Misinterpreting the Legends

or... Horror reboots, and how Hollywood misses the point

I think the glut of remakes, reboots, and imports from television and comics that pop up in theaters is basically a marketing move by the movie studios: people are more likely to go see something they're familiar with (or something they've at least heard of), which not only explains the existence of a Dukes of Hazzard movie, buy also covers Transformers and GI Joe. Since there was such success relaunching the franchises of Batman and James Bond, it made perfect sense for the studios to try re-establishing their slasher icons.

The slasher subgenre dominated the horror movies of the 1980s, pretty much to a fault-- it was rare to find any kind of horror movie beyond the boundaries of “mysterious killer picks off a group of teenagers one by one.” On the front line of the movement, a few franchises developed, and managed to capture the imaginations worldwide. As Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street generated sequel after sequel, their monsters (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger, respectively) became the bogeys of the popular consciousness.

By the 5th or 6th sequel, the franchises started to decline in popularity, quality, and profitability. The slasher genre had cooled off, and the new Halloween, Elm Street, and Friday the 13th movies could barely draw an audience by the late 80s... but the monsters never faded. Freddy, Jason, and Michael remain as well know as Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy in the western world.

In the name-recognition moviemaking strategy we see today, it's not suprising that Jason and Michael have already been rebooted in hopes of rejuvenating their franchises, and that a new Nightmare on Elm Street has just been released. Bringing these monsters back sounded like a good idea, and I hoped that (much like Bond or Batman) they could throw off their sillier sequels and approach resonant characters from a new and interesting angle.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The slasher franchise remakes/reboots vary in quality, but they all have the same problem. Instead of infusing Freddy, Jason, and Michael with new life, they lose everything that made them interesting in the first place.

They completely miss the point.

Spoiler warnings in effect: I'm giving plot details for the original
series and remakes, so be warned

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Legacy

I was actually fairly excited to hear that A Nightmare on Elm Street was going to be remade. With a talented character actor as its villain and a director who might do something interesting with the story, I thought a lot could be done with the legend. Wes Craven's original Nightmare has always been one of my favorites-- a slasher film that unfolds in low-budget (but elaborate) dark fantasy setpieces, and reveals at its climax that the villain and entire story, not just the dream sequences, were all the dream of our Nancy Thompson: her friends are still alive, her parents never engaged in an act of vigilante justice, and there never was a Freddy Kruger.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was a solipsistic horror film, a perceived reality story that was entirely based around a teenage girl's battle with her imaginary boogeyman: when she takes control and beats her attacker (with both cleverness and brute force), it doesn't kill him. Instead she follows another misty, dreamlike trail to her final confrontation where she slays her dream killer by simply not believing in him anymore.

Elm Street's sequels range from decent fun to incredibly stupid, but they all help inform the monster that is Freddy Krueger. Over the years, these movies retconned Freddy into reality: not just a figment of Nancy's imagination, Krueger was now literally a serial child killer penetrating the minds of children in his old neighborhood. In the first movie, Freddy Kruger was a sadistic, taunting trickster; he slowly became a vaudevillian comedian with knives: kill my wife, please. This transformation diluted the monster quite a bit*, but it also established him as playful, Loki-like imp. Freddy became a dealer in ironic backlash from his victims' pride and excess as well as quips and commentary through the fourth wall.

Missing the Point

The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street somehow manages to hew closely to the original while completely ignoring the central idea of the film. Though it manages to copy a number of the original film's most memorable scenes and lines, it barely flirts with Freddy being dreamt by Nancy-- like the sequels in the 1980s, this movie is entirely about a man in your dreams who can kill you. In spite of borrowing dream sequences from the first movie, and even transmuting Johnny Depp's laughable “dream skills” speech into Kyle Gallner's laughable “micro naps” plot device, the whole thing comes off as haphazard. Nancy's never really established as the take-on-her-attacker survivor type, her relationship with her friends (and their relationships with one another) is also never established, and when the “the killer's not really dead” jump scare happens in this movie, it doesn't mean Nancy's still having her world-creating nightmare, it means that the dream killer who murdered her friends has won.

None of that would sink a horror film (not completely, anyway) if the villain worked, but Freddy Krueger has gone from playful, trickster god to brute, self-righteous bully. This fundamentally mistakes what made him a resonant character, and the reason to remake his movies: Freddy was surreal.

• In the original films, he killed children (though it is implied that he was killing the same highschool aged kids that we were watching him pursue in the movie-- same as it ever was), which established him as the embodiment of dark thoughts, self doubt, and nasty conflicts of teenage life. A lot of Elm Street movies end with fantasy action climaxes: Freddy enventually became the challenge that kids had to face-- at the cusp of adulthood, would they never wake up, or rise to a challenge?
• In the remake, Freddy is a child molester who was abusing pre-schoolers. Now that his former victims are teenagers, he has returned from the grave to make them suffer for his getting caught. That’s the new Freddy: traumatize 5-year-olds, then torture and murder them after they grow up.

