Nightmare On Elm Street's Reboot Should Be A Freddy Kruger Prequel
Most horror villains emphatically do not need a prequel detailing their origin story, but A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger is an exception. For a lot of slasher horror film series, a villain-centric origin story is a terrible idea. Friday the 13th’s Jason has too tragic a beginning while the origin of Michael Myers is too depressingly pedestrian to feel truly scary, as Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake mistakenly proved. However, in the case of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, a full-on prequel focusing on Freddy’s origin would be the best bet for the iconic slasher franchise.
It is not easy to bring back a beloved slasher franchise in a way that pleases both fans and critics alike. While the 2018 Halloween was a huge success, its 2021 follow-up, Halloween Kills, relied on nostalgia and in-jokes over suspense and scares, and the movie was critically panned as a result. As a result of this historic difficulty, many horror series have instead simply started to reinvent their villains wholesale. Projects like 2019’s Child’s Play and the 2021 sequel Candyman rewrote the origins of their villains, with varying degrees of success, while the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre opted instead to add a direct sequel to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and ignore the rest of the franchise’s canon.
Related: Nightmare On Elm Street 2 Has The Creepiest Nursery Rhyme In The Series
The next incarnation of A Nightmare on Elm Street should aim for reinvention as well and go back before the start of the original. Not only has Freddy Krueger got an interesting enough backstory for the franchise to pull off a prequel centered on his start of darkness, but this is also the best approach for a resurrection of the Nightmare on Elm
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