Nightmare On Elm Street Remake’s Biggest Freddy Change Was The Original Movie Plan
The remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street made a big change to Freddy Krueger’s backstory, which was actually Wes Craven’s original plan for him.
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The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street made some changes to Wes Craven’s original movie, especially Freddy Krueger’s backstory, which was actually the first movie’s plan for the famous villain. Wes Craven’s career as a horror filmmaker began in 1972 with the low-budget exploitation film The Last House on the Left, which was met with heavy censorship but was well-received by critics. Craven’s big break arrived in 1984 with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a slasher movie that introduced the audience to Freddy Krueger, a killer with a unique method to haunt his victims.
A Nightmare on Elm Street follows four teenagers who become the target of Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a villain with a very specific plan: terrorize his victims in their dreams, so once he kills them there, at their most vulnerable, they also die in real life. A Nightmare on Elm Street was a financial and critical success, with special praise for its story and “surrealist” tones, and is considered one of the best horror movies ever made. The movie also spawned a franchise consisting of movies, TV shows, comic books, and even a crossover with Friday the 13th in Freddy vs Jason. The franchise also includes a remake, which in its attempt to modernize the story, ended up making some big changes, especially to Krueger’s backstory.
Unlike other villains from the slasher genre, as is the case of Halloween’s Michael Myers (in its most recent reboot, at least), Freddy Krueger did have a reason to go after Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends. In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, Nancy’s mother revealed to her that Krueger was a sadistic child murderer who was released on a technicality, but the parents living on the street of the crimes took on the role of vigilantes and avenged the victims. These parents burned Krueger alive, who later returned as a vengeful ghost, and his targets were the children of the parents who killed him. The remake changed Krueger to a child molester, which wasn’t well-received, but that was almost what the original Freddy Krueger was going to be.
In the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake, Krueger’s victims were not only the children of the parents who killed him but also the kids he molested when they were little. In this version, Krueger was the preschool’s groundskeeper, and Nancy (now played by Rooney Mara) was his favorite, and his horrible actions led the parents of the abused children to burn him alive. As mentioned above, Craven’s original plan for Freddy Krueger was for him to be a child molester, but changed him to a child murderer to avoid being accused of exploiting a series of highly publicized cases of child molestation that happened in California when the movie was in production. The crew behind the remake, however, returned to Craven’s initial idea as they wanted to bring Krueger back to his darker roots and keep him away from the comical and campy version from previous movies. Producer Brad Fuller told Bloody Disgusting back in 2010 that they also made Krueger a child molester rather than a murderer because it would have been easy for the teenage characters to figure out what happened to him thanks to the internet, so they had to find other ways to tell the story.
Although Freddy Krueger as a child molester was Wes Craven’s original idea for the character, the way the remake addressed it, along with other elements (particularly the performance of Jackie Earle Haley as Krueger), is what earned it a lot of negative criticism. The remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street went for a darker vibe and failed to make it interesting, and not even the darkest side of Freddy Krueger saved it from being a boring movie, which many have labeled as an actual “bad dream”.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/nightmare-elm-street-remake-freddy-original-plan-change/