With the A Nightmare On Elm Street to get the daring reboot the series has deserved for decades. Released in 1984, A Nightmare On Elm Street was a groundbreaking slasher from horror icon Wes Craven. The original movie was one of the first to combine the slasher blueprint with more explicitly supernatural horror, as dream demon Freddy Krueger hunted down teens not in an abandoned summer camp or suburbia but the supposed safety of their dreams.
Making the villain of his slasher a paranormal figure as opposed to a standard mute masked man was a stroke of genius by Craven. The director went on to reignite slasher cinema again over a decade later with the Child’s Play and Candyman. Now that the latter is being remade, A Nightmare On Elm Street is also overdue for a reboot that reinvents Freddy Krueger for a new generation.
Director Nia DiCosta’s take on Candyman is, according to its recent trailer, going to lean into the innocence of its titular villain, making his rampage of bloody vengeance all the more believable and easy to empathize with. Candyman was always an easy anti-villain to root for, as a righteously angry innocent man persecuted by racist thugs, but making him into a harmless eccentric persecuted by the police brings the character even closer to being an outright antihero. Candyman’s latest trailer may be exaggerating his innocence and the character’s reinvention could be a letdown in the finished film, but this nonetheless proves that Freddy Krueger is also overdue a reinvention that makes his character more complex and believable than a one-dimensional villain. After a failed remake that turned Freddy into even more of a monster, the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise deserves a reboot that takes a more ambitious approach and turns Freddy into an innocent - and extremely angry - man.
Freddy Is The (Anti-)Hero of The Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise
In his earliest screen incarnations, Freddy is a remorseless, sadistic child killer, but as the Nightmare On Elm Street series progressed, he became famous for his theatrical flair, inventive deaths, and goofy quips. By the time the series reached its Freddy Vs Jason proved that, even over a decade later, viewers still preferred the campy, over-the-top Freddy to the 2010 remake’s dour monster. Wes Craven changed Freddy from a child molester to a child killer to make the character marginally more palatable for audiences during the production of the original movie, and a successful reboot of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise would take this idea and run with it, making a version of Freddy that fans have a plausible excuse to root for.
Making Freddy the crazed victim of mob justice, rather than a guilty killer, would let the audience side with him wholesale. This change would make the villain a full-blown antihero in a way that Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and even Chucky never have been. Freddy Krueger’s novelty rap career makes it pretty clear that viewers already love the character, and his best-liked incarnation is far from the pitilessly cruel creep of the original movie and the much-maligned remake. Freddy’s most-loved moments are silly one-liners like those peppered throughout Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and viewers would have all the more reason to laugh along with these if Freddy was a vengeance-fuelled killer with a more understandable motive.
Horror Is Obsessed With Satanic Panic
Blame the 30-year nostalgia cycle or the return of ‘80s fads, but whatever the cause, Satanic Panic is having a major revival. To modern readers, the idea that normal suburban parents sincerely believed their children were in danger of being sacrificed to Satan by a daycare worker may seem surreal. However, the late ‘80s saw people like the victims of the McMartin Preschool trials treated like Satanic Panic, all offering takes on the uniquely ‘80s phenomenon of thinking rock music, board games, and—crucially—childcare providers were enmeshed in a vast conspiracy to sacrifice kids to Satan and the dark forces of the world.
2010’s Freddy Krueger Was Originally Innocent
In a compelling choice that the filmmakers, unfortunately, ended up walking back and reverting on, the 2010 remake of Nightmare On Elm Street originally added a twist that made Freddy the innocent victim of a moral panic. This twist was undone in an ending that confirmed (in uncomfortably exploitative ) that Freddy was indeed a twisted child ab, making the movie even more predictable and a lot more tasteless in the process. However, committing to the twist in a new Nightmare On Elm Street reboot could play into the current popularity of Satanic Panic stories, solidify Freddy as the antihero he has already become for many fans, and give the franchise a new, compelling angle.
Freddy Krueger is currently a beloved villain because of his creative ways of killing people and his cackling sense of dark humor, and both of these attributes could easily be carried over to a version of the character who did nothing to deserve his fate. In the existing Nightmare On Elm Street canon, Freddy Krueger was only 26 when he was killed by the parents of Springwood, and seeing their children grow up happy, healthy, and unaware of his murder at their hands would make an antiheroic Freddy a fascinating slasher villain viewers would have a hard time not empathizing with. Slasher movies have, since their inception, hardly been known for their moral ambiguity, and often the reason their villains are voiceless hulking monsters is so they can represent untrammeled evil at its worst. Making Freddy Krueger a rare slasher villain with a compelling sympathetic backstory could breathe new life into the Nightmare On Elm Street and bring the character back for a new generation.
