Englund, Robert (NOES: Real Nightmares)
Dread Central Staff
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Sitting by the phone, I waited. Clock ticking away. Soon it would ring and I would be going one-on-one with THE quintessential nightmare man. What would happen? Would a tongue jettison out of the receiver part of my telephone? Or would the phone ringing serve as a distraction? Something to get my attention, while something much more sinister makes its move unbeknownst to me. Only time would tell, and time was . . . running out! *The phone rings* . . .
Robert Englund: Hi, Steve!
Uncle Creepy: Hey, Robert. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RE: It’s good to talk to you.
UC: How are you doing?
RE: I’m pretty good. I’m getting geared up here to dip my feet in reality television.
UC: I know; I’m excited about that.
RE: It’s a new world, but I figure . . . you know . . . a good way to keep young is to keep new challenges going. And I’m working with some really interesting guys. One of my favorite shows on TV is the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! show, and one of those guys is onboard as the Executive Producer. Also Jon Kroll, who had two of the biggest hits with Big Brother and The Amazing Race. They are both really fun guys, and they’ve brought along this special effects guy Jon worked with who did Star Wars and X-Men 2. He’s going to recreate little short, special effects versions of people’s nightmares. So I’m really looking forward to it. I keep telling everybody we’re going to learn so much from the fans.
UC: Absolutely.
RE: That’s where we’re really going to define the show — from the input from the fans. The common denominator of their nightmares and their fears and the kind of nightmares they’d like to see and the kind of nightmares that we find recurring amongst the fans. We’re going to be going all over America, too, which is going to be interesting. That’s one of the things that attracted me. I’m trying to get some theme shows. Of course, I’m so corny – I think like [in Freddy voice] SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.
UC: Well, let me know if you ever come to Tampa, Florida.
RE: I’m the host, but I’m also the field guy. I’m going to be sort of like Robert Englund, Horror Actor/Host – a little bit of the Vincent Price thing. But then I’m also on the road. I’m like a field correspondent, a journalist, so I will be going out. We actually go to people’s houses. I’ll knock on the door, and they’re going to open it up and I’ll be there. I’ll say something like, “I understand there’s a nightmare on your street.” Then I’ll go inside and they’ll tell me the nightmare. While they tell me their nightmare, we’ll see this wonderfully recreated short film by Pete Kuran, the guy who worked on Star Wars and X-Men 2. And then we will actually bring them into an event contestant situation where the nightmare will be recreated almost like a Fear Factor element. The nastiest one I’ve heard – just to show you how far out these guys are – is from a fan who has a recurring nightmare where he’s trapped by a minotaur, half-man/half-bull. And their idea is to build a Plexiglas maze and put the contestant in it with a wild bull.
UC: Oh, man!
RE: And he won’t know that the maze with the bull and the maze that he’s in don’t actually meet. He’s going to think it’s just one maze and he better go the right way to get out or the bull will get him. In other words, you can understand the dramatic possibilities here. You’re going to have a bull with a big blubbery snout against Plexiglas, and the guy’s going to think he’s going to run right into this bull.
UC: That’s both cruel and psychotic – but great!
RE: You can see these guys are not reigned in. I told you that one of the guys did Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, which I love, and another one is Tony Yates. They are pushing the envelope every day.
UC: It sounds very exciting.
RE: My feeling is that we’ve got to really select the submissions carefully. And really look for those common denominators like people that are having nightmares about being stuck in an elevator and then segue that contestant-wise into maybe the buried alive nightmare – things like that – as well as just leaving our heads open. I was talking to my nephew, who was like 6’2” when he was 14-1/2 years old, and he skateboards and snowboards and is cool and into hip-hop, right? But his mother, who’s a fashion designer, drags him along to an antique store with antique dolls in it. It completely freaked this kid out. He’s a big giant surfer kid, but he couldn’t handle the old porcelain doll faces that are cracked and discolored – kind of like death heads. So I was just thinking as an example about why we have to have an open mind. Can you imagine if I could get my nephew in a room on a cot with floor-to-ceiling doll heads with little votive candles in front of them all, and in the middle of the night one of them, which is animatronic like Chucky, starts saying, “Hey, Larry, wake up!” We could just mess with his head and see what happens when he’s in his nightmare. There are a lot of personal demons and psychology they’re going to have to confront, which really changes it from a Fear Factor type show. While they are telling me their nightmare, we’ll actually see with actors and special effects what their dream is. And then we put them into a facsimile of it.
