New Line Cinemas will release a remake of the 1984 horror classic “A Nightmare on Elm Street” on April 30. This will continue the recent Hollywood trend of taking an old horror film or whole franchise, and rebooting it with a bunch of up and coming actors for today’s crowds looking for the next scary movie for a Friday night.
Many say it’s a blatant cash grab meant to exploit movie-goers who feel a connection to the classic films and characters but I think they’re missing the point of it. While I don’t think that every movie needs to be remade, remaking a horror movie makes a strange amount of sense to me as these remakes are usually aimed at teens and young adults. Teenagers who are just turning 17 and can legally see R rated movies in theaters have grown up in a world where the horror movies are the “torture porn” type like the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises. Whether people want to admit it or not, most horror movies regarded as “classics” don’t hold up to the desensitized youth watching movies today.
The characters may be timeless but the cheese factor is hard to ignore by the time you get to “Friday the 13 Part VIII: Jason Aimlessly Walks Around and Happens to Kill Some Ignorant Teens Who Strayed too Far From the Path.” So with the 2009 remake of “Friday the 13th,” audiences of today were introduced to Jason Voorhees, but not the lumbering, zombie-esque character from the 80’s and early 90’s, but a Jason for the “Saw” generation.
Taking timeless characters that scared so many back in the day and re-introducing them to audiences in movies that fit the horror genre today isn’t a cash grab, it’s a preservation of classic horror icons. To tons of people, Freddy Krueger is the scary murderer who’ll find you in your dreams and kill you, but to the young horror movie fan these days, Freddy is merely a caricature with a weird voice who makes off color jokes and kills people with cheesy effects.
Taking the camp out of classic horror movies doesn’t demean the original, it’s simply just extending the life of a character who refuses to die.
