Life is but a child molester's revenge fantasy

Spoilers for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake abound below!

Some time during, oh, the fourth Saw flick or so, this much should have been clear to even the most ardent horror defender: we’re the ones who are really being tortured. We slog through so much garbage and for what? To find that rare diamond in a rough like back in the VHS days? To see just how far cinema will go to freak us out and make us squirm? To actually freak out and squirm? Because being smarter than garbage beats being dumber than art? I don’t know really what the point is (probably a little from each of the presented scenarios), but I know that I’m a gleeful masochist.

Horror's got more than just torture in store. The underbelly of cinema that used to exploit via portrayals of cultures, subgroups, and fetishes, now exploits the audience. Maybe it always did, and maybe there’s a fine line between appealing to an audience and exploiting it, anyway, but the modern horror industry seems to diabolically understand what we’ll spend our money on: sequels and remakes. It hasn’t stopped working yet. And our eagerness to spend money on infinitely warmed-over crap makes at least one thing clear: we are the new freaks.

The remake offers a lot to freak out about, too, as it’s an inherent conversation between the past and present – no matter how aware we are that a horror remake is an easy, creatively bankrupt trash bag for our cash, curiosity tends to get the best of us. Did they do our beloved tale of creative carnage and suffering justice? Did they not, creating something infinitely more gawkable? Did they even bother to translate it to modern time? If not, will the ‘70s or ‘80s hairdos at least stand up? It’s all too much to resist. Never take for granted nostalgia’s narcotic properties.

A lot of these remakes are basically just sequels anyway – further chapters that adopt and reject the series’ mythology at will, and are ultimately about fresh meat for the slaughter. Slashers like Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, that basically chronicle a dude walking (or running, depending on how the mythology is adopted or rejected) around killing people, have been ripped off so much anyway that a conscious remake of one of those seems like an unpretentious antidote to all the carbon copies. That’s not the case with Nightmare on Elm Street, though, which had a singular investment in fantasy and absurdity, thanks to its dream world milieu (the investment in fantasy and absurdity in other slashers was mostly a means to explain further installments in the series – he can’t be killed!). Because it was so unique, Nightmare seemed a particularly pointless remake, at least to me, especially because the original was the movie to ignite my love of horror. You never forget your first, you can’t improve upon perfection, I like my burnt child molester just the way he is, thank you very much, etc.

The new Nightmare, though, announces its worth by presenting a story that’s deeper than its predecessor’s. Where the first one concerned a bunch of kids who were paying for the sin of their parents (the lynching of a child child murder), this one double-bakes its victims. Freddy Krueger has gone from murderer to molester (finally?). His origin again involves him being lynched (an act we see here, as this remake has prequel tendencies), but his beef is with the kids who reported him after he molested them in preschool (he worked there gardening and such, and was Groundskeeper Willie to a T, in what feels like a parody of a parody). The movie is about the kind of monster who persecutes after being persecuted for initially persecuting. This reminded me a lot of the bigots who cry foul when they’re labeled as such, or who bristle at the notion that they don’t have a right to deny others’ rights. It’s such a rotten thing, the aggressor’s victim play, and this movie realizes that it's best conveyed via the flesh-torn face of evil.

The little details here matter so much. As an abuse survivor, Nancy is a more sympathetic heroine – we are no longer rooting for her just cuz. The body’s breakdown as a result of sleep deprivation is handled more carefully than ever (as opposed to having the teens just slump over eventually). There’s an incredible scene that takes place after Nancy has been awake for a few days and the micro-naps are setting in – the scene strobes between her actual environment (the aisle of a pharmacy) and the boiler-room nightmare one. The movie even takes into account the idea that the brain goes on living for a few minutes after the heart stops (Freddy rejoices of the “six more minutes to play” that he has with a victim).

Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy is more caustic than ever. He is, after all, an actual, unambiguous child molester, and the script allows for some low-key, truly creepy sentiments (after interacting with Nancy for an extended period of time, he tells her matter-of-factly, “You smell different”). These come between the campy one-liners that have long defined Freddy (“How’s this for a wet dream?” he says again, referencing Nightmare on Elm Street 4). Instead sporting makeup based on what pizza looks like, this Freddy is meant to look like an actual burn victim, all melty and weirdly smoothed out. The effect is like seeing an actual great white shark for the first time after getting used to what sharks look like in Jaws. It’s not OK, but you know it’s right.

The Nightmare remake is by no means perfect. The first half hour, which essentially serves as a recap of the cinematic legacy that's led up to it, feels laborious and protagonist-free. There is exposition in the place of innovation. The new development – that these are kids with whom Freddy has interacted before, to say the least – gives the film an urgency and soul that Nightmare has never had, but it also asks you to believe that they’re all suffering from collective amnesia, thus they can’t remember Freddy or recognize his name or even realize that they all went to preschool together (please – I could name you 10 kids I ate paste with in preschool without even thinking about it). Even if you buy into the concept of repressed memories entirely, this is too much of a stretch in a film that attempts to iron out all the wrinkles of this saga's mythology. When it actually is making sense of this universe and with visual flair to boot, though, it seems like a downright shame that it’s telling a story that’s already been told.

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