As the Jamie Lee Curtis-led franchise nears its epic conclusion, original A Nightmare on Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp says she wants a Halloween-style legacy sequel. Langenkamp led the cast of Wes Craven's iconic 1984 horror film as Nancy Thompson, a high schooler who finds herself tormented by the spirit of child murderer Freddy Krueger in her dreams, and must find a way to stop the deranged spirit before she and her friends never wake up. Alongside Langenkamp, the cast for the original A Nightmare on Elm Street included John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund and Johnny Depp in his film debut.
Written and directed by Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street scored largely favorable reviews at the time of its release, and was a box office success, grossing $57 million against its $1.1 million production budget. This success would help spawn a multimedia franchise including five direct sequels, one meta spinoff, a crossover with the Friday the 13th franchise and a poorly received remake. With Craven's estate regaining the rights to the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in 2019, talks have swirled of a variety of plans for where to go next with the property, and now one original star has their own idea for the project.
While speaking with Entertainment Tonight at this year's New York Comic-Con, Heather Langenkamp looked back on her time with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The original final girl expressed her interest in not only reprising her role, but also getting a Halloween-style sequel to bring Nancy back to the fold. See what Langenkamp said below:
If Nancy could fight Freddy one last time, I would really like that. Gosh, I’d love to see a future in that. I’ve been really watching the Halloween saga that’s been out, and I love watching Jamie Lee Curtis get to play that part. You know, this age, where I think we have so much to give to those storylines, but yeah, I wish I was in control of that, but, unfortunately, it’s one of those Hollywood very complicated things.
How A Nightmare On Elm Street Legacy Sequel Could Work
Much like Halloween before it, a potential Nightmare on Elm Street sequel with Langenkamp back as Nancy does have the hurdle of the protagonist having been killed off in the third installment, Dream Warriors, which protecting Patricia Arquette's Kristen from Freddy. Unlike the Jamie Lee Curtis franchise, however, Nancy's death was not only co-written by her creator, Wes Craven, but was also well-received by fans of the series, offering an emotional farewell to one of the horror genre's most iconic final girls. Langenkamp would return to the fold for New Nightmare, which instead saw her play a fictionalized version of herself as she and her son Dylan came under attack from Freddy as he invaded the real world.
Should A Nightmare on Elm Street legacy sequel be produced with both Langenkamp and Englund returning as Nancy and Freddy, it would likely have to pull a page from the book of 2018's Halloween, electing to ignore the canon of its predecessors in order to bring Nancy back to life. Given the satisfying nature of her death in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, this retconning could prove divisive for fans of the horror franchise, though if a fresh approach in the same vein as David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's is brought to the fold, some may be willing to overlook this strategy. In the meantime, audiences can revisit the original Nightmare on Elm Street movies streaming on HBO Max now.
Source: ET