Over the past 10 years, a trend quickly swept across Hollywood that everything had to be dark and gritty, and that certainly extended to horror movies. Remakes of classic films aren't always a bad thing, but what's disappointing is when they strip out all of the personality of the originals, going unnecessarily bleak and nasty. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) is the definition of the phrase "no fun allowed." The 1984 film is terrifying without a doubt, but there are also fun elements to it and its sequels like in Freddy Krueger's goofy lines and some of the cheesiness from the kids. In the remake, every character is incredibly depressing, Freddy is unambiguously a child molester, and the whole thing is just an unpleasant experience you don't want to watch. The same is true of the Halloween remake and the sequel. It's not that the original wasn't dark too, but Rob Zombie's version is so excessive that it becomes absurd, like a scene in Halloween II where Michael stabs a woman over and over about 15 times in the most relentlessly grisly way possible. While filmmakers should definitely avoid being so cheesy that things gets overly comedic, going too far in the opposite direction and not allowing the audience to have any fun at all is also a mistake.
