Even though it feels like we’re forever caught in an endless cycle of reboots, remakes, reimaginings, and “requels,” we’re admittedly in a much safer time for horror where people are typically pursuing revivals only when they have something new to say. In the 2000s, though, it was a much different story, as it felt like no movie was safe from being revived for no real reason other than because they would likely score some money.
First due to the success of The Ring, a major wave of A-horror remakes began to roll in, and then the success of the reboot The Texas Chainsaw Massacre resulted in some of the most beloved horror movies of all time all getting updates. From Halloween to Friday the 13th to The Fog to Prom Night, no title was off limits, including A Nightmare on Elm Street. Even though the 2010 reboot was a relative financial success, it was a critical disaster, sitting at only 14% positive reviews on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Undeniably one of the biggest challenges the production faced was replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, who had been the only actor to play the villain up to that point.
During an appearance on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast, actor Jackie Earle Haley opened up about the process of taking on that role. Looking back on the project, the actor reflected:
“That one was scary for another reason because you know you’re going to take sh-t no matter what. You hope and pray that … it had been a while. It was definitely … they were going in for a higher-end thing with the production. I think they had a good budget. And Sam Bayer had a great sense of … [he’s] a really good DP. He wasn’t the DP, but as a director, he knew to get really cool shots and stuff.”
Characters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees evolved over time, and while Freddy Krueger was much more terrifying in the first movie, he had evolved into a wise-cracking and pun-slinging villain over multiple sequels, which was a far cry from Haley’s take on the figure, based on the tone of the project.
“Talking with Sam, it was just, it really seemed that they wanted to go back to the roots of a scary Freddy, of a dark Freddy,” the actor recalled. “So I just really tried to own the sense of, ‘All right, let’s take this guy…,’ and I think that’s how Freddy started out in that first one. They darkened him up a little bit more. I think it would have been cool had they not quite done that.”
One of the more notable tweaks the reboot made was that it at least planted the seed that, despite having a legacy of torturing and killing children, maybe Krueger was wrongfully accused. The reboot ultimately walked back that idea to cement his guilt.
“There is a version where this guy could have been innocent, but they made him guilty,” Haley confirmed. “But that also was, I think, Wes Craven’s initial version of this, that’s who that character was. And he had to lighten that up when he made him. So these guys felt like, ‘Well, we can put that … let’s put that in there.'”
Going along with the movie tonally being much darker, the burn makeup was also much more severe. Jackie Earle Haley noted that, at least from his experience, he’s witnessed audiences starting to turn around on the project.
“I thought they did a great job [with the makeup],” Haley expressed. “I think the movie’s caught on a little bit more with the younger people who aren’t so attached to the first one. But you’ve got people that just hate it, but there’s a lot of people that love it just because it looks more realistic. It looks like this guy got burned.”
He added, “I think that was the whole idea, is to try to give a lot of what the first movie was, but put a modern adaptation to it.”
As it currently stands, there is no official new A Nightmare on Elm Street with a release date at this time, though reports claim both a new movie is in development at Paramount and that Warner Bros. is independently pursuing another installment with Lee Cronin.
What did you think of the A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot? Let us know down in the comments!
