The Horror Movie Series That Fans Want To Get A Campy Sequel In Space
Time does funny things to people. Take any trend considered ill-conceived and tacky at the time, and add about 20 years. Suddenly, everyone wants low-rise jeans, a floating mustache, and their hair parted down the middle.
The floating mustache of the horror community is the poorly-thought-out sequel where the bad guy goes to space. Friday the 13th did it with Jason X. Leprechaun, Hellraiser, and Critters all did it. Demonic Toys might have done it, but until we find someone who's watched all of the Demonic Toys movies, there's really no way to confirm it. Two decades after society's "put-monsters-in-space" fever broke, fans are looking back at this phenomenon, wondering what could have been and pushing for a return to good old-fashioned, low-budget, shoehorned spaceship horror.
Frequenters of Reddit's r/horror forum recently looked at some of their favorite slashers, demons, and demonic slashers and asked themselves if a particular franchise would be best served by a round-trip ticket to the inky void, and the consensus wasn't startling. Some pushed for Jaws, which is something we didn't know we needed until just now. Others wanted to see Gremlins on a space station, where water floats through the air and it's always after midnight. More than any of these, though, one horror staple takes the cake in terms of wasted potential. Logistically, getting all of Elm Street into low Earth orbit might prove difficult, but that's something for the creatives to figure out.
In space, no one can hear you DREAM
Freddy Krueger has gone through a lot in the last 40 years. He's been reimagined, rebooted, and worked into an episode of The Goldbergs. But never once has the Springwood Slasher made his way into the abyss. Fans want that to change with a Nightmare on Elm Street movie set in space.
Picture it: Freddy, bored after centuries of terrorizing teenagers and tired of being beaten again and again, discovers a new opportunity to achieve power through the genesis of deep space exploration. He stows away on a colony vessel, preparing for a years-long trip into the void, and gorges himself on the dreams of the cryogenically frozen passengers and their bevy of anxieties. After Freddy overdoes it, one of the passengers experiences a medical crisis, causing their sleep pod to eject them. They work to awaken their fellow passengers, knowing that they only have enough oxygen on board to keep a handful of them active at a time (which helps to keep the film's budget reasonable). They have to stop the dream demon before his influence spreads to other worlds.
On a side note, at some point, Freddy probably possesses the ship's helpful robot and says something like, "Do androids dream of electric creeps?" before frying someone to death. The ship, in all likelihood, is owned by some futuristic company called Lao-Michaelson Space Technologies — or "L.M. S.T.," for a nice Elm Street nod.
All we're saying is that Warner Bros. is sitting on an oil well and refusing to build a pump. Someone get Robert Englund on the line — this thing has legs.