While many of the remakes and reboots that have inundated Hollywood in recent years have reached some level of success, one genre that has had difficulty has been horror. Among the recent terrible attempts to remake classic horror films was the lackluster A Nightmare on Elm Street from 2010 that was so forgettable you’d probably forgotten they even made it. However, one early idea for the remake would have taken the film in a very different, and truly scary, direction.
When the Nightmare on Elm Street remake was first going into production French filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who had made the indie slasher Inside, were in talks to take on the reins. Things eventually went in a different direction, but Bloody Disgusting recently inquired as to what their plan would have been. The description is already quite terrifying.
Our idea of a good remake is to have a new vision on the same thematics. Here it was to really use the fact that Krueger is a child molester. So the idea was to have a twisted version of the ‘Goonies’ with a bunch of kids being stalked. We thought it would have been great for a remake to switch the teenagers of the original with real kids. Besides, childhood is the moment in life when you are truly and deeply frightened by nightmares, when you’re not able to see the difference between reality and dreams…
Freddy Krueger meets The Goonies. Yeah, that’s actually an incredibly disturbing thought. We can imagine that a film that focused on the child molester aspects of the famous horror monster might not have been a popular idea with the studio, but we have to admit that the concept certainly gives us the creeps, which is, of course, the point. Using actual children would have put the film’s protagonists at a natural disadvantage. Somehow the idea of using children just seems terrible and wrong, but then again that’s exactly the reaction that you want from a good horror movie.
Since the actual remake that we got was much closer to the original version it was likely that New Line Cinema wasn’t looking for Nightmare on Elm Street to take as big a departure as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo were suggesting. The remake hit several of the exact same beats that the original did, the problem was that since they didn’t hit any of them as well as Wes Craven, it was automatically a less than impressive film.
