20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise
5. New Nightmare Was Originally Going To Be The Third Movie
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was a brilliant conclusion to the series, with Wes Craven returning in the director’s chair after a bunch of bizarre sequels.
The story almost came much earlier on in the series, though. When Craven was writing the screenplay for Nightmare 3, he wanted it to be the end of the franchise, and so his pitch was basically identical to the plot of New Nightmare: it would be about Freddy Krueger invading the real world, following the crew that made the original movie. New Line didn’t like the idea, but when it was time to end the series almost a decade later, they finally let Craven do it.
Craven really wanted to make the series scary again and bring it back to the quality of the original. He noted that in preparation for directing the seventh installment, he went back and watched all of the movies in the series, and he found them virtually impossible to follow.
The director concluded that the sequels got needlessly complicated and none were as good as the original, and that feeling helped inspire New Nightmare. He also noticed Freddy got more comedic as the sequels went, and so this time, Freddy is much darker, and his glove even gets a minor redesign to be more threatening and organic.