In the beloved — OK, beloved by some — 1948 comedy-horror hybrid “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” the hapless lycanthrope Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr., who did hapless better than he likely wanted to) tries to explain his condition to the skeptics played by the film’s titular comic team. “I know you think I’m crazy,” he bleats, “but in half an hour the moon will rise, and I’ll turn into a wolf.”
“You and 20 million other guys,” says Lou Costello’s Wilbur with a smirk.
That’s the sort of thing that constituted — some might say “passed for” — knowing adult humor in popular entertainment those days. Less than a decade later, after Sinatra’s bobby-soxers brought the notion of adolescent hormonal activity into the mainstream, a movie calling itself “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” was hardly a surprise. Since that fairly risible 1957 Michael Landon film, the teen-horror subgenre has gone through quite a few changes of its own, growing out of its awkward phase and yielding some of the most striking work in horror, period. But then something happened. Last weekend yet another remake of yet another teen-horror classic opened and became the number one movie at the box office: “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” in which the iconic bogeyman Freddy Krueger (here played by Jackie Earle Haley, the go-to guy for creep-you-out roles nowadays) troubles the already anxiety-laden dreams of your average teens by actually slaughtering the kids from within those visions. As with recent rethinks of scare fare from “The Hills Have Eyes” to “Friday the 13th” and beyond, the filmmakers’ concern here seems less about artistically revitalizing the genre than with making a few bucks off a familiar brand.
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