While Johnny Depp was willing to reprise his role for a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel, unfortunately, viewers missed out on this cameo due to an unlikely issue. As a director, Wes Craven was never short of nerve. The horror legend made his mark in the genre with Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, a pair of bleak, unsparing 70s exploitation movies that hid sharp social commentary under a lot of tense set-pieces, gruesome gore, and hopelessly dark plot twists.
Over the decades, Craven continued to redefine the horror genre with franchise-spawning slasher masterpieces like Scream and Nightmare On Elm Street as well as more outré fare such as The Serpent and the Rainbow and My Soul to Take. However, Craven’s unfailing nerve was shaken at one unexpected point in his illustrious career. Luckily, this didn’t deprive viewers of a horror classic. However, Craven’s uncertainty did mean that horror fans missed out on a potentially memorable scene that never made it into the Nightmare On Elm Street series despite the director’s ambitious plans.
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Wes Craven Wanted Johnny Depp Back In New Nightmare

When Craven began developing the meta-sequel New Nightmare, a reboot of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, he wanted to bring back most of the original movie’s cast. Nightmare On Elm Street’s original heroine Heather Langenkamp returned in the finished movie, while Craven played a parody of himself. Most impressively, Robert Englund pulled double duty by playing a redesigned, even scarier version of Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger while also simultaneously playing a campy, self-interested parody of himself in New Nightmare. However, Johnny Depp didn’t appear as himself in New Nightmare since Craven never asked him to return to the series, assuming that the rising star would be too busy.
Craven presumed that, since Depp had become an A-list star after appearing in the original Nightmare On Elm Street, he wouldn’t have the time to play a role in New Nightmare. However, on New Nightmare’s DVD commentary, Craven admitted he had been wrong. The star of the original Nightmare On Elm Street met Craven after the movie debuted and said that he would have loved to play a self-parody in New Nightmare if the director had only asked. Sadly, Craven opted not to bother the star and, as such, genre fans missed out on this appearance. To make matters worse, Depp did film a much weaker cameo.
Johnny Depp’s Nightmare On Elm Street 6 Cameo Was A Waste
Depp did appear in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, playing a parody of himself. However, this messy, disjointed Nightmare On Elm Street sequel was famously a tonal disaster, and Depp’s supposedly comedic cameo highlights this issue. In one of the many inexplicable celebrity cameos in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Depp plays himself in a parody of a DARE-style anti-drug advert. After Depp does the standard “this is your brain on drugs” shtick, Freddy appears and bashes the star over the head with a frying pan.
If that sounds cartoonish and un-scary, that is because it is. The cameo is one of many ill-judged moments in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel that leaned hard into the fantasy and comedy elements of the series. While this was not necessarily a major issue in itself, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare also effectively abandoned any attempts at serious scares, resulting in a movie that was too silly to be scary but not funny enough to be a full-blown parody. In contrast, Craven’s still-underrated New Nightmare parodied the Nightmare On Elm Street series while keeping its scares deadly serious.
Related: Nightmare On Elm Street 6’s Original Script Was Perfect (& Impossible)
Why New Nightmare Still Worked Without Johnny Depp
Even without Depp’s presence, New Nightmare is a testament to Craven’s ingenuity. The Nightmare On Elm Street reboot works both as a straightforward slasher and as a savage satire of Hollywood, with Craven’s characters explicitly discussing how much money the franchise has made and how little its creative qualities matter to studio executives. While the Scream movies fused slasher tropes with self-aware characters, New Nightmare entered into trippier territory by seeing the horror director and his stars play fictionalized versions of themselves.
While New Nightmare might have been too weird for mainstream acclaim, it soon became a cult classic. New Nightmare’s Freddy Krueger Entity is still considered one of the scariest versions of the villain and the movie acted as an effective dry run for Craven’s hugely acclaimed blockbuster Scream series. As such, losing out on Johnny Depp’s appearance didn’t doom the successful Nightmare On Elm Street sequel in the long run.
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