According to interviews, Rooney Mara hated the experience of working on this film, and almost quit acting as a result of it. By her own admission, she was never excited over the role but gave too good of an audition to get passed up, and as a result she didn't even try to give a good performance.
The film's writer, Eric Heisserer, also doesn't think too highly of it. When asked what parts of his script he wishes were in the finished film, he replied, "Uh, just about all of it." He also said that the film was rushed out to meet the 25th anniversary of the original (a Milestone Celebration that it wound up missing anyway), and that his first actual visit to the set, where they were filming a scene that he knew he'd never written, was what convinced him that the film was on the wrong track.
Thomas Dekker has retrospectively spoken out against the film post-release. When appearing in a documentary on the making of Village of the Damned (1995) he mentions this as an example of failed remakes and called it "a horrendous mess."
Creator Killer: The negative feedback surrounding this movie killed any chance Samuel Bayer had at directing another movie after this film. This was his first and only film to date, and Bayer has since returned to directing ads and music videos.
Disowned Adaptation: Wes Craven was reportedly not approached about this remake, and later spoke against it publicly.
Deleted Scene: The Blu-ray contains several deleted scenes you can view in full as well as others which can only be briefly glimpsed in the other special features. The deleted material includes:
Alternate opening: A burn patient (Fred Krueger) painfully dies in a hospital.
Dean's alternate death: Kris hosts a garden party which ends with Dean falling to his death.
Krueger confronting Kris in his candlelit lair.
Krueger, as Kris, taunts Nancy as she drowns in the blood-flooded hallway.
Alternate final sequence: Quentin encounters Krueger in a dilapidated church.
Additional footage of Freddy killing one of the Elm Street parents in a bedroom dream sequence and an alternate ending of Freddy bursting from a sleeping Quentin.
Alternate ending: Freddy traps Nancy in the dream world and turns back into his human form, thus staying human when Nancy pulls him into the real world.
Enforced Method Acting: To provoke a response from the actors in the scene in "Freddy's Cave", the photographs they found were Polaroids of little girls mixed with real Polaroids taken from medical surgeries.
Franchise Killer: Jackie Earle Haley and Rooney Mara signed up for multiple films. His contract was for three total films while hers was for two. It is now over a decade later, and there is no indication that a sequel is ever going to happen.
Refitted for Sequel: Freddy was going to be a child molester in the original film. This was dropped in order to avoid accusations of exploiting then-recently reported child molestation cases.
Throw It In!: Jackie Earle Haley would often improvise his lines on the set, feeling this might help unease his other cast members if they didn't know what line he was going to say.
In the original script, Freddy was really innocent.
Two alternate openings that were filmed. The first, which was shown in the trailer and original script, was of a party being held where Dean (played by Kellan Lutz) kills himself by jumping off a high point and crashing into a garden. The second, featured on the DVD and Blu-ray, was Freddy Krueger lying in a hospital bed, covered up to hide his face before dying. He had somehow lived through his ordeal from being lit on fire and was comatose. He only dies several days before the remake even occurs.
According to the casting call sheet, Quentin was originally written as a "indie-style guy who runs the high school's podcast Insomnia Radio".
Nancy and Quentin were also were set to face off against Freddy inside an old church for the ending, with scenes even filmed at a local church, but it was cut out entirely and scrapped for the theatrical ending.
Before settling for a remake, the film was supposed to be a prequel.
Earlier drafts of the script had the dreamworld more fleshed out as an actual location, with one of the characters exploring and even making a map of the place long before Freddy got around to dealing with him.
, Rooney Mara hated the experience of working on this film, and almost quit acting as a result of it. By her own admission, she was never excited over the role but gave too good of an audition to get passed up, and as a result she didn't even try to give a good performance.