On the very vague off chance you would actually want to, available now to watch on Netflix are the remakes of two of the most iconic slasher movies in history: A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday the 13th.
Released in 2009, the new Friday the 13th mixes aspects of the first three films, as it was a while before the series introduced all the iconic elements with which it is now most closely associated, and sees Jason kidnap a young woman who bears a resemblance to his dead mother and is searched for by the girl’s brother as the unstoppable hockey enthusiast offs a number of generic randoms.
A year later, also from Michael Bay’s remake machine Platinum Dunes, came A Nightmare On Elm Street, where teenagers who may or may not have been abused as small children are hunted in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, the revenant of the man their parents killed in vigilante justice for the crime.
While neither movie is especially good, Friday the 13th at least has fun with the pointed clichés of the sub-genre, and to be fair, does play a little with the audience’s expectations regarding character archetypes and their associated survival rates, although misses the opportunity to throw in some ambiguity over the killer’s identity. A Nightmare On Elm Street, meanwhile, is a soulless retread of the original movie that manages to excise everything sinister that made it such a success, while what few new ideas it incorporates are sorely underused.
Unless they are something truly special, remakes are generally met with a lackluster reception. Horror films in particular are prone to this, as they can have fanbases who are fiercely loyal and unforgiving of any perceived transgressions, as well as often being reflections of the time in which they were made, which is impossible to adequately replicate in any modernized iteration. In the case of the remakes of both A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday the 13th though, the strongest reaction they will likely instill in you is the desire to just go back and rewatch the originals.
