Robert Englund’s Never Made Freddy Krueger Prequel Movie Is His “Only Regret”

A Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund says his “only regret” from his tenure as razor-clawed killer Freddy Krueger is the never made prequel movie that would have explored Krueger as a flesh-and-blood child murderer killed by vengeful parents.

“There’s some great internet Youtube versions of a kind of prequel Freddy, or early Freddy, that I like that are really interesting. If I could go back in time, there was a script kicking around — it might have been called Krueger: The First Kills — but it’s not the series Tobe Hooper version of the prequel,” Englund said at Dragon Con of the Hooper-directed origin story episode of TV series Freddy’s Nightmares.

The First Kills “centers on Freddy and the children, two bumbling cops trying to catch him, and then these two sharp lawyers,” Englund said. “And these are the real stars of the project, [they] get Freddy out of jail. But you see Freddy in prison, you see him meeting with his lawyers, you see Freddy in the courtroom. You see the lawyers going back and forth with the prosecution and getting Freddy off, and getting away with, obviously, murder.”

A gloating Krueger would then “burn like Joan of Arc by the vigilante parents who just can’t stomach this injustice anymore.”

“The rumor was it was going to be John McNaughton directing that, the great director of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, starring Michael Rooker. And I was excited,” Englund continued. “I was excited, and for a brief second of time, there was some validity to that project.”

When Nightmare producer New Line Cinema was acquired by the Turner Broadcasting System ahead of its merger with Time Warner, The First Kills “sort of got lost.”

“But that, that I guess I could consider a regret. That would have been when it would have been fun to do, and I was still young enough to do it,” Englund said. “I had some ideas — I wanted to dye my hair red like I did in Freddy vs. Jason — things like that. I had some ideas I wanted to play with. That’s probably my only regret.”

Englund reprised his most famous role in ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, but admitted to ComicBook.com he’s “too old to do another Freddy [movie] now.”

“If I do a fight scene now it’s got to be real minimal because I can’t snap my head for eight different takes and different angles. My spine gets sore,” Englund told us in 2018. “I can still be mean and scary, but I’m mostly relegated now to sort of Van Helsing roles, old doctors and sh-t. So it’s fun that the last moment of me ever playing Freddy is a wink to the audience.”