You’ve no doubt heard of Freddy’s Revenge, but what about Freddy’s second coming?
Horror legend Robert Englund recently sat down with Too Fab (h/t Dread Central) to discuss all things Elm Street and the future of Freddy, a conversation which inevitably touched on the 1985 slasher sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
Helmed by Jack Sholder, the second coming of Englund’s Midnight Mangler fell far short of its predecessor, leaving many horror fans bitterly disappointed, as we all collectively pondered over what could have been. Thank the heavens, then, that Dream Warriors managed to salvage the Elm Street franchise with an imaginative rebound, but Englund believes now is the time for a full remake of Freddy’s Revenge.
Forget the long-rumored reboot of the franchise; Freddy Krueger has called on the movie Gods to revisit the second entry in the Elm Street series.
The secret of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ is the loss of innocence and the kids need to be like Midwestern kids, they can’t be hip, chic, junkie kids. They have to be middle American kids that think they’re a little hip and they are co-opted by evil and they lose their innocence on all levels; sexual, violence, murder, death, the realization of their parents’ flaws, all of those things. But because our society now is more damaged because of the opioid crisis, because of incredibly diverse, because of the openness now with gender and sexuality, those kids now have to be different than the kids from the original ‘Nightmare’ and someone has to write a different batch of kids and Freddy needs to be a different kind of evil. His evil needs to be, he needs to toy with what they like in the culture.
Englund went on to present his vision for a modern-day take on Freddy’s Revenge. Essentially, bringing A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 into the 2020s would allow for a deep dive into Freddy’s fractured psyche.
Via Too Fab:
If they redid Nightmare 2, for instance, and really deal with the subtext, Freddy toying with that boy’s sexuality. But the fact that we’re much more comfortable with that now, I think it would be really fun to have Freddy play with one kid who’s gay. Maybe one boy is not. Play with them. Tempt them. Force him out of the closet or back into the closet and we can do that. Audiences would accept that now. Freddy would do that because he’s in your head. But it is going to take somebody very clever to do that.
The full interview is well worth a read for any horror fan, particularly if you’ve been longing for something – anything – related to Elm Street. Suddenly the 2010 reboot, in which Jackie Earle Haley wielded those dreaded, blood-soaked claws, feels like a lifetime ago.