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A Nightmare on Elm Street represents the first step in Method Studios' recent expansion into feature vfx, which has been bolstered by the appointments of Dan Glass, Drew Jones, Stephane Ceretti and Patrick Davenport.

Indeed, moving forward Method (part of London-based Ascent Media, which also owns Company 3, Beast and Rushes UK) has Matt Reeves' Let Me In, among other features.

Of course, in the case of Nightmare, it helped that Method's strong commercial and music video rep drew the attention of co-producer Michael Bay and Samuel Bayer, who hails from short form work and makes his directorial feature debut with the Nightmare remake.

"It's always kind of fun working with a first-time feature director," says Glass. "Obviously not first time directing, remotely, but he lends a new, fresh approach to things. There's not a tremendous amount of blood and guts, but [Freddy's] face is pretty full on, and the really fun thing about it was that Sam didn't want it to be anatomically correct. He wanted it to be scarier. There was this dark void of muscles and tendons and sinew that went in to the depth of the face that didn't have any reality you would expect.

"It's a good part of Method's expansion into features to take on that level of complexity. Eighty shots is not a tremendous shot count, but, nevertheless, it's an important achievement for the team here."

Sean Faden (Let Me In, Percy Jackson) served as visual effects supervisor for Method, and was onset during the 44-day Chicago shoot, which was nearly all nighttime. Not surprisingly, updating the face of the iconic '80s boogey man, Freddy Krueger (played by Jackie Earle Haley), was the biggest challenge and involved the most amount of vfx work (70+ shots).

"Definitely the advances in technology allowed us to do a lot more with Freddy's face," Faden suggests. "The prosthetics took his face pretty far and it looked great. Originally the damage was going to be to one side of the face to keep the budget down. But in the end, it was decided to go further, so we did damage to both sides of his face and added additional wounds to the cheeks and sides of the head and chin. We used the latest rendering technologies to get a nice wet, subsurface-y, flesh look."