UC: Very, very interesting.
RE: One thing we’ve really got to learn is how to vet and scrutinize submissions because people are going to want to get on the show and will fake stuff. So we have to start looking for threads and common denominators of not only people who are BS’ing but also people who have legitimate nightmares that dovetail or are similar as well as just original. Some of the ones I’ve heard already that I can tell are original deal with that feeling where you can’t get out of bed. A lot of people have that, but it has different associations. Some people say they have a demon on them.
UC: Or a ghost some people say.
RE: Or just “someone” on their chest. It might be their boss sitting on their chest holding them down, pinning them down. That one is starting to show up a lot, so we’re looking at that one pretty carefully too.
UC: Now the show’s going to be called Nightmare on Elm Street: Real Nightmares?
RE: It’s Nightmare on Elm Street because that’s the franchise. It’s what everybody identifies. But the show’s real name is Real Nightmares.
UC: And will Freddy make an appearance once in a while?
RE: I don’t think so. What I’m looking for is a really great trench coat, but I don’t want to look like Dio.
UC: You want to avoid the Robert Stack Unsolved Mysteries look too.
RE: Yeah. I just like the idea that I’m out there kind of like the reporter. If we get the right color and everything, there’s just something cool about it. But I also think – with the visuals and stuff and my own body language – I can bring a little bit of that attitude to the role. I want to be a confidante of the guests, but I also want to prod them and scare them a little bit. I want to hear their stories and be sympathetic, almost like a shrink, and I want to also caution them. But I want to dare them too. So I have to go back and forth across the line. I have to bring a certain amount of attitude to it, and I think a little bit of wardrobe goes a long way to solving attitude and body language.
UC: Sure. Where did the concept come from? Has it been in the works for a while?
RE: Jon Kroll, whom I mentioned earlier, is this great, really smart guy. He grew up in Northern California on a commune or something and loves great movies, great horror, and great sci-fi and cyberpunk. He’s very intellectual and has an incredible vocabulary at the tip of his fingers, but he’s also unapologetic about how reality television changes the way we view the world and television and the news and documentaries and everything else. This is not necessarily to blame scripted television for anything because I’m actually a champion of formula. I watch Seinfeld or The Honeymooners or Law & Order because I love the formula. The formula is sort of a Marshall McLuhan massage for me. And I love that anticipation . . . like when I watch an old Twilight Zone and you can see the act and the setup and the structure. I love that if it’s a good show. So I don’t think that too much formula was necessarily the downfall of scripted television and the rise of reality. I think it had more to do with copycat television and packaging than anything else as opposed to novelty ideas. But you know, I see great shows all the time that nobody watches – whether it’s a show like Sportsnight; Line of Fire with my buddy David Paymer, which was just as good as the Sopranos and getting better with every episode; My So-Called Life, which was a great show for young people that didn’t make it; and Freaks & Geeks. So it’s not like Hollywood’s not making good stuff. It just doesn’t always catch.
But Jon Kroll is just this terrific guy, and I think he’s now the Senior Vice President over at New Line Television. When he went to them, because he’s a horror/science fiction/cyberpunk fan and buff and also such a champion of reality TV, he wanted to use one of their franchises because of the name recognition and everything; and the most logical one to him was Nightmare on Elm Street because no one has really mined that. It’s not like a mine field that we’re walking through here, but it is tricky, and we are going to learn so much from the fans. And we have to be open to that, even perhaps to change the structure of the show. Right now we’re going to try to have three nightmares per show, but I think there might even come a time when the whole show could be one nightmare. Or it could be theme nightmares. Or even favorite nightmares – people that didn’t pass the confrontation test and come back to try again. Just like you have favorite characters on Survivor, there might be favorite Real Nightmares, and we’re going to want those people back. We have to be careful because it’s network, but I think in almost every nightmare there’s also an element of sexuality. People also confront death in their nightmares. There’s a lot of that element of mortality, and we have to deal with that carefully. But also I think we can deal with it dramatically.
UC: Are we looking at 30 minutes or 60 minutes?