The Freddy in the remake isn't the kind of character that would spawn a franchise: he's the kind of queasy, low-level sicko audiences want to forget as quickly as possible.

Halloween

The Legacy

John Carpenter’s Halloween is easily the most influential slasher film ever made (if not the first-- the debate still rages) and one of the most influential horror films of all time. More than any of the individual characters, or even Michael Myers himself, the movie is about innocence and dangers of wandering away from a fairytale path of safety: the Yellow Brick Road or Little Red Riding Hood’s trail. In Halloweeen, that "path" is purity: this is the horror film that stamped the template about sex and drugs in scary movies: you stray, you die.

Subtext and influence aside, Halloween remains an amazing film because of its restraint. The first two acts of the film are slowly building suspense, turning up the tension one beat at a time, until the mood is thick, the bubble bursts, and the killer starts claiming lives. Michael Myers is also a very spare character as we learn about him: he is simply destructive, behaving almost like an alien confused by the human beings he’s murdering. All we know of him is that he is an emotionless killing machine; Myers feels nothing (“no reason, no conscience, no understanding,” we’re told). He’s a simple force that enacts the “sex and drugs equals death” rule of the horror universe, the boogeyman that punishes all of the kids who wander off the straight and narrow.

The legacy of Michael Myers is never really enriched by the sequels. In the first film, he’s instinctually returning to his childhood home and the scene of his first murder; his victims are killed simply because they’re in his territory. By the second movie, the girl who survived the first film (a very young Jamie Lee Curtis) is revealed to be his sister. The third film attempts to scuttle the franchise by not even featuring Michael... and fails-- as the series moves on, Myers has ties to cults, magic powers, and prophecies… of the three big monsters, Michael Myers is the one who benefited the least from his sequels. Halloween 2 isn’t awful, but the first film established Michael: originally called “The Shape,” the more subsequent movies tried to tell you about him, the less effective he became.

Missing the Point

Rob Zombie took on the Halloween remake after directing The Devil’s Rejects, a very successful film that leaned hard on the 70s exploitation, grindhouse, and slasher genres. A good start, in my opinion, but his take on Halloween is a Michael Myers character study: who he was as a child, how he grew up, his family, and why he is the killer he is. Michael is no longer The Shape, and he’s not the unstoppable force from the original Halloween’s dark moral fairytale. It also completely does away with tension building; instead of suspense, the killing comes early and often, and the end of the movie isn't much different from the start.

Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers is just a serial killer… unfortunately, this version of Halloween just isn’t a very good “in the mind of a killer”-type horror movie, and it doesn’t help any that the central figure is supposed to be the boogeyman from the 1978 original. There were plenty of more human serial killer slasher films when the original Halloween lorded over the genre; there’s a reason Michael Myers is remembered when others were not. A movie about Myers’ backstory, logic, and reasons for killing not only ignores but also undermines what made him an icon in the first place.

Friday the 13th

The Legacy

Released in 1980, the original Friday the 13th was the most successful copycat of Halloween; it didn't have the same kind of tension, sure-fire direction, or mythology, but it did have more death, more graphic kills, and buckets and buckets of blood. It did follow Halloween's example of punishing hedonistic teens-- the basis of the first film is that a young Jason Voorhees drowned one night as camp councilors were too preoccupied with sex and drugs to save him. The killer in the first movie is Jason's vengeful and insane mother; Jason has been dead for years in the first film, and only appears in a dream sequence/tacky jump scare at the end of the film.

Like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees only becomes a real monster in the sequel, and doesn't look like the horror legend that we'd identify until Friday the 13th Part 3, where he acquires his signature machete and hockey mask. Jason, unlike Michael Myers, developed very gradually as a spirit of vengeance, and invariably punished the kind of wayward teens that caused his original death and went on to kill his mother.

Though the series toyed with the idea of Jason having survived his childhood incident, he was established as being functionally immortal as the series developed: he might be contained, but nothing could kill him. In a way, he was like a classic zombie: raised (why or by whom is never actually addressed) to avenge a wrong committed by the self-indulgent and self-obsessed. During his time on screen, Jason has passed by small children, ones who would have been easy victims, and left them unharmed... they aren't the targets of his bloody mission. Young Jason died innocent, and his rampage only takes down the indulgent.

