A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Brad Fuller

Warner Bros. Pictures

## Overview

While at the Springwood Diner, Dean Russell falls asleep at the table and meets a severely burned man in seared clothes wearing a bladed gardener's glove on his right hand. In the dream, the burned man cuts Dean’s throat; in reality Dean cuts his own throat as his friends Kris Fowles and Nancy Holbrook look on. At Dean's funeral, Kris sees a photograph of her and Dean as children but cannot recall knowing Dean before high school. Kris begins to have nightmares about the burned man and then refuses to go to sleep for fear that she will die like Dean. Jesse Braun, Kris' ex-boyfriend, shows up to keep her company while she sleeps, but Kris meets the burned man in her dreams and is murdered. Covered in Kris' blood, Jesse runs to Nancy's house and learns that Nancy has been having nightmares about the same man — Freddy Krueger.

Jesse is arrested by the police under suspicion of murdering Kris and is killed by Krueger when

he falls asleep in his jail cell. As her friends die, Nancy questions everyone's connection to each other, given that none of them can remember each other before their teenage years. Nancy and her friend Quentin Smith discover that they attended the same preschool. Nancy's mother Gwen reluctantly tells Nancy and Quentin about Krueger, the preschool's groundskeeper who was accused of molesting the children, including Nancy. Gwen explains that Nancy was his favorite and that she came home one day and told her mother about the things Krueger did to her in a secret location. Gwen alerted the other parents, including Quentin's father Alan, but she tells the teenagers that Krueger escaped before he was arrested. Refusing to believe her mother's story, Nancy attempts to track down the remaining kids from the school but discovers that all of them have been killed. Following Jesse's death, only she and Quentin are left. Meanwhile, Quentin falls asleep during his swim practice and sees a flashback to the parents, led by Alan, tracking Krueger down and burning him alive.

As a result of their insomnia, Nancy and Quentin have sporadic microsleeps and become hypnagogic, causing them to dream and hallucinate randomly. To try to stop Krueger, they decide to go to the preschool to learn what they can. On the way, Nancy is attacked by Krueger when she hallucinates, during which she pulls a piece of Krueger's sweater out of the dream world into reality. Quentin takes Nancy to the hospital, where he steals adrenaline to help them stay awake. Nancy and Quentin eventually make it to the preschool and uncover Krueger's hidden room to find proof of his crimes; they realize that Krueger, now a vengeful ghost, wants revenge on them for disclosing his abuse. Nancy decides to pull Krueger out of the dream world and kill him in the real world. Quentin tries to stay awake long enough to pull Nancy out of her dream when she grabs Krueger, but he falls asleep and is attacked.

Krueger goes after Nancy and explains that he deliberately left her for last so that she would be comatose. Quentin awakens and uses the adrenaline to wake Nancy, who then pulls Krueger into reality. They fight and Nancy uses a broken paper cutter blade to kill him before she torches the room with Krueger's body inside. She and Quentin escape and are rescued by the police officers and firefighters, who are unable to find Krueger's remains. After Nancy and her mother return home from the hospital, Krueger suddenly appears. While Nancy screams, Krueger kills Nancy's mother before pulling her body through a mirror and disappearing.

## Cast

* Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger
* Rooney Mara as Nancy Holbrook
* Kyle Gallner as Quentin Smith
* Katie Cassidy as Kris Fowles
* Thomas Dekker as Jesse Braun
* Kellan Lutz as Dean Russell
* Connie Britton as Gwen Holbrook
* Clancy Brown as Alan Smith
* Aaron Yoo as Marcus Yeon (uncredited)