The director, a veteran of memorable music videos and commercials, makes his feature debut with a reboot of the Freddy Krueger slasher flick. ‘This was “Twilight” before “Twilight.”
No matter how fierce your devotion to popular culture, odds are you’ve never heard of Samuel Bayer, who makes his feature directing debut Friday with the reboot of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” But you’re almost certainly familiar with his work.
A prolific commercial and music-video director, Bayer has been responsible for some of the most memorable images of the last 20 years: Kurt Cobain thrashing around a gym in Nirvana’s music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; the bespectacled girl in a bumblebee tutu finding elusive companionship in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video.