When they announced a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, you could tell that Derk wasn’t happy, but he was holding out hope. When they announced that antagonist Freddy Krueger would be recast with Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen), he may have actually started frothing at the mouth and swearing loudly, resulting in an ongoing threat of a rant in Ponderous Rhetoric.
Well, much to what I’m sure will be his dismay, a new image was released today with Haley as Krueger, and he looks like…well, shit, Freddy Krueger. Kind of a spoiler, so hit the jump.
Now, there were a lot of things wrong with Watchmen (A lot, as me and Derek both said in our reviews of it), but Earle’s Rorschach was pretty spot-on, I thought. Sure, there were moments towards the end that didn’t make sense (The mentally unstable Rorschach was doing a few too many spin kicks at the end there!), but a lot of that movie didn’t make sense (Well, except for the opening credits).
A Nightmare On Elm Street is a franchise that I’ve not seen a whole movie of, just bits and pieces, because I’m a lazy slacker who’s only recently gotten into the horror genre. And I get that a lot of people are upset that the role was recast, but c’mon. Robert Englund has done a lot of great work, but he’s pushing 60, and even he acknowledges he’s getting a bit old for the role. Haley won’t be Robert Englund, but I think he can do pretty good with this. And when you’re rebooting/reimagining a franchise, what you need is someone who isn’t the original actor at all. But, if there’s anything fans can pull from this image, despite it being incredibly silhouetted and teasing, it’s that the company seems to know they can’t go too far from the original material, considering that this Krueger looks a lot like the one we’ve seen before.
IMDb lists the tentative release date for the flick as April 16, 2010. Directed by music video director Samuel Bayer, the film also stars Thomas Dekker (Heroes, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles), Kyle Gallner (Smallville), and Clancy Brown (Highlander, The Shawshank Redemption).