Missing the Point

Strangely, the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th doesn't bungle the mythology as badly as the other two, and compresses the first few films into a coherent storyline, so that Jason doesn't need to be resurrected from an establishing chapter where he'd obviously been dead for years. The reboot establishes Jason as the product of the crazy mother who went on a killing spree, an abandonded boy who then grew up alone at a deserted summer camp. When the teenagers arrive, they're just like the ones who killed mom and let bad things befall little Jason, and they obviously need to be put down. Also re-imagined, this Jason Voorhees is a clever woodsman and skilled with traps, after having to live off the land for so long. As far as re-imagining the monster, not a bad job, and it makes him the kind of monster from Friday the 13th Part 2 was: he never actually drowned, and has a grudge against the selfish camp councilors that ruined his life. I don't even have too much of a complaint about trading Jason Voorhees' unstoppable, zombie-like trudge into a kind of wilderness madman who would actually... well... run after someone he was pursuing.

The problem with the reboot is that it's so damn generic. There's nothing that actually distinguishes the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th from the tired, uninspired, nearly endless sequels it ought to be getting away from. It's just random dead teenagers and an audience waiting for the next kill, hoping against hope that at least the kill shot will be new and interesting... and it probably won't. Granted, after having Jason Voorhees in space, battling telekinetics, or (no, really) Jason Takes Manhattan, a by-the-numbers Friday the 13th movie is sort of a back to basics move, but it completely misses the point of the reboot. It's the exact movie people got tired of seeing over and over again.

Getting it Right

The slasher film saw diminishing returns after the close of the 80s, and though it became toxically uncool, it never really died. The 90's saw the slasher film as a mix of Dawson's Creek and Agatha Christie's 10 Little Indians (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend), and the 00's brought us torture porn (Saw's Jigsaw is the closest you'll come to finding a current equivalent to Freddy, Jason, or Michael), but the idea of the cinema bogeyman in popular culture is not usually well realized.
While the Big Three have all failed in their own reboots, the myths and ideas that made them work and stick with us for so long still occasionally show up in movies, and sometimes to great effect.


Here's a few examples:

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Starting as a documentary, this film establishes itself in a universe where Freddy, Michael, and Jason are all real killers as well as folk tales, and we tag along with a documentary crew that meets and sticks with Leslie Vernon, who aspires to be a similar type of monster, preparing for his first night of multi-teen slaughter. Over the course of documenting his preparations, his style, and his myth, and the selection of his "hero girl" who will battle him as the last one standing, Leslie's detailing of the night appears as a well shot movie. His description of ambushing kids who sneak into the basement for alone time, with a close-up of an open shirt and bare breasts, breaks when the documentarian claims he's being exploitative.

Leslie explains: "There are conventions, and you have to honor them." The cinematic playing of his conceived kill-scene continues.

Behind the Mask continues to flip back and forth between mockumentary and cinematic slasher film, with a keen eye on what makes the genre tick, and manages to have its cake and eat it too: it is a fantastic, winking dissection of the genre while also being an honest and well executed member of its genre.

Freddy vs. Jason

The Bride with White Hair director Ronny Yu seemed to grasp what made both Freddy and Jason special with this movie, playing them as complete opposites... Freddy died in fire, was a deviant, taunted and teased his victims, and tended to slash and de-limb his victims; Jason died in water, was a chaste innocent, was always deadly serious, and tended to penetrate or stab his victims... (castration/penetration metaphors abound) Not only are these two of the monsters that remain in the popular consciousness, but they are precisely opposite monsters.

The film allows for both monsters to excel as their established selves: Freddy is allowed to be his trickster self, dishing out ironic punishments to the self-indulgent (bonus: he manifests as the Hookah Smoking Caterpillar), and Jason is literally given fields of hedonism in which to wreak puritanical retribution. The central conflict between the two opposite monsters ("This town's not big enough for the two of us") is nowhere near as well developed as main body of the film, which is well made enough to simply indulge the monsters well onscreen.

Scream

It almost seems like a cheat to include this, but Wes Craven never seems to run out of tricks, Elm Street's original director managed to reinvent the slasher film by satirizing it in 1996 (and making it meta before meta became an establishment). Scream's greatest power is that it knows all of the cliches and conventions of slasher films, tells us that not only does the movie know but so do the characters, and then indulges us anyway... because the killer knows all of the cliches and rules as well.

Scream was almost too popular for its own good-- after two sequels, it quickly fell to the same problems that felled the slasher genre proper-- but the first Scream still has staying power. It still has some fantastic setpieces (a delay on a camera feed being my favorite), but makes its mark by embracing the well established (and constantly revered within the film) the mythology of slasher films in general.

 Reckless Reviews - Eric

*The first Elm Street was the last movie that really kept me up nights when I was young. After watching the first movie, I eventually got over my fear of Freddy Kruger by watching the sequels. [back]