The NIGHTMARE Never Ends: New ELM STREET Coming

While I will stand up for Platinum Dunes' reboot of Friday the 13th I cannot in any good conscience say anything positive about A Nightmare on Elm Street, except perhaps for the casting of Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger. Otherwise that movie was a shit show. I remember visiting the set of that one and getting the impression it was a troubled production; the best part of the visit was coming out to catering and they were blasting Smells Like Teen Spirit, the video for which had been directed by Elm Street director Samuel Bayer. I wondered if it was a rule that all playlists on or around set needed to be made up of songs on which he had worked. 

Anyway, that film tanked but like all the great slashers you know that Freddy wasn't really dead at the end - in terms of showing up in more movies, I mean. That version of Freddy is way fucking over. But a new reboot is in the works at New Line, with David Johnson writing. Johnson's only good credit is also his first: the batshit insane Orphan, an underseen modern classic. 

It's hard to have any feelings about this beyond one: these movies were B-level cheapies back in the day. Making them for 30 or 40 million dollars is simply insane and cannot be, in the long run, that profitable. I understand that the major corporate interests want to hang on to these characters who have valuable ancillary lives, but the modern studio system is simply no place to make hack and slash films. New Line was an indie when they started this franchise, but now as part of the Warner empire they simply are too big to be making this kinds of movies, which will never be the sort of success at the box office studio accounting demands.