Looks promising, doesn’t it?

I have little doubt that Jackie Earle Haley will “kill it” as the new, more gruesome-looking, and less quippy Freddy Krueger, but I do share others’ concerns about the movie being too similar to the original.

I haven’t watched any of the original Nightmare films in ages, but from what I’ve seen from the trailers, there looks to be  a fair amount of recycling of material from the first two films.

On the plus side, at least this time, the trailer focuses on the scares.  The teaser trailer released awhile back showed a bit of the new Freddy’s origins, including an unintentionally funny shot of pre-claw Freddy about to be burned alive, tearing off his jacket to reveal the character’s iconic red and green-striped sweater.

In slow-mo, no less.

When it comes to the sweater, the less viewer attention drawn to it the better, I think.

The same can be said of most superhero movie names: Magneto (Mag-neat-o!), the Abomination (“My, God, he’s become some sort of horrible … Abomination!”), even Iron Man are all incredibly silly, if you really think about it.  Luckily, superhero movies typically move along at a steady clip (“Wait.  Did he just say his name is Sinestro?”) and rarely, if ever, draw attention to the silly sounding names that have their roots in comic books dating back to the 1960s and earlier (“What do they call you?  Wheels?”).

Freddy shows up in the new trailer wearing his regular “costume” plus hat and is suitably creepy, and it works.  I don’t think any audience member really consciously questions his choice of wardrobe these days.  He looks the way we expect him to look, like Santa Claus or Spiderman, and we don’t give it a second thought, as long as Freddy sticks to doing what he does best: slaughtering helpless teens in gruesomely creative fashion.