NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Englund, the actor who turned Freddy Krueger into a fearsome household name, say he’s looking forward to someone else taking a stab at reviving the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise.
Englund said it’s time for Krueger’s razor-fingered glove to permanently pass to another actor.
“I’m too old,” said the 72-year-old. “I know that everything gets remade eventually.”
Englund played Krueger, a murderous villain who stalks his victims through their dreams, in eight films and occasionally on TV. He acknowledges a few years ago he thought he might’ve had the stamina for one more “Nightmare” movie, but compares the situation to “an athlete who can’t get out of bed Monday morning.”
He’s eager to see someone else up the ante.
“Now with the new technologies, films are gonna get remade because we can do special effects even better and more sophisticated, and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing a new ‘Nightmare’ film where they can really go crazy with a dream landscape, with the nightmare sequences, using some of the techniques used in ‘Inception’ or in that old Robin Williams film ‘What Dreams May Come.’”
“A Nightmare on Elm Street” was revived in 2010 with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy and also starring Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy and Kellan Lutz. It received poor reviews but was a box office success, earning more than $115 million worldwide.
Wes Craven directed the first film in 1984, and one of the stars was a then-unknown named Johnny Depp.
“Johnny dressed very rockabilly then. He had the best hair,” recalled Englund. “He called everyone sir and ma’am.”
As for his favorite “Nightmare” film, Englund cites the seventh installment: “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.”
“It was really a valentine to fans. We all kind of play ourselves in it and we make fun of ourselves, we make fun of Hollywood a bit. But we also made it kind of meta, you know it’s a movie within a movie,” he said. “It was a little ahead of its time but after the ‘Scream’ franchise opened, a lot of the fans revisited ‘Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’ and they really picked up on the hidden Easter eggs and the sort of meta structure of it.”
Englund is currently hosting the new Travel Channel series “True Terror with Robert Englund,” airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. From screaming headlines about haunted houses to twisted accounts of people being buried alive, Englund digs up these old stories with the help of historians.
