It’s all in a face: Wes Craven’s perpective on changes in FREDDY’s mug for NEW NIGHTMARE revealed

Freddy Krueger is still one of the most haunting horror movie icons of all time.. Robert Englund made that so, without him there would have been no sequels. But without the intricate and frightening makeup job that teams performed over the course of several movies, there would have been additionally no marketing and artwork that has accompanied the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise–minus the newest incarnation that Hollywood tried to pass on to fans..

The HOLLYWOOD REPORTER interviewed Wes Craven about a number of different topics.. but the makeup of FREDDY’S face made the most headlines. Craven said he had no role in the MTV’s changing of the GHOSTFACE face.. And more, reported by Emmet McDermott:

“In general,” Craven says, reflecting on his own experience with the Scream sequel and beyond, “we didn’t mess with the mask at all. It’s something we didn’t try to change. With Freddy [Krueger] and the New Nightmare (below right), I felt that I probably should have stuck with the original face (below left). [With Scream,] we just let Ghostface be Ghostface.”

“It would have been safer [not to change Freddy],” Craven explains. “I’m not going to speculate in public, probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it, but you know, sometimes you realize that something’s not broken, so don’t fix it. And that was the course we took on all the Screamfilms: Don’t mess with that, it’s just perfect.”
For Craven, the success of the Scream franchise hinged upon the mask. No other mask would have done the trick. “No way. No way,” Craven insists. “I knew it in my bones that [Ghostface] was a unique find, and I had to convince the studio that they had to go the extra mile to get it.”
I thought then and do so more now after reading this HOLLYWOOD reporter story that the licensing fee to use the mask was much more costly than MTV would have preferred. Money talked. In this case, it became clear that changing the face would be cheaper, and they could spin it into somewhat positive press..
Craven’s perspective on changing Freddy may be a commentary on MTV’s change, too.  Will people still watch the MTV  version? Sure.. but will it feel the same? No.
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While we are on the subject of FREDDY…ROLLING STONE recently posted a great article that NIGHTMARE fans may want to consider bookmarking or even printing if they’re so inclined to save paper .. Wes Craven and others talked openly about some of the aspects of FREDDY he purposely planned. Such as the glove.. knives, Craven said, have been scary for 1000 years. With a glove consumed by knives, Craven led to a modern day weapon that had deep roots in the human psyche for generation. The ROLLING STONE article also details the ‘Tina’ body bag scene from the first film–this was personally one of those moments in FREDDY history that haunted me. Amanda Wyss, who played Tina, described the REAL body bag that was used during the scene:

I freaked out in the body bag. It wasn’t a “stunt” body bag — this was a low-budget film, so somebody went to the morgue, got a [real] body bag and poked some pinholes in it. There’s no inside zipper on the thing, they just zipped me in. I was just like, “Seriously?”