A Nightmare on Elm Street

New ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ Movie in the Works From Paramount (Exclusive)

The studio has inked a deal with the estate of Wes Craven to revive the Freddy Kreuger horror franchise and will release it via its newly launched Paramount Primal label.

The Hollywood ReporterBorys Kit

Paramount (yuck) apparently got the rights to A Nightmare on Elm Street, and have immediately announced their intention to reboot the series.

Here's the thing. I love A Nightmare on Elm Street. As much as I love anything horror, I love A Nightmare on Elm Street. Those first three movies were everything to me when I was a kid.

I was a kid who, in the fifth grade, got in trouble at school for making a cardboard and construction paper Freddy glove, glued to my hand with Elmer's glue. I was really, really into Freddy.

Even as the movies got sillier and further from what made them great in the first place, I held on. Even as the nineties wound down and Freddy hung up his had and glove, I was holding out hope that one day, he'd come back.

And he did. A couple of times, with mixed results.

First, Wes Craven came back to the series to direct Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which was his attempt to make Freddy a little more serious and scary again. Unfortunately, for me, it was a major disappointment. It was goofy, in the wrong ways, and wasn't particularly scary. It was just kind of impressed with itself.

There was Freddy vs Jason, which I actually kind of liked, but it didn't really feel like more than silly little one off.

Then... there was the remake. The one that stared Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy. It was very divisive, with good reason, because it was mostly shitty. Not because of Jackie Earle Haley, who was phenomenal in the role, but they just didn't pull it off. That's the long and short of it. It just wasn't a good movie.

So that brings us to the news of the day, which is that Paramount is rebooting Freddy. There's not much more information than that, beyond that Wes Craven's estate is involved, so do with that what you will.

There are a lot of interesting opportunities to do this well, and I hope someone does.

Here are a few things to consider.

First, who should direct it?

Curry Barker, Mike Flanagan, Lee Cronin, Alexandre Aja, and Guillermo Del Toro have all expressed a desire to reboot ANOES, and honestly, I'd be thrilled with any of those guys taking a crack at it. I'd love to see Nia DeCosta and Brandon Cronenberg added to that mix myself.

For me, what I need, is the horror of nightmares personified. Not just scary, but the gleefully indifferent horror of raw fear. The 2010 remake wanted Freddy to be some kind of psychosexual metaphor for abuse, and that was all wrong. Freddy is, at his core, a murderer of children, and while, when done right, can be scary, compelling, and even funny at times, it's a really delicate balance to maintain and not many filmmakers would know what to do with a new Freddy Krueger movie.

Luckily, there just so happens to be a whole slew of talented filmmakers who COULD do something with it.

Hell, give it to Rose Glass and let Kristen Stewart play Freddy. Make the CHUDs heads explode. Just do SOMETHING interesting with it. Something interesting and new. That's what I want.