Elijah Wood Wants To Bring Back Robert Englund For Nightmare On Elm Street Reboot

The potential of a second reboot of A Nightmare On Elm Street inches ever closer to becoming a reality, and Elijah Wood has stated his desire to bring back Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger.

The franchise has had no new installments since the abysmal reboot just shy of a decade past, the less about which is said the better, where Freddy was instead played by Jackie Earle Haley. However, now that the rights for the series have returned to Wes Craven’s estate and who subsequently opened pitches for a continuation, anyone could throw their hat in the ring, with it being recently announced that Wood and his producing partner Daniel Noah are interested in pursuing the property. Nothing official has been announced, or been suggested that it will even go ahead, but Wood is adamant about the importance of Englund being a part of any potential new movie.

“You have to bring Robert Englund back for one more film. I think, especially if you’re going to open up a new franchise and take it in different directions, you have to establish it with him and then you can move on. I don’t think it’s interesting to tell the same story over and over again, we don’t need another origin story of Freddy Krueger, I don’t think it should even really be so much about Freddy.”

Wood then went on to speak about New Nightmare and its importance to the direction that the perception of slasher movies took in the late ‘90s.

“Scream owes a real debt to New Nightmare. That was the first time the notion of referencing horror movies in another horror movie was possible, it had never really been done before.”

The limited use of Freddy harks back to the original film, which was largely focused on Nancy and her friends first trying to figure out what was going on and then survive it, with the dream demon’s actual screen time being severely limited, especially in comparison to the dominating force he later became. As for New Nightmare, in addition to introducing the idea of meta narratives, it also served to revert Freddy to the sinister stalker of dreams he was in the series’ original installments before his popularity and cultural saturation ended up turning him into a wisecracking joke, so using it as a reference point is a pretty good place to start.

As previously mentioned, there’s nothing yet set in stone, but it certainly seems that Wood has a solid understanding of the Nightmare On Elm Street films and what would make a good version of them, so if another remake is ultimately on the cards, the powers that be could certainly do a lot worse then giving him a crack at producing one.