When 2010’s Nightmare On Elm Street reboot arrived in cinemas, reviews were unanimous in their agreement that the remake failed to replace Robert Englund’s version of Freddy Krueger. First seen on-screen in 1984’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger was an unlikely candidate for cult status. The slasher villain is an unrepentant child murderer, and yet he remains beloved by legions of horror fans despite being one of the slasher sub-genre’s most irredeemable villains.
In Wes Craven’s original Nightmare On Elm Street, Freddy indulges in almost none of the punning and humorous one-liners that would come to define his character in later sequels. He is a ferociously cruel and unsettling creation with little levity, although he clearly takes a perverse delight in tormenting final girl Nancy and her friends as he picks them off one by one. The killer is a complete monster, yet audiences immediately loved Freddy—likely because his sick delight in his evil deeds was so unlike his fellow slasher villains.
Many of the archetypical slasher villains who had come to define the sub-genre were inspired by Halloween’s mute Michael Myers. As such, most of the villains seen in slashers throughout the early ‘80s were wordless masked monsters who said nothing and felt less, a trend epitomized by Friday the 13th’s hulking, unthinking monster Jason Voorhees. In this context, Englund’s Freddy was a rotten breath of fresh air, a monster who seemed invested in his awful crimes where so many of his contemporaries seemed almost unaware of their actions. However, 2010’s Nightmare On Elm Street remake proved incapable of recapturing this element of the character, and, over a decade after the reboot’s arrival, Englund’s Freddy remains the definitive take on the part.
Jackie Earle Haley Wasn’t Scary
Character actor Jackie Earle Haley has been a threatening screen presence throughout his career and if his Freddy were a New Nightmare-style reinvention of the character, he may have been able to leave a stamp on the role. However, despite Earle Haley’s talent, his Freddy took a lot of inspiration from his turn as Watchmen’s Rorschach and ended up being oddly rage-fueled, rather than outright sadistic. This Krueger iteration was angry and tough, but never as scary or sadistic as Englund’s take in the character. Haley’s Freddy seemed driven by fury rather than twisted glee, making him less unnerving than Englund’s take on the character. The bizarre decision to play the character as a tortured vigilante rather than a twisted creep may have its origins in the Nightmare On Elm Street reboot’s missing twist, which revealed that Freddy was innocent when he was burned to death and only became a monster after his murder. However, with this detail excised from the finished movie, Earle Haley’s Freddy being so angry makes him seem less implacable and thus scary.
Freddy’s New Face Was Unnecessary
Few viewers would have called New Nightmare’s Entity scarier than the original Freddy, but the new villain was at least comparably creepy. In contrast, the Nightmare On Elm Street reboot redesigned Freddy and made the monster remarkably less frightening than the original, thanks in part to a reliance on CGI over practical makeup effects and in part to making his scarring more realistic and thus less scary. Freddy’s original visage was never outdone by the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels, and when the critically acclaimed New Nightmare was unable to improve on the original, it came as no surprise that the remake’s CGI-heavy approach didn’t help.
Moreover, redesigning Freddy’s face was unnecessary when the actor playing the role was already changing in the Nightmare On Elm Street reboot. With Earle Haley taking on the part, Freddy would have looked noticeably different even with the same makeup as usual. Thus, given how much viewers responded to that original look with terror, recreating it on a new actor seemed a logical conclusion. Instead, the remake opted to reinvent the monster’s face and lost his scary appeal in the process since, unlike It’s reinvention of Pennywise, the new Freddy Krueger was less scary and more human in appearance than his predecessor rather than vice versa.
Freddy Needs To Have Fun (Not Be Funny)
The later Nightmare On Elm Street sequels made Freddy an almost antiheroic figure, an overcorrection that made the franchise less scary. However, the best Nightmare On Elm Street movies and the ones which remain fan favorites such as the original, New Nightmare, and Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors all see Freddy have fun with his almost godlike powers, even though he remains terrifying. The Nightmare On Elm Street reboot’s Freddy didn’t seem to take any twisted joy in his killing and, as such, felt more like another Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees than the iconically creepy earlier version of the role. Englund’s Freddy Krueger was having fun with his inventive kills and creative nightmares, whereas Earle Haley’s killer was seemingly stuck going through the motions.
Freddy Can’t Be Too Twisted
The biggest issue that hampered the reinvention of Freddy Krueger, however, was not even rooted in Earle Haley’s performance or the character’s appearance. The choice to make Freddy a pedophile and clarify this in the reboot was an unfortunate one that added nothing to the retelling but put a lot of viewers off the character. While it is heavily implied in the original movies, the fact that Englund’s Krueger is never explicitly revealed to be a child abuser—as opposed to a killer—makes his twisted antics a lot easier for viewers to stomach. Much like Chucky of Child’s Play fame often manipulates children in his murderous schemes but isn’t predatory toward them, making the slasher villain a more mundane, banal, and realistic type of monster made many Nightmare On Elm Street franchise fans more disgusted by the new Freddy than afraid of him. It was more than enough for the original Nightmare On Elm Street movies to hint at Freddy’s evil deeds, whereas the reboot’s decision to explicitly address them onscreen ground the action to a halt and added an uncomfortably exploitative aftertaste to what might have otherwise been a passable popcorn horror effort.