10 Movie Sequels That Completely Flipped The Original

When horror hero Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street hit screens in 1984, it was a breath of fresh air for genre fans who had tired of endless mute masked killer rip-offs in the few years since Halloween and Friday the 13th popularized the slasher movie formula. Freddy Krueger, the reality-warping dream demon, was a new and original sort of villain whose powers tread the thin line between horror and fantasy to spine-chilling effect.

Within a few years, however, fans had grown weary of Freddy’s antics, and the varying quality of the franchise’s instalments hadn’t helped matters, with the formula of Freddy targeting a new batch of interchangeable teen victims with a debatable connection to his hometown of Springwood each time.

So when Craven returned to the series in 1994, it was time for a change, and two years before Scream defined the meta-horror subgenre, the director had just the trick. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare saw the now-real Freddy invading the lives of the original movie’s star Heather Langekamp, playing herself, and Craven, as well as his own actor Robert Englund. The resulting satire-horror hybrid was roundly praised as the cleverest, funniest, and scariest outing for Krueger since the first film debuted.