Review #400: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #28 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Hot on the heels of the Friday the 13th remake, the people over at New Line Cinema knew they had to follow the trend and remake the classic introduction to our favorite dream demon, Freddy Kreuger. In this movie, a bunch of high school students in the town of Springwood, Ohio start having nightmares where a spooky burned man with a bladed glove shows up and terrorizes them, and as the dreams get more and more intense, they start dying in their sleep. It turns out their parents killed Fred Krueger, the gardener at a local preschool whom they suspected had been inappropriate with their kids, and now Freddy is back to take revenge in the children's dreams. As the main group of friends start dying off, the two primary protagonists- Nancy and Quentin- fight to stave off their fatigue and find out the truth behind Fred Krueger's death so that they can stop him once and for all.

So, unfortunately I'm going to be mostly negative about this movie, and I've got some specific reasons why. But before then, I want to say that this entry (as is expected for this whole series) has some fantastic sequences with amazing visual design- dream sequences are one of my favorite things in movies, and the Nightmare series really goes all-out with them. The original movie of course didn't cut any particular corners, but there were some parts of the remake where they really used today's technology and cinematography to do things that could never have been done before, and they definitely deserve credit for that. The movie looks good, has a nice vibe to it, and tells an interesting story.

That being said, I can't help but feel like this is lesser than the original in virtually every way. And I'm really sorry to say it, but I feel like a huge brunt of the blame for its lessened appeal to me lies entirely on the shoulders of Jackie Earle Haley, the actor playing Freddy. I think this is one of the strongest examples of a miscast role I've ever seen, and it really brings the whole experience down.

Now, don't get me wrong- I love Jackie Earle Haley, and I was PUMPED when I heard he was taking the mantle after Robert Englund retired from the franchise. I loved Haley in Watchmen, and I really liked this movie series, so what's not to love? Two great things mashed together! Then I actually saw the movie. Maybe it might be a bit much to lay the blame entirely on his shoulders, as some of the issues were probably on the directorial side of things, but let me give some examples of why I don't think this version of Freddy worked:

1. The makeup looked cheap to me. Which is crazy, because I would wager Haley's makeup was probably twenty times as expensive as Englund's makeup was, but I cannot look at a single shot of Freddy's face in this movie and see anything except a stiff rubber mask. If I'm being charitable I could say maybe the director was intending to make the mask stiff and unexpressive, because it actually looks a bit more like a real burn victim's face than the original Freddy makeup did, but just because something looks "realistic" doesn't mean it looks "good on film". Every time Freddy is on screen in here, I just see a rubber mask.

2. To go along with that one, Jackie Earle Haley just doesn't have a very expressive face, at least nowhere near the level of Robert Englund. Even in the scenes where he doesn't have makeup and rubber caked on his face, I still barely see any expression coming through. (I was about to make a joke about how maybe I only liked him in Watchmen because his face was covered the entire time, but no- there are scenes in that movie where his mask is off and he's acting his heart out. So it seems to only really be an issue in this movie!)

3. And to add onto both of the last two issues, I really don't think the voice Haley was doing works. On paper it should have been perfect, Freddy with a deep gravelly voice is fine in concept, but he expresses virtually no emotion throughout this whole movie- everything he says is in a low monotone, which I'm almost positive was a directorial decision- and because he's speaking so low and gravelly for the whole movie, I'm pretty sure close to 100% of his lines were re-recorded during post-production (or at the very least, his dialogue is all so heavily edited to add extra weight and reverb that what you hear almost never quite matches up to his barely-moving mouth under the rubber mask). So the end result of all of these three issues is that whenever Freddy is on-screen, it doesn't feel like he's actually talking to anyone, it feels like he's lip-syncing his mouth to someone else's voice being piped in from elsewhere. It made it VERY hard for me to take his words seriously, and it was like this for the entire movie.

4. And I feel really bad about this last one, but just... Jackie Earle Haley isn't imposing. At all. He's so short that the high school students he's terrorizing are all taller than him. I know he's a dream demon or whatever so size shouldn't matter, but I really think they should have done something- anything- with the physicality of the performance to make up for his small stature. Robert Englund wasn't a giant or anything, in fact Google right now is telling me there's only a five inch difference between the two, but those five inches goes a long way.

Needless to say, I just never, ever felt scared or intimidated by Freddy in this movie. I didn't always feel scared of Freddy in other movies either, but that's why most of the series made Freddy such a goofball- they could play up the horror by giving it a dash of absurdity. This movie has no levity whatsoever, not a single joke is told, because it's meant to be a grim and gritty remake, as was the style. And the end result is a Freddy who looks like a mannequin and sounds like Batman.

(And I didn't even find a good place to put this last complaint, but this movie tries to do a lot of the same scares from the original movie, but either cuts them short- like the bathtub scene that is inexplicably missing half of the sequence from the original movie- or fills them with poorly-aged CGI instead of using timeless practical effects. Also, this is less of a complaint and more of an observation, but apparently a lot of fans got very upset with this movie explicitly making Freddy a child molester, because once again, fans are 100% cool with cheering for a mass-murderer but the moment that murderer is also a rapist, suddenly a line has been crossed.)

I enjoyed having a chance to see this movie again and try to get lost in the setting and vibe, but unfortunately this one just misses the mark in a lot of ways.

Overall Rating: 3/10 School Counselors Throwing Molotov Cocktails

Vidya Games: I never really found a time to talk about these, so I'll put them here. Both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street lived on in the video game space, and I really liked them both! Friday the 13th got a dedicated video game a while back, where you would play online with a bunch of other players to try and either escape Crystal Lake (if you were playing as one of several camp counselors), or kill all of the counselors (if you were chosen to play as Jason). It featured incredibly well-detailed locations from the various movies, as well as several different versions of Jason, taken from each of the different movies (except for Freddy vs. Jason and the F13 remake). It was a fantastic game I loved playing, but unfortunately the servers got shut down a few years ago so I don't think there's a way to play it anymore. A Nightmare on Elm Street never got its own dedicated game, but there's another online multiplayer game called Dead By Daylight, which has a huge amount of licensed horror villains in it (19 different franchises, as of this writing), including both Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger- and the version of Freddy they included is the Jackie Earle Haley version from the Nightmare remake! (You can also play as a very off-model version of Quentin from this movie as well!)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179056/