A Nightmare on Elm Street

Directed by: Samuel Bayer
Written by: Wesley Strick & Eric Heisserer
Full credits at IMDb

Producer and existing-franchise exploiter Michael Bay may have settled on a different director to helm his Elm Street sequel remake reboot—the guy who handled the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video!—but the product looks straight out of the Marcus Nispel School for Slasher Updates: grungy settings, more "teens" than the original, more gore, more CGI, more jolts. (Nispel himself graduated on to the upcoming Conan remake whatever.) But the Wes Craven classic was a different kind of horror movie than Friday the 13th or The Hitcher: it was never really just about slaughtering hordes of horny "teens" in too-tight tees for the purpose of sexual moralizing.



Pfft, whatever: that doesn't stop the new crew from casting models (Katie Cassidy), Gossip Girl rejects (Kellan Lutz) and Pattison lookalikes (Kyle Gallner) as the new Freddy fodder. The least attractive among them, Rooney Mara, stars as Nancy—do parents still name their daughters Nancy?—refigured as an artsy outsider who's not much of a nonconformist when it comes to her dreams: they're the same kind of nightmares her turning-up-dead classmates are having, featuring a bugaboo with a burned face, knives for fingers and an ugly sweater.

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Watch the trailer: