MovieSet Dailies

Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes (no, it’s not the name of a “gentlemen’s club” but the production company that Bay co-owns) has been on a horror movie remake rampage. First they did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then it was The Amityville Horror followed by The Hitcher and shortly it will be a new Friday the 13th. After that what else is left to do but remake A Nightmare on Elm Street, right?

Brad Fuller, one of the other co-founders of Platinum, has told Shock Till You Drop that the company’s next movie will be a new, reimagined Nightmare. “It’s like what we’re doing to Friday the 13th,” Fuller told the site. “It’s not Freddy cracking jokes. We want to make a horrifying movie. The concept is so scary, don’t fall asleep or you’ll die. This guy gets you when you’re most vulnerable, in your sleep. We love that. That’s the basis of the movie. It’ll be most similar to the first one but in terms of kills and dreams we’ll borrow from the entire series.”

Robert Englund, the actor that played Freddy Krueger throughout eight films in the Nightmare franchise, won’t be back under the scarred makeup this time and a new actor will be cast as the dream villain. However, the door will be left open for Englund to play another role, perhaps as a father of one of the kids Freddy will menace.

I don’t really have much of an opinion one way or the other with these horror remakes; my blogging partner in crime Mike Browne is the bigger horror aficionado of the two of us and I’ll leave it up to him to weigh in with his opinion when he chooses the right moment to do so. The one thing that I will remark upon is where are the new horror movies with memorable scary villains? Hollywood has forsaken coming up with the next Pinhead, Michael Meyers or Freddy Krueger in favor of remakes. Or maybe it’s only natural that they are breathing new life into these horror icons; maybe they’re the new Frankenstein’s Monster, Wolfman, Dracula, Creature From the Black Lagoon and Mummy. I wonder what the psychologists would have to say about our society that we’ve replaced the movie monsters with masked maniacs.

Author: Patrick