Thomas Dekker Cast In Elm Street Rehash

The word on the street is that Sarah Connor Chronicles has been axed by Fox. I can't say I'd blame them. Should that leave you wondering – by any chance – what will become of that nice young Thomas Dekker chap, I have your answer.

According to Ryan Rotten at Shock Till You Drop, Dekker has been cast as Jesse in the new Nightmare on Elm Street. So... who is this Jesse? I'll tell you what I know...

Shock's report describes Jesse as "a jock on the swim team" but my information suggests this is incorrect and the swim team character is actually Quentin, to be played by Kyle Gallner. As far as I've been told, Jesse Braun is the ex-boyfriend of Kris Fowler (they're the closest thing this version has to Tina and Rod) and is the first to work out that Freddy Krueger is killing the teens of Elm Street through their dreams. Jesse has a motorcycle, which clearly connotes the kind of character they're going for here (see also: Thomas Dekker's stand-by scowling demeanor). He is at the heart of the biggest conceptual change in the new version, which I won't spoil for you, but it's worth knowing that Freddy might just have a personal grudge against Jesse.

As ever, it is possible that some or all of this is going to change as the film goes through production and post, but at the moment, that's the deal. I'm betting it remains intact all the way to the silver screen.

The big casting news, of course, is going to be the girls. It's no secret that, villain aside, the girls are the key casting in any traditional slasher, particularly as one of them is going to wind up as the 'final girl'. At least in my experience, teenage girls make up a very large proportion of the cinema audience for slasher films and definitely so in comparison to most other genres. What's more, a large majority of the teenage girls I've taught over the years have admitted to being first-weekend punters for horror flicks too. Not sure why this is, but it seems to be related to the abundance of representations of young women in the genre, even though many of these representations are hardly flattering, and definitely not realistic.

Here's an amusing idea: if this reboot completely tanks, then it can actually be incorporated very easily into the overall Elm Street meta-mythos with a sequel to the New Nightmare. Or, more likely, it can just be lamented a while and then, as the years go by, forgotten.