The Razor Gloves Are Off: Why Heather Langenkamp Can't Watch The 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' Remake

One, two, Freddy may be coming for your, but hopefully our next trip down #ElmStreet will fair better than the boogeyman's last razor-gloved attack. We all know about the maligned #WarnerBros remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street - starring Rooney Mara and Jackie Earle Haley, the 2010 film is still haunting the infamous monster franchise to this day. It now seems that all of Hollywood has another supporter, as we have found yet another person who refuses to watch Samuel Bayer's car crash of a film.

Original final girl Nancy Thompson, a.k.a. Heather Langenkamp, says that she can't bring herself to watch the living nightmare that was the remake film, and we can't exactly blame her. Speaking on the 30th anniversary of the third film, Dream Warriors, Langenkamp said why she refuses to stick on a DVD of the remake:

"I can’t let go of my own vision of Nightmare on Elm Street. I just don’t want to. I don’t want to see another person play Freddy Krueger. I don’t want to see scenes that we worked really hard on be reimagined. I respect their reason for doing it but I don’t want to have it in my imagination or my mind. Those memories are so precious to me. I was a teenager when I made that movie so it’s so formative. My friendship with Robert Englund is so important to me that I don’t need it."

Hev and Buried

You can't blame her stoic attitude toward the remake anyway; Langenkamp was one of horror's original final girls and was easily the face of the franchise. First appearing in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Steet, Heather sat out the homoerotic sequel, then returned in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, which also saw creator #WesCraven back to pen the story. Although her second appearance proved fatal for Nancy, coming a cropper on Freddy's glove, Langenkamp seemingly remains open to her resurrection in the future:

"You see this in some of the other horror franchises, is that they’re taking the universes of these stories, all the elements of the story that was created and picking something that was over here, not the main thrust of the story and expanding upon it. There’s so much in the Nightmare on Elm Street realm that could still be explored. I would never say no to the option of doing something like that. It’s a great universe and it’s one of the most creative franchises. There’s more to be made, I’m sure."

Sorry to break it to you, but that may be a bit of a pipe dream, Heather. Bear in mind than the 52-year-old already returned for the meta take on the franchise in the much-improved Wes Craven's New Nightmare. After a slump for the fifth and sixth films, Langenkamp played herself in No. 8 as #FreddyKrueger stepped from sleep and into the real world. It is a struggle to see how else Nancy would return, especially so many years after she last played the role.

As for Bayer's 2010 film, don't count on the other Nancy returning either. Sadly, Rooney Mara never got a chance to reprise her role as Nancy, and any plans for a "new" franchise were rightfully canned after just one outing. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong in the film; it was visually stunning, Jackie Earle Haley put on a decent performance as the melty-faced killer, but something from the 1984 classic was missing.

Perhaps we had seen it all before, but as one of the most critically panned horror films out there, the new Elm Street suffered from remake fever. As Langenkamp said, the ideas of Elm Street are still out there haunting our nightmares, and there is so much in that universe that needs exploring. In the meantime Freddy remains "Fred and buried." Langenkamp returns to horror in the upcoming Hellraiser: Judgment, while elsewhere, the upcoming Robert Englund documentary Nightmares in the Makeup Chair could possibly reignite the fire in Freddy's boiler. Englund will undoubtedly remind us what made the series so great, but with the tragic passing of Wes Craven in 2015, perhaps some things should be left in our nightmares.