Few characters have endured the last forty years like A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, and now one of the people who added to that is talking about how he can be reinvigorated on the big screen.
Surviving movies, books, TV and a so-so reboot, Freddy started off as a face of pure evil, haunting the dreams of teens in Elm St and giving them more and more terrifying and gruesome deaths and over the years he became a pop-culture icon and embraced the fun and silliness a bit more but with Robert Englund in the red and blue top and burned make-up, his character was always one to look forward to seeing on the big – or small – screen.
Now, Chuck Russell, director of the third – and arguably best – Freddy movie, A Nightmare on Elm St 3: Dream Warrior, has said that there’s only one person who can breathe new life into Freddy now that Englund has gotten too old for the role… Jim Carrey.
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Russell directed The Mask, the movie that arguably made Carrey the star he is by showcasing his cartoonish talents, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Freddy and Carrey.
Speaking on the Development Hell podcast, Russell said: “I’d love to do another Elm Street if there was the full support of everybody. Patricia Arquette [who starred in Dream Warrior opposite Englund] has said she’d like to do it again… I still think Robert, for me, is the only Freddy.”
However, when asked about Carrey, left, he conceded that yes, if Carrey was on board, he would be happy to do a new Nightmare movie: “Jim, in my opinion, could almost do anything if he put his heart into it. For Jim to do it, we’d have to do something that was another leap in the Elm Street series—a little bit like what Wes did with his very meta New Nightmare.”
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Of course, the only issue is that while Englund is 78, Carrey is 64, so it probably couldn’t happen that Carrey launched a new Nightmare series at that age as Freddy is a very physical role.
Being realistic, with the Nightmare series sitting in limbo after the 2010 remake, if Freddy is to return and terrify a whole new generation again, then something fresh needs to happen, and while Carrey is probably also getting too old for such a gig, having the director of Dream Warrior return might just be the push the franchise needs to wake up.
Thoughts? I know you have them and I wanna hear ‘em all.
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Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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