Thomas Dekker Talks Elm Street Remake and Catering to the Lowest Common Denominator
Steve Barton
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As the self-proclaimed proud representative of the lowest common denominator, even I’m not sure what to make of the latest comments from Thomas Dekker, who starred in the tepid remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, regarding the film.
In a recent interview with Screen Geek, Dekker dropped the following on fans regarding his time on Elm Street.
“It’s a tricky one to talk about. I would say it was an honor to be a part of it. I think the cast… as we know, we had two, now one-time Oscar nominee and another two-time Oscar nominee who’s still a very good friend of mine, Rooney Mara, and I think the issue at hand with that movie can’t really be thrown at the director because the director was basically a gun for hire to make it look good, and he did that. It looked great. But it’s basically like most good films tell a story, that film was to sell a tuxedo. It’s a sales movie. ‘It’s okay, we got this idea we’re going to take and we’re going to make money off it, so let’s just do that.’ Even though the intentions of the artistic forces behind it were, ‘Okay, we’re going to open up the mythology of Freddy Krueger; we’re going to make him darker and actually explore the idea of child sexual abuse,’ and those are all the things that interested me. Of course at the end of the day when you have to put it in 1,000 theaters or more, you have to shy away from those things and just make it a sell-able entity. So I think you can’t really start judging the leaves of a tree if the seed is fucked.”
Dekker continues, “And that’s that situation. The unfortunate part is if it had been an independent film, sort of ‘inspired by’ Nightmare on Elm Street, I think it could have been something really special, but in order to afford that brand, then you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, and that’s what happens with these remakes. You’re not allowed the privilege of originality if you’re not coming up with an original idea. (pause) I don’t know… that was a lot of words I just threw at you; I apologize.”
No matter how many finger knives you slice it with… a shit movie is still a shit movie.
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