A Nightmare on Elm Street has gone through some strange transformations over the course of its franchise, but Peter Jackson actually had the opportunity to put his own personal stamp on Freddy Krueger.
There have been a number of pivotal horror franchises that have lasted the test of time and spawned enough sequels, reboots, and remakes to reach double digits. Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers have their charms, but Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street brought a terrifying level of surreal fantasy to the horror genre. Freddy Krueger doesn’t just have the power to invade dreams, when people are at their most vulnerable, but it feels like he can literally do anything.
It’s this nearly limitless level of power that eventually ran the Elm Street series into trouble, which began to hit diminishing returns and slowly turn Krueger into a parody of himself. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child found the series’ popularity at an all-time low and New Line was desperate to mix things up for part 6 in order to save the struggling series. New Line commissioned more than one script for the sequel, in order to properly weigh their options and explore more directions. One of those scripts would eventually become Rachel Talalay’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, while the other was written by an up-and-coming Peter Jackson.
Peter Jackson Wrote A Script For Nightmare On Elm Street 6
Due to the reputation that Peter Jackson had built for himself from his low-budget horror debut feature, Bad Taste, New Line gave Jackson a shot at the future of the franchise. Peter Jackson co-wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover with Danny Mulheron, which tells a somewhat meta story where Springwood is no longer frightened by Krueger and teenagers actively take sleeping pills so they can enter the Dream World and bully the powerless Krueger.
Krueger’s major struggle is in getting fear back in the public, which he eventually succeeds in after some Dream World shenanigans go too far and he manages to kill a kid. Once Krueger traps a police officer in the Dream World, his son most venture in to save him from Freddy Krueger. Jackson’s script still ends with Freddy defeated, but it’s hardly as definitive as a sequel that’s titled “Freddy’s Dead.”
Peter Jackson’s Script Might Have Saved Freddy And The Franchise
If The Dream Lover turned out to be successful, the franchise likely would have continued with Jackson’s idea of exploiting the Dream World and reclaiming it against Freddy. Maybe Freddy would even have to permanently leave it because he doesn’t feel safe there anymore, pushing the films into new ground. Details are slim on why New Line passed on Jackson and Mulheron’s draft, but they likely preferred a film that continued the series’ mythology and attempted to conclude it, rather than Jackson’s reboot-like approach.
Not only would Jackson’s take on the material have pushed A Nightmare on Elm Street to new territory, but if Jackson had scripted the film, he might have also stayed involved with the franchise in some capacity. This could have resulted in Jackson helming subsequent sequels from his Dream Lover idea or even being the person that they turned to when the reboot was going into production. Since Jackson’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 6 premise uses many of the ideas that Wes Craven would later turn to in New Nightmare, it’s safe to say that New Nightmare wouldn’t have happened or would at least be very different. With New Nightmare largely acting as Craven’s transitional steppingstone towards Scream, maybe this sequence of events could have even resulted in Peter Jackson directing Scream.
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