A Nightmare from Friday to Halloween - A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The three most prominent American horror franchises (Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street) have influenced American cinema even beyond the horror genre. As of 2021, there are exactly 31 movies across all three franchises, and I am going to attempt to watch all of them, for this Halloween, one per day.

It’s almost a cliche that many major actors got their start in horror films, often pretty crappy ones. Naomi Watts in one of the Children of the Corn movies, Paul Rudd in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and Rooney Mara in....Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, but this movie too. I could see a very different, and less illustrious career for her if she hadn’t popped so hard in The Social Network, but she is a sign that this movie definitely had a higher pedigree attached to it. It’s basically a remake of the original 1984 movie, but it also kind of wants to act as if literally years of sequels didn’t exist by taking the material super seriously. I will say that it does pretty well in that respect, and Jackie Earle Haley does make a pretty decent Freddy, though nowhere near as instantly iconic as Robert Englund. But it also doesn’t do much to merit any further exploration of this world. There’s a sense of fun that’s severely lacking in this retread, and no fan of this franchise is ever going to forget that.