A TASTE OF NIGHTMARES TO COME
Recently announced was a new television show featuring Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger entitled Real Nightmares, where contestants are stuck in a situation that is very similar to their reoccurring nightmares in the hopes of ending those nasty dreams. Inside you’ll find a portion of an interview with Robert Englund, who gives us a taste of what’s to come…
Here’s a sample of the interview, which can be read in full over at The Horror Channel:
RE: I’m the host, but I’m also the field guy. I’m going to be sort of like Robert Englund, Horror Actor/Host – a little bit of the Vincent Price thing. But then I’m also on the road. I’m like a field correspondent, a journalist, so I will be going out. We actually go to people’s houses. I’ll knock on the door, and they’re going to open it up and I’ll be there. I’ll say something like, ‘I understand there’s a nightmare on your street.’ Then I’ll go inside and they’ll tell me the nightmare. While they tell me their nightmare, we’ll see this wonderfully recreated short film by Pete Kuran, the guy who worked on Star Wars and X-Men 2. And then we will actually bring them into an event contestant situation where the nightmare will be recreated almost like a Fear Factor element. The nastiest one I’ve heard – just to show you how far out these guys are – is from a fan who has a recurring nightmare where he’s trapped by a minotaur, half-man/half-bull. And their idea is to build a Plexiglas maze and put the contestant in it with a wild bull.
UC: Oh, man!
RE: And he won’t know that the maze with the bull and the maze that he’s in don’t actually meet. He’s going to think it’s just one maze and he better go the right way to get out or the bull will get him. In other words, you can understand the dramatic possibilities here. You’re going to have a bull with a big blubbery snout against Plexiglas, and the guy’s going to think he’s going to run right into this bull.
UC: That’s both cruel and psychotic – but great!
RE: You can see these guys are not reigned in. I told you that one of the guys did Penn & Teller’s Bull****!, which I love, and another one is Tony Yates. They are pushing the envelope every day.
UC: It sounds very exciting.
RE: My feeling is that we’ve got to really select the submissions carefully. And really look for those common denominators like people that are having nightmares about being stuck in an elevator and then segue that contestant-wise into maybe the buried alive nightmare – things like that – as well as just leaving our heads open. I was talking to my nephew, who was like 6’2′ when he was 14-1/2 years old, and he skateboards and snowboards and is cool and into hip-hop, right? But his mother, who’s a fashion designer, drags him along to an antique store with antique dolls in it. It completely freaked this kid out. He’s a big giant surfer kid, but he couldn’t handle the old porcelain doll faces that are cracked and discolored – kind of like death heads. So I was just thinking as an example about why we have to have an open mind. Can you imagine if I could get my nephew in a room on a cot with floor-to-ceiling doll heads with little votive candles in front of them all, and in the middle of the night one of them, which is animatronic like Chucky, starts saying, ‘Hey, Larry, wake up!’ We could just mess with his head and see what happens when he’s in his nightmare. There are a lot of personal demons and psychology they’re going to have to confront, which really changes it from a Fear Factor type show. While they are telling me their nightmare, we’ll actually see with actors and special effects what their dream is. And then we put them into a facsimile of it.
Courtesy of Bloody Disgusting
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