‘Annabelle: Creation’ Director Wants to Tackle ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ Remake

Director David F. Sandberg has proven himself as one of the more exciting new horror filmmakers, giving us last year’s Lights Out and this year’s Annabelle: Creation, which opened to both positive buzz and big financial numbers. In a thread on Reddit about his latest movie, the director revealed he hopes to transition into a new franchise and potentially tackle one of the most iconic franchises in the history of cinema by giving audiences his take on A Nightmare on Elm Street.

When asked if he’d like to get involved in another franchise, the director explained, “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about what fun franchises New Line has like A Nightmare on Elm street and Critters. Might be fun if you took something like that in a different direction from previous installments. Like instead of remaking Nightmare you do some continuation of it in the same world kind of thing.”

Considering the amount of money Sandberg made for New Line Cinema over the weekend, it wouldn’t be surprising if they gave him the keys to the kingdom to develop a new film from one of their existing properties. With it having been seven years since the last installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and no real progress as to another installment, this could be the perfect opportunity for Sandberg to revive the series.

Although not as well known as the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Critters is a beloved property that blends humor with horror throughout its series of films that are similar in tone to the Gremlins films. Sandberg could potentially deviate from the world of straightforward horror and flex some of his more comedic muscles with an adaptation of that series.

Sandberg’s schedule is starting to get quite crowded, as it’s already been announced that he’s making a follow-up to Lights Out in addition to tackling Shazam! for the DC Extended Universe.

The director recently spoke to Bloody Disgusting about some of the lessons he’s learned for working on horror films.

“I don’t know if there’s any particular ways but I’m learning more and more how to make movies, how to approach it,” Sandberg explained of his evolution as a filmmaker. “One of the things was on Lights Out, since it was my first movie and I wanted to make sure it was good so I would get to do more movies, I prepared like crazy.”

He added, “I made all these shot lists, story boards and diagrams and everything and then you show up on set and those are thrown out the window because I really don’t have time to do it that way or there’s technical difficulties or you just come up with something better to do. So on Annabelle it was more like, let’s just figure out on set together, don’t over prepare and it worked out pretty well.”

Annabelle: Creation is in theaters now.