RE: It’s an hour show. We’ll choose the nightmare; I’ll show up at somebody’s house and knock on their door. They’ll open up, and there will be Robert Englund in twilight standing under a lamppost. Then I’ll come in, and they’ll tell me their nightmare, hopefully articulately, but even if not, we’ll have the cut-away to a wonderful re-creation by Peter Kuran, our special effects whiz. It might be 30 seconds, it might be a minute and a half – that’s a long time on television. It’s going to be terrific, just like a little Alfred Hitchcock, a Brian DePalma nightmare, a Wes Craven dream sequence, Salvador Dali kind of stuff. And then, if they’re up for it, if we can cajole them or if they really do want to, we will take them somewhere – either a graveyard or a haunted house in their home town or to a set back in Hollywood where they’ll confront the nightmare. It’ll be like confronting their demons, confronting their own psyche.
UC: It sounds amazing.
RE: I think it’s going to be fun, and I think one of the things that’s going to hook people – and this is what I’m hoping for, what interests me – is getting out there in the field as I keep saying and finding the common denominator. Whether it’s drowning, claustrophobia, whatever. We’ve had a lot of submissions about dwarfs. It’s strange. I always thought that was some kind of corny Hollywood Fellini thing, but apparently it’s true. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but a lot of people have dreams about . . . I know it’s politically correct to say “little people,” but I don’t think you’d say you have nightmares about little people. It’s a dwarf, a demonic kind of dwarf/midget thing. I don’t know where that comes from, but it may hearken back to the classic Grimm’s fairy tales or other fairy tales of children with trolls and evil elves and things like that. Maybe Hollywood has planted that seed as well, but we’re getting an awful lot of people with that submission.
You know, we’re doing these open calls all over the country. All you have to do is bring a photo or an ID. We’re going to be in all the major cities. I know they’re going to Chicago and Texas and on the East Coast, so we’re going to be looking for people all over.
UC: Great. It definitely sounds like a fan bonanza.
RE: I think it’s going to be interesting. I also want to plug whatever new horror movies are being released that week on the show. I want to keep it thematic. I don’t want it to be Fear Factor. The thing about Fear Factor is that those are just general fears. They’re not specific to the individual. There are always people that I think are pretending on that show to be afraid of, you know, eating chocolate covered ants or something when they don’t really care. As opposed to if it really is your nightmare . . . if you really are afraid of sharks and you’re in a shark cage. That’s way different from sticking some surfer in a shark cage who doesn’t care or some skin diver who doesn’t have any fear of the water. Some guy that scubas every other weekend is not that afraid to go into the shark cage as opposed to somebody who’s had a nightmare about them since they were a kid.
UC: Are you specifically fielding the different nightmares or do you have a team?
RE: They have a professional team. These guys have been around. They know when people are lying about stuff. But we also have to get out in the field. There’s a kind of statistical science that starts to happen off the page of the submissions. You have to meet the people face-to-face. We’re also looking for various types of people that others can relate to – whether it’s a Goth girl, the blue-collar guy, the sweet old ladies, whatever the classic ingredients are. We want to see people from all over the country because I have this idea of theme shows. Every community has “that” house that the kids are afraid of. Every community has the abandoned quarry or something where horrible things have happened. Every community has a famous murder or a serial killer or the kid that disappeared. The dead body that turned up when somebody was remodeling. Or just haunted communities to begin with, whether it’s neighborhoods in New Orleans with voodoo or Salem, Massachusetts with all of the bad karma there. I think we need to deal with that element too.
UC: I bet you’re going to get a lot of submissions about clowns. People have a real fear of them.
RE: The clown thing is so strange because it goes all the way from John Wayne Gacy and all of that stuff and clown serial killers. That’s right up there with that group with my nephew who’s afraid of dolls. There are just these strange, strange fears that people have. My agent’s brother is married to this beautiful, gorgeous lady, and she cannot sit at a table with peas.
UC: Peas?
RE: At some time in her childhood she ate peas that were spoiled or bad or she was forced to eat peas by a stepfather – who knows what it was? It’s beyond her memory. She cannot tell what it was from. She could be in Spago at a premiere party with beautiful Chinese peas displayed by Wolfgang Puck, and she would have to run out of the restaurant. She actually has nightmares about peas! So there’s weird stuff out there – food nightmares, weather nightmares, you name it. We all know about people who are afraid of thunder, but apparently people have nightmares about thunder.
UC: It’s unusual. I personally have nightmares about nuns. I really don’t know what that’s about at all. I’ve never gone to Catholic school, never did anything like that, just nuns scare the hell out of me.
