurts that increase in frequency. There’s a particularly cool sequence that utilizes this in a grocery store, and for that one moment, Platinum Dunes had hired the right director for the job. Bayer also acquitted himself well with the re-imagining of the body-bag sequence from the original. Sam was on solid ground as long as there were visual effects going on and no one was speaking. Change either of those, and the man was lost.

Also, let me comment on something that pisses me off. If you’re making a horror film, do not make the opening shot a scare; most times, you shouldn’t even make the opening scene frightening. Both the original “Elm Street” and this remake begin on Freddy already hunting someone, and this is a horrible mistake. Things are always scarier with context. If we don’t know the characters yet, we’re too detached to root for them, and if we don’t have a tangible sense of the world they’re living in, we can’t perceive their attacker the way they do. Even if you’ve seen a thousand horror films, each one creates a slightly different universe to exist in, and it’s so imperative that we be bathed in that atmosphere before you try to scare us. Monsters are twice as effective if they’re inserted into an established, believable world. More than that, though, it’s just basic human nature: dynamics dramatically increase emotional returns.  The guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven” is that much sweeter because it follows a slow, gentle build.

The point is, don’t see “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” I went in your stead, I tasted this poison for you so you don’t have to swallow it. Go watch “The Descent” or “Drag Me To Hell.”