SusannahFriday the 13th (reboot 2009) vs. A Nightmare on Elm Street (reboot 2010)
June 14th 2010 11:15
Friday the 13th (reboot 2009) vs. A Nightmare on Elm Street (reboot 2010)
Friday the 13th: Starring: Jared Padalecki, Derek Mears, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti, Travis Van Winkle
Friday the 13th: Directed by: Marcus Nispel
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, Clancy Brown
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Directed by: Samuel Bayer
Two of the longest running horror series have both had reboots recently. In the case of Friday the 13th the reboot is an amalgamation of the first three films in the series, whereas for A Nightmare on Elm Street it is more a direct remake of the first film. I am very familiar with both horror series, and surprisingly, I found both reboots very enjoyable.
I have seen every entry in the Friday the 13th series, so I am very familiar with the villain, Jason Voorhees, being an un-dead, slow-walking, machete-wielding zombie. The reboot brings us a Jason for the 21st century. This Jason hunts. He moves fast, uses strategy, and a variety of weapons with which to dispatch his victims.
The victims, meanwhile, are almost a piss-take of the teenagers from the original movies. Nearly every single college-aged person in it is despicable. A group of five get dispatched right at the start after revealing that they are about to get rich from pot they have been growing near Camp Crystal Lake (a big Jason no-no), having loud, enthusiastic sex (another big no-no), and just generally being douche-bags. They cannot die soon enough, and die they do; but not before they have revealed over the camp-fire some essential back-story regarding the legend of Jason.
Jason’s mother is not forgotten. The opening sequence reveals that she killed everyone at the original camp as revenge for not watching her son and letting him die. It turns out though that Jason did not in fact die, and he subsequently sees his mother be beheaded by the survivor girl. Why he did not tell his mother his was still alive is not dwelt on. Anyway, he saves her head, and they find it in his shrine at his hideout. Jason also does his initial killings wearing the sack with one eye-hole from the series’ second instalment.
Six weeks later and Clay (Jared Padalecki, Supernatural) has come to the area to look for his sister, Whitney, who was a member of the group that died at the start. He encounters a new, even bigger group of douche-bags, led by Trent (Travis Van Winkle) who are staying at a very swanky cabin in the area. These young people are so annoying and have so few redeeming qualities that you are actually rooting for Jason to put them out of your misery. They take drugs, have obnoxious sex and generally have boring and inane conversations with each other. I suspect the filmmakers are actually satirising the vacuous teens of the original movies by pushing the stereotype to its limit. Clay also meets a local redneck, who you also cannot wait to see be dispatched, and who later provides Jason with his iconic hockey-mask.
By contrast, the teenagers in A Nightmare on Elm Street are a lot more sympathetic. You are not wishing Freddy would dispatch them, even though you know he is going to. This reboot fixes a lot of the problems with the narrative that are present in the story of the original film. First of all, Freddy has to wait until the kids are teenagers before killing them because he feeds off their memories. Because of the trauma they experienced at the Badlam preschool, the children have repressed their memories of Freddy Krueger, the memories only surfacing as they get older. Also, Freddy is revealed to have been a child molester, rather than a child killer, which makes more sense that the parents could get away with lynching him without the police prosecuting them. And therefore, when Freddy resurfaces he is able to go after his victims and pursue them, and kill them, which he was not able to the first time around.
The film basically follows the plot of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Nancy the survivor-girl, and (shudder) Freddy’s favourite when she was a child, being the one to take him on at the end. The deaths pay homage to those in the first film, like Kris dying in her bedroom, and Jesse in his jail cell, but they are not identical to the first movie.
Jackie Earle Haley is truly frightening as Freddy, and refrains from descending into cheesy comedy that plagued too much of Robert Englund’s performances as the original series went on. The filmmakers rely on a lot of jump-cuts for the scares, but they are surprisingly effective, meaning that Freddy can, and does, pop-up from anywhere when the characters are dreaming. In Friday the 13th the filmmakers opt for a more tension building formula with a slow build-up to each kill. This also works effectively to scare the audience.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street the science of sleep is also explored. The characters know that no matter how long they try and stay awake for, after 72 hours they will start to fall asleep and dream in micro-naps, whether they want to or not. And, similarly to Jason, what Freddy does to them when he gets them is both brutal and horrific.
Altogether, pleasing reboots for your favourite horror franchises, and favourite horror villains, which both honour the spirit of the originals while reinvigorating them.
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
There are very few remakes that are actually any good. And what's worse is many of these current remakes are toned down to appeal to a wider demographic. It sucks.