Film

Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Nightmare on Elm Street lends itself to so many variations and spin-offs because its true villain isn’t a monster, but the most basic of human needs: sleep. The degree to which the remake exhausts you probably depends on your reverence for the original. Stylistically situated midway between the bourgeois-indicting crudeness of The Last House on the Left (1972) and the well-oiled thrills of Scream (1996), Wes Craven’s 1984 film became famous for its bogeyman effects, its portrait of teen angst and—for a then-ascendant New Line Cinema—its unexpected mainstream success. But it lacks the elegance of near-contemporaries like Halloween or Alien; today the most famous sequences seem edited to privilege the design work over shocks.

So it’s not as though the new Nightmare is slaughtering a sacred cow. As helmed by music-video and commercial vet Bayer, this polished, Michael Bay–produced reboot could scarcely be more respectful. Keeping the torture porn to a minimum, it adds a garish palette, cell phones, Google searches, some ingenious variations on the formula (adrenaline shots; “micro-naps,” or waking dreams) and—as seems to be de rigueur for recent horror remakes—ironic use of a golden oldie. (Here it’s a pharmacy sequence set to the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”) Mara and Gallner make an attractive couple on the lam—yes, those are Chicago locations, at least in part—and Haley, as Freddy Krueger, hams it up to an almost alarming degree. Bayer also plays on expectations from the earlier film, notably with a bathtub scene fakeout. But the movie stops short of full-fledged reinvention: Paradoxically, it’s a stylish gloss on the original that never quite feels like its own film. It turns out this Freddy is a vampire.