RE: There is something about them. I’ve never been afraid of nuns although I’ve heard nun stories all my life because my best friends all went to Catholic school. My mother used to say she donated so much to my friends when they’d come knocking at the door for contributions that she owned the front steps of the Catholic church. Years and years later I was shooting a movie with Tobe Hooper in Tel Aviv, and I went to Jerusalem one weekend. I loved the diversity. Back then everybody was getting along. You’d see sheiks and Orthodox rabbis and priests and nuns and everybody. I’d watch these nuns walk up a staircase into the dark, and they looked like they were floating. It was beautiful when I saw it.
UC: It doesn’t sound beautiful to me!
RE: They were probably from a cloister in France or something. They had those weird tops that almost looked like boomerangs. I wish I’d had a camera to take a photo of them. They looked great! It didn’t freak me out, but now I dream about that. It’s that random thought process. It doesn’t know where to file itself in my brain, so now it comes back to me; and it can be really frightening where it fits itself into my subconscious.
UC: Absolutely. So, what are you afraid of? What do you have nightmares about?
RE: Mine are weird. I have those classic stress dreams a lot. They’re a combination of the algebra test you didn’t study for and not knowing your dialogue. I have lots of dreams about losing my script, losing a scene I have to do, being backstage and hearing the cue but not knowing my lines, vomiting in a bucket. It just goes over and over and over. It’s on a continuous loop like that sequence in Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, the Renny Harlin one, where they keep exiting the Crave-In, the drive-in.
UC: Yeah, yeah.
RE: It just happens over and over and over. It gets really horrific even though it seems like a rather banal nightmare. I can’t stop it. And it gets worse every time. The last time I had it, my fingers were bloody (not in real life but in the dream), and I was looking underneath coiled ropes and in the scenery and everywhere. I was frantic looking for some dialogue pages I had hidden there to refresh my memory. So that’s one of the ones I have. My main recurring nightmare that I don’t have anymore but used was that I’m on a playground – a Southern California, classic post-War, contemporary bungalow playground with fields of asphalt surrounded by the promise of post-War California orange groves. In the middle of the asphalt is the handball court where we played dodgeball, like the new movie Dodgeball. So the handball court stands there like a giant gravestone or the monolith from 2001 and whichever girl I had a crush on at the time (this started when I was in about 6th grade) is cradling me in her lap. There’s a slight breeze blowing, and I look real handsome but blood is coming out of the corner of my mouth. Here’s where it gets weird. Coming over the chain-link fence and approaching me are a bunch of Red Chinese soldiers. You know that Red Chinese/Korean War/Siberian cap that snaps up and has earflaps like Rick Moranis wore on Second City? They all have those with a red star on them, and they’re wearing Mao jackets all buttoned up and have guns with bayonets on them. It’s sort of like this Cold War nightmare. It’s kind of in black and white and kind of in color. They’re coming at me with the bayonets. I’m kind of a hero, like maybe I saved everybody, but now they’re going to get me. I used to have that dream well into adulthood. I’m trying to remember when I first saw Manchurian Candidate – maybe I saw that or Pork Chop Hill or some war movie, and that’s where it came from. I got it all mixed up with early sexuality and being a dodgeball champion. I don’t know what it means, but I had that dream over and over from age 10 or 11 all the way to about 25. I just kept substituting girls I had a crush on all through life.
UC: Have you ever consulted one of those dream encyclopedias?
RE: Not exactly. I told it to a psychiatrist once, and he thought it had to do with suppressed Cold War fears, that maybe as a kid that stuff scared me a lot – drop drills and all that. So he thought it might have had something to do with that. But I think it has to do with images from war movies that I saw as a kid. I remember watching the Korean War as a little kid – a baby almost – but I remember my mother on a typewriter or shucking sweet peas (peas again).
Anyway, that’s my major nightmare.
UC: Any hope of seeing that formed into a story on the new show?
RE: I don’t think so because I don’t know how we would resolve the conflict.
UC: I just wonder if your producers would turn the tables on you.
RE: It wouldn’t pass the test – confront your demons and confront your psyche. I don’t know how to do that with this dream. I think I’m always a kid in the dream. I don’t think I’m an adult lying there. I can’t remember if I aged along with the dream, but I think I’m just a little kid. I feel like a little kid in my heart, you know.
UC: This whole idea is just amazing. It really sounds like something that could easily erupt.
RE: I really feel like I’m in good hands. It’s weird; it’s a whole different vocabulary. Like when you’re dealing with anything new in the Internet or computer world and there’s all this new vocabulary that goes along with it. It’s the same thing in reality television. It’s a whole new world. The demographics, the vocabulary, the recipe, the menu, the ingredients. The way they treat time and how much film they shoot. It’s a completely different reality than scripted, which I know pretty well, although that’s changing too because of CGI. I remember when you would try to lowball on a budget for a movie when you’d be out pitching it. Now they want the bigger budget because you can do anything. Anything you can imagine, you can do.
