Crawl director Alexandre Aja says that he'd love to reboot A Nightmare on Elm Street. Aja has been the director behind films like Horns and Piranha 3D, but he also directed the remake of another Wes Craven horror classic, The Hills Have Eyes.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was released over 30 years ago, but Freddy Krueger is still a massive influence on pop culture and the horror genre. The film got a total of seven sequels over the years, as well as a reboot by Samuel Bayer in 2010 starring Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy. There have been several reports of a Nightmare on Elm Street reboot over the years. At one point, Orphan writer David Leslie Johnson was thought to be penning the script, but that plan seemed to fall through. Other directors have shown interest in A Nightmare on Elm Street, including David F. Sandberg and Don Mancini, the latter of which even had an idea for a Chucky and Freddy crossover. Now, Aja is the newest director to claim he wants to tackle the film.
When being interviewed by CinePop, Aja expressed his interest in directing an A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot. When the interviewer asked him if he'd like to remake any of Craven's other films like Scream or A Nightmare on Elm Street, Aja responded by saying, "A Nightmare on Elm Street would be amazing, one of my most traumatic experiences as a kid was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street and I would love to kind of explore, this is a great world to explore." Aja didn't seem as enthuastic about Scream. Check out his interview below.
While rebooting A Nightmare on Elm Street is one way to continue the franchise, New Line Cinema could also go ahead with a sequel with the original cast returning. Robert Englund himself has teased he might be down to play Freddy one final time, and even Heather Langenkamp is more than willing to return to her role of Nancy Thompson. The 2010 reboot didn't go over well with fans or critics, so a sequel might be the best way to go, even if they retconned the prior Nightmare on Elm Street sequels like Halloween did last year.
Aja seems more than enthusiastic about potentially rebooting A Nightmare on Elm Street, and with the recent addition of Crawl to his filmography, Aja continues to prove himself a notable director within the horror genre. Even though many people would like to see Englund return for another sequel, others would be curious to see what Aja could bring to the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.
Source: CinePop