With the release of the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake happening today, many sites have recently been posting special Freddy content. April seems to be the month of Krueger.

I’m a big fan of the series (after all, I made not 1 but 2 Freddy Krueger pumpkin patterns) and wanted to comment on the original franchise. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen these movies. Some I may not have even seen in their entirety.

So I dove into my DVD collection and watched every one in order. To keep them straight in my head, I wrote up a mini review for each. So join me on this guided tour of Elm Street, and try to stay awake…

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The remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is just a week away. Wondering what the pioneering boogeyman thinks? Take a look at this quick clip of Robert Englund, speaking at the Monster Mania con last summer. With this hopeful and diplomatic response, sounds like the original Freddy is (resting) at peace with Hollywood’s ways.

Joel Robinson is a full-time horror and comic book artist specializing in character portraiture. Pick any famous movie monster and chances are Joel has crafted a gritty digital painting of said character. Everyone from the Tallman to the Candyman. He’s immortalized many of Vince Price’s roles, as well as every single Jason Vorhees. Check out artpusher.net to feast your eyes on more of his work, if you dare.

Most of us know The Addams Family as a black-and-white sitcom that ran for two seasons in the mid-60′s. A younger generation might be more familiar with the early-90′s movies. The family took on cartoon form in both the 70′s and 90′s. And this year the Addams clan even became a Broadway musical.

Before all of that though, the Addams Family was a single panel cartoon. The brainchild of Charles Addams, the comic was first published in The New Yorker in 1938.

But yet another incarnation is on the horizon. A 3D stop-motion animated version, to be directed by Tim Burton. This no doubt comes as great news to his fans, who look forward to being treated to another dose of typically twisted and macabre Burton style. But for everyone else, well… I can hear the collected groan of “Here we go again.”

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A creative design agency aims to make a splash (or at least a splatter) in the advertising market with this bloodthirsty stationery. Zombies are being stabbed with staples, torn with tabs, cleaved with compact discs.

Unfortunately, most of us won’t get a chance to write ransom letters on this gory paper. It’s corporate letterhead for Germany’s most famous crime and horror channel, 13th Street. Puncturing paper has never been such bloody good fun.

Recent zombie culture has made viewers accustomed to a speedy zombie, with productions like Dawn of the Dead (2004), 28 Days Later, Dead Set, Left 4 Dead and Zombieland.

But it wasn’t always so. Traditionally a zombie is a slow-moving, groaning, shuffling corpse. After all, their body tissues are decomposing, right? Which is why the movie Shaun of the Dead stayed true to the classic image of the undead.

See, Simon Pegg knows his zombies. He knows about Haitian voodoo folklore. He knows that George Romero introduced the modern movie zombie. He knows the these monsters didn’t crave brains until Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead. And Pegg paid homage to the Romero-style ghoul in his own black comedy.

So who better than zed-word purist Pegg to pontificate on the debate of slow vs. fast zombies:

“Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable. Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.”

He makes more great points in this 2008 Guardian article, The Dead and the Quick. Give it read and see if you agree that a speed limit should be enforced on the walking dead.