In the early ’90s, director John McNaughton was making waves in the horror world with movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and The Borrower. In a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, the director talks about how he almost helmed a prequel to Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street and why the studio ultimately decided against a movie taking place in Hell:
I started thinking about what we haven’t seen before and the idea came of well, where did Freddy [Krueger] come from before he returned in the first picture? Hell. Nothing could keep me from going to Hell and the idea of actually setting a story in Hell, that to me, I was just like a pig in sh*t.
Sounds like a promising idea. However, McNaughton explained the issue stemmed from one man:
New Line had just made, what’s his name…the comedian that gets so little respect and makes so much money…
Goddammit, it’s Adam Sandler. Particularly Adam Sandler in Little Nicky. It seems that the notion of a movie in Hell had been tainted:
Yeah and it was one of his goofy comedies…Little something or other…there was a number of scenes in Hell and it was his first comedy that didn’t do to well…
[After] that didn’t do too well, New Line didn’t want to go back to Hell. So I basically told them to go to Hell. Just the idea of being under the thumb of the studio and being called on to satisfy genre expectations, it’s not something that would make me happy. They were unwilling to go to Hell with me and it just came apart.
Thanks a lot Adam Sandler! You ruin EVERYTHING!
(Source: Bloody-Disgusting)