I just went to see the last Harry Potter film. I was a little disappointed in the other films, but this new one is by the director of Y Tu Mamá También, and it’s really interesting. It’s much darker than the others.
UC: I’ve heard that.
RE: And there’s some really interesting stuff in it and some good magical stuff. As a dark fantasy film, I think it really succeeds. I was pleasantly surprised.
UC: Is there anything else you want to tell us about the new show?
RE: If any of the fans want to investigate their own dreams and nightmares and write a script based on one, or if they’ve had any recurring images that have frightened them that might seem relevant to our show, they should definitely submit them.
UC: How would they go about doing that?
RE: Well, there are the open calls – they should look for ads about those.
UC: Is there anywhere on the Web or elsewhere they could submit it to?
RE: I think you can go to New Line Cinema, to their website, and then look up the show there. It’s Nightmare on Elm Street: Real Nightmares. Also try the CBS website.
UC: Very cool. I’ll be sure to get the information out there.
RE: My webmaster has been in Italy for the last month, but when he gets back to town, I’m going to post a lot of stuff on my own website about this. I’m usually a couple of days behind, but I’ll have enough on there that it will at least give people a warning about this stuff.
UC: What’s your website address?
UC: I’d like to link to it from The Horror Channel.
RE: Oh, yeah. Go check it out and definitely link. I’m in the process of putting on a bunch of stuff. I just got back from seeing a lot of fans in Europe. I’ve been neglecting my Northern European fans for years, and it was just amazing in Germany and Paris. I went to a toy store in Paris called Toy Star, which was fabulous. In fact, when I hang up with you, I’m going up to LA today to meet with the guys from the Paris toy store. There are some phenomenal collector places over there. Floor to ceiling displays of Ron Perlman as Hellboy beautifully sculpted – just absolutely some of the best stuff I’ve seen. I came back with a trunk load of it. I’ve been looking for an original Black Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, and I’m going to get an 18-incher today.
UC: So you’re a collector as well?
RE: I’m not a big collector. I collect a little bit of black and white photography and a little bit of my memorabilia. What I really like I don’t have room for – the really ludicrous, trashy stuff from Thailand and Cambodia. Circus poster size stuff of a giant head eating Patricia Arquette. I love that stuff! Every once in a while I’ll find a really cool Phantom of the Opera or Mangler . . .
“The Mangler is finally making its way to DVD on August 17, 2004, featuring alternate/unrated scenes (including side-by-side edit comparisons) along with the widescreen version of the film.”
. . . or stuff like that that’s really lurid and circus colored. I kind of like the trashy stuff.
And then I love the real classy Japanese coffee table books with phenomenal set stills. I remember the takes, but I’ve never seen them before. They’re sexy or weird. It’s like Freddy sitting around smoking a cigarette and stuff like that. I love that too. I try to keep one thing from everything I’ve done, but I’m not a real collector. I live real casual down in Laguna Beach, and I have a little funky place in Santa Fe with a lot of local folk art. I love galleries and I love art, but I’m sort of jammed up with enough already. I do have some prize pieces. I won an award which is the Metropolis lady, the robot. It’s really nice. I’ve got a terrific little bust of Frankenstein from a model company that I love – that’s heroic and cool. And some Imperial Walkers from Star Wars. I love those. I probably have about 2/3 of Freddy memorabilia – one of each just to have them. I have the original storyboards from Part 3 and my favorite kill from Part 4 – the boy that was deaf. I have his ear. So there’s things like that that I have that are personal.
UC: Now you also have a new movie coming up too – 2001 Maniacs?
RE: I’ve got to do a reshoot. I’m sitting here right now scratching my beard because I want to look sort of like a weird Colonel Sanders from Hell. I’m working with Raw Nerve – a wonderful bunch of guys over there. Eric Miller and Eli Roth. I love Eli. Tim Sullivan, our director. Just a bunch of terrific guys. John Landis is in the film. What happened is that we kind of got rushed towards the end. We had this fabulous location, but less time, so I’ve got to do some reshoots this week. I just hope I match. I’ve got my hair growing out; I might have to go bleach it a little bit tomorrow.
UC: I’m sure the folks at Raw Nerve can hook you up.
