A Nightmare on Elm Street is a timeless staple in horror history and defeats its 2010 remake in nearly every way, including edging out its final girl, Nancy Holbrook, with Freddy’s original foil, Nancy Thompson.
It’s clear that Robert Englund’s iconic portrayal of Freddy Krueger was superior to Jackie Earle Haley’s more serious version of the dream stalker, and final girls can seem rather interchangeable in horror franchises, but some movies break the mold, especially with the classics. For example, Friday the 13th’s Alice Hardy survived Pamela Voorhees in the first movie, but returned and was killed by Jason in the second. Laurie Strode, from Halloween, has faced off with Michael Myers many times through various storylines including a remake, a retcon, and sequels that follow two different canon storylines. Sidney Prescott is always running from a different Ghostface killer - usually more than one - in the Scream franchise. Therefore, the choice to craft an entirely new Nancy who was intended to be distinctly different was a strange exercise of artistic license from the beginning.
Despite being played by Academy Award-nominated actress Rooney Mara (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), Nancy Holbrook was a different take on the classic final girl, but not necessarily in a good way.
Nancy Thompson Outplayed Her Doppelgänger (Against A Better Freddy)
Though both characters had a similar backstory with Freddy Krueger, Nancy Holbrook and Nancy Thompson couldn’t have been more different. In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) has the girl-next-door charm, a close-knit group of friends, and started seeing the finger-bladed dream demon in increasingly alarming ways that cut through the reality of her charmed life. However, Thompson possessed natural leadership abilities from the beginning of the film, even as tragedy started to befall them, and showed fearless determination. After her friend Tina’s murder, Thompson’s friend Rod - Tina’s boyfriend - is blamed, so she went toe-to-toe with her father about her doubts. Instead of sitting idly by, Thompson took action in trying to hunt down Freddy on her own, and enlisted her boyfriend Glen to stand guard while she sought him out. She showed a solitary dedication to protecting her friends, and dug at her parents to discover the truth about Fred Krueger’s murder, then fought Freddy alone, even though she knew she might not make it out alive. She returned to face Freddy a second time in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but didn’t survive that battle. She led a new generation of teenagers to fight him, as she and her friends once did, before she perished.
Described by Rooney Mara as “the loneliest girl in the world”, Holbrook doesn’t possess the same tenacity as Thompson does from the start. As her friends became targeted by Krueger, she enlisted the help of her friend, Quentin (Kyle Gallner), to get to the bottom of the mystery and worked as a team rather than Holbrook going it alone. It was the smarter choice, perhaps, but final girls in horror are notorious for being the sole survivor against their enemy, even if they have friends to back them up from time to time. In some ways, Quentin felt more like the sole survivor than Nancy did in the remake, since he supplied his own prescription medication so they both could stay awake. He also stole adrenaline from a pharmacy and saved Nancy when she faced Freddy in the dream world. Without Quentin’s assistance throughout the movie, she likely would have died. The two depended too much on drugs - and each other - for either of them to be strong enough to go it alone.
The inspiration for Nancy Holbrook was not only the original Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, but also Lori Campbell from Freddy vs Jason. Though Holbrook did find her strength at the end, it took her a while to get there, and took a lot of extra encouragement to make the shy, artistic loner into a formidable nemesis for the man of her nightmares.
Next: How Freddy Krueger Finally Killed Nancy In Nightmare On Elm Street