RE: I’ve actually got somebody down here that does it. I started it down here, but it’s been a while. I finished this film last Christmas.
UC: Has it really been that long?
RE: Well, they shot a little longer, and they’re shooting right now. They wrote some extra scenes. But, yeah, we finished it right around Christmas. They just finished editing maybe three or four weeks ago and realized they needed to pump up some stuff. We rushed this one sequence at the end, and we had a motorcycle stunt that didn’t work. So we’ve got to do a couple of reshoots. I’ve got to do that, and then I’m off doing some voiceovers. I’ve been doing The Riddler on the new Batman series. That’s fun to do. I just show up in my pajamas.
Then there’s this other thing I’ve been doing called Super Funky Robot Go. It’s this weird anime series, which is kind of fun. It’s fun to kind of get my feet wet in that. Sometimes I go over to Burbank for interviews. You can walk in that animation building at Disney, and every time I go there, they have a different set of original animation cells on the wall. The last time I was there it was all the background cells for the original Pinocchio. And you know The Island of Lost Boys? They had all that. It’s absolutely the most phenomenal stuff.
UC: Are you an anime fan?
RE: I love all kinds of great animation. I love the great nasty, funny, silly Warner Brothers stuff. I love Aeon Flux, which they’re making into a movie. I like good Japanese anime, but I love Nemo too. I’m just a fan of good animation period. I don’t know how to describe exactly what works for me, but I know it when I see it. Sometimes the animation is better than the plot.
UC: Often times.
RE: That world is so wide open. It’s just so much fun. It’s like special effects – it’s so wide open now. I just took a friend down to the KNB EFX Shop. They’re working on like eight movies at once out there. But it was just so much fun. I felt like a kid again walking around, and I got the tour with Howard Berger for my friend who’s from Norway. He was just blown away by all the stuff over there.
UC: Yeah, KNB is amazing.
RE: They’re doing the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They’re in the middle of that, which is a huge, huge project.
UC: Just one more question, and I’ll let you go. I have to ask you because everybody’s going to be dying for it. Freddy vs. Jason 2? Possibility? Or maybe a new Nightmare movie? What do you think?
RE: You know what you want to do. You want to get in touch with Steve Katz over at New Line. He’s the hottest guy to talk to. He’ll know the hottest gossip on this. The gossip I hear is that they’ve talked to Bruce Campbell, and they’re thinking of bringing Ash into the mix. That could be a lot of fun. We might need to do that – really go over the top with this one. It’s sort of like saving the world from sequels. That I like because I love Bruce. Maybe he could bring Sam Raimi in or some of his crew. You know they’ve got a lot of talented people surrounding that along with the guys at New Line. All I’ve heard is they’re looking for a screenwriter. I’ve also heard a great plot outline. I know they talked to the Michael Myers people too. I’m not saying John Carpenter but some of the people that were involved in creating Michael Myers. So . . . there you have a situation. That’s a great idea, and I’ve heard a great plot idea where it would bring Jamie Lee Curtis to Elm Street.
UC: Wow.
RE: She’d be in rehab with her child, and it would be sort of like Alien 2. It would take the mother of all the teen-age scream queens confronting Michael Myers. He’d be after her, and Jason and I would be there too. She’d move into the Elm Street house accidentally. I love that. But we might need to do that after because that’s a lot like Freddy vs. Jason.
So, those are the two I’ve heard. Now there’s also apparently a prequel script called Nightmare on Elm Street: The First Kills going around. I haven’t read it. I’ve heard good things about it, but I don’t think it’s at the studio. I think it’s just “around.”
UC: What, a fan project?
RE: It’s unsolicited, but I hear it’s a good script. Those are the rumors that I know. Those are all rumors based on fact, but I can’t confirm any of the details on any of them.
UC: Well, that’s a great little scoop for the fans.
RE: Okay!
UC: Are you planning any appearances soon?
RE: I should be at Monster-Mania in August in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, so tell some of the fans to check it out. Also, let the fans on the East Coast know that we are going to be looking for nightmare submissions. I don’t know whether they’re going to be in Miami or Orlando or Atlanta, but they’ll be somewhere near you.
UC: All right, Robert, thank you again. Take care.
RE: Bye, Steve.
Well, there you have it, folks! I made it out relatively unscathed. Except for all that talk about nuns. *Shudder* No more irrational ringing phobias for me! Wait . . . Was that the doorbell?! *Gasp*
Original concept artwork by Bill “Splat” Johnson.
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